Dragon Boat Battleship

Upon hopping into the dragon boat itself ichi-e-ichi-go, we realized that no one really had any experience with boats or rowing, or drumming (in my case). This inevitably led to a series of mistakes, which could have led to the death of the dragon boat itself. Imagine a vast crowd of 300-ish Japanese people staring out over the water in front of stone docks, and then 10 gaijin girls trying to learn how to row in front of their eyes, DURING A RACE, no less. We couldnt figure out how to keep the boat straight, and scraped along the entire half of a football field of stone wall to the starting line. People were shouting at us trying to help us out (I think) ... but we don't speak Japanese. So this made us even more nervous and uncoordinated. Needless to say, we ended up wrecking into the boat in front of us, like a battleship ... talk about EMBARRASSING!! Then, in a crazy rowing feat, they somehow managed to turn their boat and grabbed ahold of our boat so we didnt hit anything else, like the stone docks. Afterwards, they took off away from us at lightning speed. By this time, we were further away from the bulk of the crowd and starting to realize how to row a boat. We eventually made it to the starting line, but then had to somehow maneuver ourselves to a straight line with the other rowers to hold a tiny rope. This was too much, it took us about 10 minutes of back and forth, side to side rowing to figure out how to get our boat to the right place with the rope. So umm yeah, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE was staring at us, and the Japanese rowers were trying to help us by shouting "righto" and "lefto" and making wild gestures, so we didnt hit anything else, like the stone bridge. On the loudspeaker I could hear something about "ALT's"(Assistant Language Teachers is what we all are), which could not be good based on our lack of rowing ability. We were getting frustrated and shouting at each other, trying to figure out which side should row to turn left, and which side should row to turn right. I'm not gonna lie, it was ugly.
Thank God we finally made it to the little rope... after holding up the race for10 minutes of a silent crowd and shouting rowers. Then, the gong sounded, and we expected to sink our boat...but somehow, it all just clicked. We all rowed altogether like we had been rowing for years, to the beat of my awesome drumming skills and WE WON THE RACE!! ... JK , we actually came in DEAD LAST, but the fact that we made it all the way without turning in circles (like the ALT's last year) was amazing. We were screaming and screaming and making a big ruckus and pumped our way back to the docks in a straight line and had our pictures taken and were greeted with hundreds of Japanese smiles of awe and probably relief. Ohhh freakin yeah! Glorious! That's how we do it both in and out of the classroom! ;)