46th World Championships
By Petra Cada (Team Canada)

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Saturday, April 21st
Me, Marie-Christine Roussy, Mariann Domonkos and Pradeeban Peter-Paul arrived in Osaka from India where we had spent 12 days participating in the 14th Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships; it was raining in Osaka, but about 14 C.

At the Osaka airport, everything was so well organized and volunteers were waiting for us to guide us to a nice clean bus that took us to the hotel; on the approximately 45 minute bus ride to the hotel, a message was played on the P.A. system greeting everybody to the World Championships - the message was in about 5 different languages.

There were 3 different tournament hotels and we stayed at the main hotel - Rihga Hotel- along with Sweden, France, Hungary, China, Qatar, Italy, Czech Republic, Belgium, Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, etc...and all the delegates.

We arrived in the hotel and everyone received their accreditation cards and room cards almost immediately; we met the rest of our team: Johnny Huang, Dennis Su, Kurt Liu, Chris Xu, Mikael Andersson (men's team coach) and Lijuan Geng; I was in a room with Chris Xu.

The hotel was absolutely huge with about 15 restaurants and bars, a shopping mall, a huge health club and swimming club, massage center, beauty salon, business center, etc.. however, there was a charge for the swimming and health club for guests - we found the price really unreasonable - about $20.00 U.S./day.

By this time it was around 19:00 - dinner was from 19:00-22:00, so we went to eat all together as a team; we ate in a huge conference room with long tables filled with food - buffet style; the food was great: a variety of Chinese, Japanese and Western-style food.

The conference room had a high ceiling with this fancy dome-shaped glass ceiling. While we were eating and talking, Danny Heister of the Netherlands, ranked 25th in the world, came over to tell us that he could hear everything that we were saying despite the fact that he was sitting 3 tables over! Apparently the ceiling had an echoing effect that reflected our voices to the table where the Dutch team was sitting, so he kindly warned us to be careful of what we said!!!

Back in the room, we unpacked and watched t.v.; most of the channels were in Japanese except for 2 of them; we watched an old episode of "Beverly Hills 90210" and went to bed.

Sunday, April 22nd
It was really hard to get up this morning: major jet-lag.

We had 2 practice sessions scheduled today; there were altogether 3 different competition halls used for the World Championships with a practice room in each hall - the "Osaka Municipal Central Gymnasium" was the main competition venue, which held about 10 tables; the stadium held about 8,000 people.

Every player got 24 tickets that could be exchanged for bottled water; bananas were also offered free of charge.

Breakfast and dinner were always to be eaten in everyone's own hotel, but lunch was to be eaten near the main competition venue: there were signs everywhere and volunteers were posted everywhere on the street to guide the athletes; everything was so incredibly organized and the Japanese seemed to follow rules strictly by the book; today was a beautiful sunny day.

More countries arrived today; we found free Internet in Rihga Hotel - there were 4 computers, which were constantly occupied by players sending emails.

We ate dinner in the hotel, but this time in another conference room (the hotel had about 30 different conference rooms - it was like a complete maze) and the new room was confusing to find; luckily, volunteers were placed every few meters to guide us: it was incredible how many volunteers we saw today!

In the evening, we had a team meeting; after, Chris and I watched "Lethal Weapon" on and I did my laundry - the water from my laundry was almost black proving how dirty and polluted the air was in India, I was shocked and grossed out; Chris and I both fell asleep watching t.v. - we were absolutely dead.

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