Katie arrived to Hefei early in order to assist with the final preparations of the SPL RoboCup arena.

She woke to loud noises – potentially fireworks – at 6am and was unable to go back to sleep despite trying for two hours.  She headed to breakfast at 9am, and saw HTWK as well as her own team.  After breakfast she sat in her room (#2006) and worked on her team’s drop-in player code.

After receiving a WeChat message from the local organizer, she went to the venue at 11am and was happy to find Brad from UNSW as well as Rico and Stefan from HTWK chatting with the local organizer.  The venue looked relatively well put together, but the overhead lighting was flooding the fields.  The decision was made to turn the lights upward, and construction crews came over to do that.

Crews of volunteers were lining the fields, and there was not much to be done at the moment, so Katie chatted with HTWK for a while before heading to the grocery store, KFC for lunch (they have soup at KFC in China! ¥41.30), the hotel to pick up some supplies, and then back to the venue to meet Rudi, Dickens, and the local organizer.

Once back at the venue, we worked to assign tables to teams, mark coach boxes, and get the volunteers to draw the throw-in lines.  There was no power on the fields, so we decided to wait until the first set-up day to work on setting up the GameController computers and the routers.

Katie left the venue around 8pm and headed back to the hotel.  Hefei is really humid, so you feel moist and sweaty every time you walk outside.  Once back at the Fengda International Hotel, Katie changed and went to the basement gym, which was pretty well stocked for a hotel.  After working out, she showered and went to bed.