District Conference... Turtle anyone?

Before we knew it, Saturday had arrived and we attended the Rotary District 3470 Annual Conference in Tainan. This was a well attended occasion with over 1,300 attending on the day. A light lunch outside before moving inside the school hall to get proceedings underway.
Introductions of each club and their presidents initiated the conference and with 57 clubs in the district, this took some time. Various speeches were then made including the International President representatives and District Governor. Due to language differences, we are not able to inform all our followers of what we are sure were memorable speeches.

Before we knew it, it was time for GSE Team 9690 to deliver a stellar presentation to our biggest audience yet. The presentation went smoothly and was well received. The biggest challenge was the demonstration of Australian Football on stage. After doing this demonstration in various sized restaurants over the last three weeks, the space of the stage was overwhelming. Ed's wayward kick meant potential disaster, but with some great anticipation of the bounce by James, the situation was saved.

After our presentation we had dinner outside the hall and on the menu tonight was not only a full chicken with the head still on the plate, but some delicious turtle! Took the team a few minutes to give it a go, but we managed to get over our child hood memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and enjoyed this fine dish.

Dinner included some Karaoke and prize give-aways before we returned inside for the evening entertainment, which included some great violin pieces from a past GSE member. All entertainment was provided by Club members, so the standard varied tremendously.

Upon returning to the hotel, we decided to enjoy some more Taiwan Beer, so down to 7-11 we went to pick up three long necks for $165 NT Dollars... which is about $6 AUD.

Karalyn's views - just a few comments on District Conference Taiwan style. It is held in district, moving to venues in the local area of the current DG. As Brad mentioned, the conference attendance exceeds 1300, so the venue needs to be very large. It is usually a school gymnasium. The initial parade of Club banners, and Club Presidents, each being introduced individually, followed by individual introducion of all attending PDGs, and several other notables took almost 2 hours. It is very formal, the men wear business suits, and the ladies in quite formal dress, with many sequins and a few furs. The only break from introductions, and speeches from the Rotary International President's reresentative and the DG in the whole two afternoon sessions (from 1-6pm) was our team presentation and a short performance by the Exchange Students. There were to be a couple of Guest Speakers on Sunday's program.

All Clubs pay for their members to attend Conference. It was difficult to follow some of the content as it was in Chinese, but a very comprehensive program gave some insight into the sessions. Lots of noise and colour, and again the incredibly friendly people.