Scorpions on a Stick

The Future

2008-09-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Our trip of a lifetime is about to become just the first of many.

We've decided to go to London for the 2012 Olympics and to wherever the 2016 Olympics are held. With what we've learned from Beijing and through talking to other multi-Olympic attendees, we feel like it is entirely possible that we could become true Olympics junkies.

Our plan for London is to go in a couple years and get the sightseeing out of the way and do some groundwork research so when we go to the games in 2012 we can totally focus on the Olympics and do so without spending a ton of money.

For 2016, the location will be announced in October of 2009. Our plan is to immediately start learning the language, do similar pre-visits to the city like we're doing for London and then do the entire 17 days instead of just the last half or so like we did in Beijing. The candidate cities for 2016 are Tokyo (which would be awesome), Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.

Of course, full trip blogging and photo posting will be included.

Videos!

2008-09-04T06:21:00.000-07:00

We had our Flip video camera with us but didn't think to use it very often. We did however get a few clips of the people performing in Jingshan Park (from Day 1), a couple clips from the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square.

Jingshan Park

The Great Wall:

Tiananmen Square:

Even More Photos

2008-08-30T22:52:00.000-07:00

Day 10 — The Summer Palace

Day 9 — The Temple of Heaven

Day 8 — USA vs Australia Gold Medal game

Day 8 — Russia vs China Bronze Medal game

Home

2008-08-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

Nothing like 60 degree weather, blue skies and a civilized three-foot personal space bubble to make you feel like you're back home.

We got up at Noon on Monday (Seattle time) and got in at 9 am Tuesday. That's a long freakin' day, my friends, even with dozing off on the flight. We're trying to stay awake until this evening to do a brute force body clock reset. Angie's already fading, partially because she's one step away from being narcoleptic normally but also because she came down with a nasty head cold before we left. I keep telling her it's the SARS. She's not amused.

The unpacking went pretty quick. The cats are still under the bed. Lola has been retrieved from Puppy Heaven over at her Godmothers' house. Life is almost back to normal, or will be once we both crash and sleep for a day or two.

Before you go, there will be one more post-trip entry with some final impressions/observations of Beijing and our list of Won't Miss/Will Miss things about our trip. Oh, and I have a ton of photos to go through and post to Flickr. Stay tuned for just a little bit longer.

Beijing Day 10 - Summer Palace

2008-08-25T12:57:00.001-07:00

As Scott previously mentioned, we ditched our official tour guide and decided to do the Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven on our own. Neither one of us wanted to spend another day with Shall's lecturing (we believe she was reading the signs back to us). So today, we headed off to the Summer Palace. Once there, we were very glad we didn't try to do the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven in one day. Both are massive. We spent 4 hours walking around the Palace, got lost a few times and still managed to cover only about a quarter of the structures. We purchased this awesomely illustrated map that was less than helpful in finding out where you were and how to get to the next location. We were again thanking our trainer for all the squats and lunges that we having been doing. We'd have never made it up and down all the hills and stairs without them. Even so, there were a couple of places I thought I was going to die before we reached the top of the hill. Steep, steep, steep and stairs that are about half as deep as modern steps and twice as high.

The architecture is pretty much what we saw at the Forbidden City which I thought was weird. If you want a summer retreat, wouldn't you like new or different walls to look at? Scott guessed that it was to impress upon people that whoever was in the Summer Palace had the same power and authority as those residing in the Forbidden City. Scott has pictures to post and they tell most of the story. There were easily 50 different buildings, several galleries of artifacts where the newest items was more than 100 years old and lots and lost of opportunities to buy souvenir crap, including at least 6 Official Olympic shops.

Scott made the comment this park and the buildings had been here for hundreds of years, that you'd think that every Chinese person alive would have already seen then and wouldn't need to visit them again. I think he was just frustrated at the crowds. It was more crowded than the Temple of Heaven and all the areas where you could get away from the crowds, you had to be a billy goat to get to.

After walking around for about 3 hours, we took a short boat ride across the lake. The Summer Palace is more than 20 hectares in area (don't ask me what that is in acres) and more than three-quarters of that area is lake. We rode across to a little island and then walked across a bridge with 17 arches and then kept walking until we reached the gate where we came in, taking detours and meanders whenever we saw something interesting.

At the gate, we went to go catch a taxi. There were about 6 of them lined up. We showed them our hotel card and one guy that wasn't dressed in a taxi driver uniform grabbed the card and said he'd take us. He started leading us towards his car which was black and didn't have a taxi sign on it. We hesitated and asked if was a taxi. We'd heard of scams where drivers wouldn't have a meter and they take you to your destination and demand an outrageous amount of money. If you called the police, you'd always lose and end up paying and apologizing to the driver. He claimed he had a meter and when we took back the card and tried to show it to another real taxi driver, he said something to them and they handed it back to us without a word. Against our better judgment, seeing that he did have a meter, we got in the car. He kept talking about what a nice car he had and how it was so much better than a normal taxi. Right. When we go to the hotel, he charged us 4 times what a normal taxi would and insisted that he had a nice car. In reality, we are only talking $20 USD difference in fare, but it's aggravating being taken advantage of. Again, we wish we would have been able to learn more Chinese so we could have told him to bug off.

The rest of the day was spent showering and pre-packing. We just had dinner at one of the hotel restaurants (they have three) so that we were eating "safe" food. It was really good Chinese food, but cost about as much as it would in the U.S. Neither one of us was willing to take a chance with intestinal distress right before such a long travel day.

We'll be up again at 3:00 am local time to finish packing and catch the shuttle to the airport. That'll be noon on Monday Seattle time. Barring any delays, we should arrive in Seattle at 9:30 am on Tuesday, one hour after leaving Beijing based on local time. We are going to time travel again.

More Photos

2008-08-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of the medal ceremony for Women's Basketball.

Beijing Day 9 — Temple of Heaven

2008-08-24T17:10:00.001-07:00

Our plan for the day was pretty loose. We wanted to try and get as close to the Olympic Green as we could to see the fireworks from the Closing Ceremony. We were both pretty beat and didn't really want to go out. Angie is coming down with something and we've both just about had it with the crowds and heat. But, we've only got a couple days to go — we can rest when we get home.

We started out kind of late, mostly because we were unsure of what to go do. We settled on starting with the Drum and Bell Towers, the ancient Beijing versions of Big Ben — used to communicate the time and/or public messages before the advent of speaker towers. When we got there, both were "Closed long time" — according to the sign. Okay, plan B.

We weren't too far away from one of the lakes that stretch down towards the Forbidden City, so we decided to walk down there and stroll around. Touristville, big time. We actually rode through part of this area on our bike tour, but I don't think we got a very good look at it. There were "Visa, the official card of the Beijing Olympics" signs every 10 feet. Seriously. I have a picture to prove it.

We did have several opportunities to buy Rolexs. One woman in particular really tempted me as she whispered, "Lolex" and started to unzip her fanny pack. If anyone really wants a Rolex, which I'm sure is real, I can hook you up with her.

We decided to ditch the Rolex crowd — we were asked 4 times about Rolexs — and head over to the Temple of Heaven, one of the major historical sites in Beijing. Originally, we were scheduled to see the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace, the Emperor's palace away from the palace, tomorrow as part of another formal tour with Shall. Neither of us have been looking forward to it since we were confident that A/ more forced shopping would be involved and B/ she'd fly us through both locations so that we could have more time for A. She ran us through the Forbidden City in a half hour. When we went back through on our own, we were there for 4 hours and still only did about half of it. Knowing that both the Temple and Palace were as big or bigger than the Forbidden City, we knew Shall would shortchange us again. Before we left the hotel, Angie called and canceled the tour.

The Temple of Heaven really is a massive place. Like Jingshan park, the spot we visited on our first full day here, this was exactly what we needed at this stage of our trip. There were a lot of people here, but they were all so spread out that it felt like we had space and could meander as we pleased. Even inside the areas where the main buildings were, until you got up to the primary focus of a particular place like the spots you could see into the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the crowds were manageable.

The whole complex was built so that the Emperor could do ritualize sacrifices to Heaven. The sacrifice process was long and involved, took several days and each step had it's own building. Even the warehouse that they used to store everything was sacred and given the same high status architecture as the more important buildings. One of the funnier spots is the 70-year old gate. The staff of one elderly Empreror had a hole cut into the wall surrounding the main Hall so that their 70-year old Emperor wouldn't have to walk so far during the normal ritual. He thought the door was a cheat, but still used it. To keep anyone else from taking advantage of the shortcut, he decreed that no one under 70 could use the gate, so it became to 70-year old gate.

I think that the Chinese still hold this place in higher reverence than some of the other spots we've been. There were fewer vendors and the ones that were there were concentrated in a couple spots. There were fewer people performing like we saw in Jingshan park. It was much quieter and peaceful. It was a welcome break from normal life in Beijing.

As we left the park, we tried to get a taxi to the Night Market once again, figuring that it was about the cheapest place to eat and neither of us got the squirts after eating there. One guy wanted to charge us 100 RMB to get into the cab. Since that is easily 3 times what any other cab ride has cost us, we walked away. The next two cabs we tried to get flat out said no to us and said something about "Olympics." Feeling like we were missing something big, like the city was being locked down due to the Closing Ceremonies, we decided to hoof it over to the nearest subway. It was a bit of a hike, but we found it and rode up to the stop we thought was closest to the Market.

We missed it by one stop, we discovered, after walking for about a half hour or so. We finally found our way to the street where the Market is and found that it was closed. Angie thinks that the cabbies were refusing to drive us because they knew the Market was closed. Since there were tons of cabs up there, I think they were being dicks. Either way, we decided to head back up towards the Olympic Green and try to find a good spot for the fireworks.

We got off the subway at a spot that we thought would be closest to the east side of the Bird's Nest. It was, but we were still a couple miles away. The maps we have are horrible on scale and it's been very difficult to estimate distances. So we walked, and walked, and walked. We got turned around and had to walk back a bit. By the time we got close-ish to the stadium, we found the first police barricades.

They had a perimeter blocked off around the Olympic Green of about a mile in all directions. By this point, it was getting dark and we were getting pretty tired. We were already worn out before the day started and, with the walking we'd done in the park, were up to about 6 hours of walking today. With no clear view of the sky due to buildings, powerlines and trees, we were about to give up. I convinced Angie to go a little further before we bagged it and cabbed back to the hotel.

We found a street going in the right direction and were able to get about as close to the stadium as possible. We could see the top of the broadcast pagoda and the glow from the Olympic Flame in the mist. It was still about a half hour before the start of the Ceremony, so we staked out a spot. And stood there. And stood there. And stood there. And decided since the fireworks were only going to really go off at the end, which was 2.5 hours away or so, and since we were both very tired that we'd bag it after all and go back to the hotel.

So we watched the Closing Ceremonies and fireworks like everyone else, on TV.

We could see bits of the fireworks from our hotel room, but they were all in the distance. They were spread out all over the city by the looks of it. We were fairly frustrated that we weren't able to correctly communicate with anyone that we had wanted to watch the fireworks. Communication, even with English-speaking Chinese, has been spotty. You can never be sure that they understood your question or the intent of your question. The answer they give you often is very limited to the specifics of your question, if they get it right. They don't offer any other information, such as "No, you can't get on the Olympic Green to watch the fireworks without an event ticket, but if you want fireworks here are the 6 other locations you can go." Or, if they aren't sure about what you've asked, they just give you a no. We've really had to work hard to ask the right questions the right way in order to get the information we want, and even then we can't be sure until we get to where we think we're going that the information we received was correct. The Chinese people, except for a couple small instances, have been very helpful and seemed honestly sincere in their attempts to be good hosts, but the language barrier was a lot bigger than we'd expected and it hampered us in a lot of ways.

So, by the end of our "take it easy" day, we'd walked 25,000 steps according to Angie's pedometer. I don't know what that translates to in miles, but it felt like lots.

Tomorrow is our last full day in China and we're heading to the Summer Palace for one more sightseeing jaunt. Then, it's a full day of airports and no leg room.

Oh, one more thing — we saw a cat in a dry moat around the Fasting Palace in the Temple of Heaven. It was the first cat we've seen and I tried to follow him, but we lost him. I think I miss our cats.

Beijing Day 8 — Volleyball and Basketball

2008-08-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

Today began with Bronze and ended with Gold, with a little cloak and dagger action in the middle.

Women's Indoor Volleyball — Cuba vs China, Bronze Medal match

The venue for the volleyball match was the Capital Gymnasium. It is actually fairly close to our hotel and is on a bus route that also stops right in front of our hotel. With our Olympic tickets in hand, we get to ride for free, so the trip over was no problem.

But before we hopped the bus, there was a little business preparation that needed to happen. We stopped at a local bank to make sure we had enough RMB on hand for the scalper negotiations we would be facing before the basketball matches later on. We've kind of lost track of what day it is — everything is defined by what events we have going on, not what day of the week it might be — so it didn't occur to us as we walked to the bank that it might not be open on Saturday. It was and we had no problems.

The crazy thing about this bank, and a lot of places around this city, is that it is located in a run-down neighborhood and is tucked into a strip mall-like string of store fronts crammed into the first floor of what looks like an old apartment building or office building. Sometimes it's hard to say what they are. The store fronts are really shabby and covered with huge signs. They really don't look very hospitable to business, but that's how just about everything looks around here except for the very new buildings. But walk inside and you're standing in a super clean, air conditioned, modern bank. The facade in no way conveys what is going on inside and to make a judgment about any business by how it looks gets you nowhere here. It is true that a lot of the little holes-in-the-wall businesses really are what they seem, but you can't always assume that. Plus, they had someone who spoke English.

Anyway, getting to the volleyball venue was a snap. We went right in and got ready for our first final match of the Olympics.

This venue was a pre-existing arena that was spruced up for the Olympics. It is interesting that the older venues always seem to have better seating than the new ones. The new arenas might have cushy seats (except the Watercube — pure, solid plastic), but the leg room sucks and they tend to be pretty narrow. We were up in the upper section, but our location was great — almost center court and high enough that nothing obstructed our view.

We ended up sitting next to a couple from LA and in front of a Cuban couple who currently live and work in Beijing (her) and Malaysia (him). I think that the fact we always end up sitting next to other Americans must be due to how the event tickets are allocated. Each country gets a certain number and the organizers must have given those out in chunks instead of random seats around the arena. At every event we've been too, we've sat next to Americans or other English-speaking foreigners like Aussies.

One conspicuous change from this event to all the others we've been to — no national anthems. There was a performance before the game by some dancers during which they used the two countries' flags, but no anthems.

As the game got underway, it was pretty clear that China was in control. The Cubans had their moments and were able to win the second set, but China was much more consistent and made almost no mistakes. The Cubans really shot themselves in the foot over and over by committing unforced errors like serving long or into the net or really misplaying their setting. They gave China upwards of 6 or 7 free points in a couple matches. With the power players China had, Cuba had to play a perfect game and they really didn’t come through.

Not having ever been to a high level volleyball match before, it was great to have the Cubans behind us commenting about the game. The Chinese also really seemed to know and understand the game. Things would happen and the Chinese would start cheering even before the refs would call the point.

The Chinese team won 3 sets to 1. It seemed to be over pretty quick. Unlike our tickets for any prelim games, this one was for only one match. So, we had to leave and were unable to stick around for the medal presentation.

We got some food and headed back to the hotel room for a nap so we’d be ready to go for the our last late night of basketball.

Interlude — the Scalpers

We made it to the basketball arena well ahead of the start time so we could cruise the sidewalks looking for some tickets. We discovered that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it was for the last games we tried this.

There was security everywhere. Police walking around in pairs, soldiers stationed every few yards apart, police vehicles parked every which way and what looked like plainclothes cops (even I could spot them, later confirmed by one of the scalpers) patrolling the area.

There were more people looking to buy than sell. It took us awhile to find someone selling and he was really hesitant to talk openly. He didn’t even have the tickets on him and had to call to another person once we had talked price. Once that guy got to where we were, he had us follow him to one of the corners of the venue grounds so we could cross the street and get away from some of the security. We had to wait a bit because a couple plainclothes cops followed us to the corner, but when we just stood there, they continue on. The scalper had us loiter for a bit before going across the street.

We were more than a little nervous. We certainly didn’t want to go anywhere with these guys and tried to make it clear that we were going across the street and nowhere else. We didn’t want to get arrested, but we didn’t want to get robbed either (more than we already were).

Once we crossed the street, he handed us the tickets and had me put them in my bag quickly. We then started walking down the street, away from the corner, slowly and he motioned for us to get out the money. He walked on one side, Angie was in the middle and I was on the outside as she got out the money and handed it to him — our backs to where the security was stationed. He took the money, counted it quickly and off he went, looking pretty happy.

We headed back to the venue, happy to have A level tickets. I won’t say how much we paid. It was a lot, compared to the other tickets we’ve had. But then almost all of our other tickets have been ridiculously cheap in US dollars. A couple of events cost us about $10 each. And really, we paid what you might pay for decent seats at an NBA playoff game. Spendy, yes, but this was the Bronze and Gold medal matches for women’s basketball at the Olympics. In context, we came out on top in this transaction.

The last hurdle was to get through the ticket scan and security. Again, no problems — they were real tickets — and we were in for the finals.

Game 1 — Russia vs China, Bronze Medal match

China had plenty of chances to make this a game and they just let them all slip away.

For the most part, the game was fairly even except for the second quarter. During that period, Russia jumped out to a big lead that the Chinese were never able to come back from. Every time the Chinese had an opportunity to make up some ground and cut into the 15 or so point lead, they botched it. I didn’t get any sense of urgency from them. They played like it was a fairly normal game, not the Bronze medal match in their home Olympics.

The Russians did seem to have that urgency behind them and were able to convert on fastbreaks and on Chinese turnovers again and again. The Russians really had complete control of the middle with their bigger post players. Stepanova looked like she was playing unguarded much of the time. She was getting deep into the paint and was able to either get her shot or get rebounds and put-backs. The only thing stopping her was foul trouble. But even then when she was sitting on the bench, the Chinese couldn’t take advantage.

The real reason the Russians won was Becky Hammon. Without her, they would have been totally beatable not just by the Chinese in this game but throughout the tournament. I’m not even sure they would have made it out of pool play without her. Not only was she one of the Russians’ primary scorers, she was also setting up her teammates with great passes and assists. That is, when she was in. The Russian coaches had a convoluted substitution scheme. She again did not start, but had plenty of playing time. Bringing her onto the team basically bought them a Bronze medal.
We were sitting in row 21, behind the Russian bench, so we were a little out of optimal “Brick” range. We gave it a try and got a few Chinese people in front of us to join in. It seemed to work on a couple players, but it’s hard to tell. There was a lot of additional noise going on and it really needs to be quiet for it to be effective. Angie did go a bit hoarse with all the yelling. I actually hurt my neck the other night during the US/Russia game with the yelling I did.

For the Chinese, I think that we could see more than a couple of them back in the WNBA. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Lejie Miao and Sui Feifei come back to the W (both already played for Sacramento) followed by Nan Chen and Lan Bian. Like so many teams in this tournament, they have a few good players but little depth and when they face teams with more experience they get blown out. The next step for the Chinese is to have their players go international on a more consistent basis. I think this Olympics might be a launching point for a handful of China’s national team stars into the WNBA or Euroleagues.

Game 2 — USA vs Australia, Gold Medal match

This one is why we were here, to see the best basketball players in the world play for the Gold Medal, and more specifically to see our players — Sue and Lauren — play for the Gold.

Even with LJ (who is arguably the best in the world), Penny Taylor, Belinda Snell (who was turning out to be the Aussies’ go to player game after game), Kristi Harrower and Tully Bevilaqua, the Aussies just didn’t have enough guns to keep up with the Americans.

The American team is all starters, except for maybe Delisha Milton-Jones who seemed to be there mostly to hold down the end of the bench and dance around a lot. Our second team is still better than most countries’ first teams. As soon as the Aussie bench players started to rotate in, the US started to pull away.

That was really what decided the game. The Aussies couldn’t match the US player to player, but neither could any of the other teams. The US was beaten in the last World Championships, but you could see that they learned from that loss and were playing with more determination and poise than anyone else.

This needs to be Lisa Leslie’s last Olympics. If the US has a weak link, she’s it. She was horrible out there. She’s no longer our best player, nor is she even our best center. Based on how she and the other post players were playing not only in this game but the other two three that we saw, she’s number three and not four because Milton-Jones has that spot. Leslie was a foul machine, was getting pushed around under the basket and looked relieved too many times when she got pulled and replaced by Sylvia Fowles.

Fowles is the real deal. If Leslie used to be the player that no other country could stop, Fowles is that player now. Nobody could do much against her, even with double or triple teams. She’s going to be a huge force in the WNBA and the anchor for Team USA for a long time to come. I don’t know if an MVP is awarded for the Olympics, but she gets my vote.

For Australia, we were surprised not only during this game but in the other games we’d seen that the Aussie coaches don’t seem to know how to use Lauren Jackson. The only time she was really being utilized correctly was in the third quarter of the Gold medal game. The Aussies finally started going to her first and letting her drive to the basket or getting her the ball in the post and letting her make her move or kick back out to the perimeter. It seemed like she was the second or even third option at times, while the focus of the offense was on the Aussie guards.

This wasn’t a big issue early on since Harrower, Snell and Bevilaqua were easily outplaying their counterparts on other teams. Once it got to the Americans, however, the Aussie guards were held in check more of the time (they still were able to score, but not as easily or as often) and the Aussies didn’t go to Lauren or Penny fast enough.

The biggest criticism of Team USA from their World Championship loss was that the coaching staff didn’t adjust to the other teams quick enough or at all. I would say that the Aussies were guilty of that tonight. We all know that no one can really stop LJ. Yes, people can slow her down — especially Tina Thompson, who ended up playing LJ most of the time — but no one can hold her down the whole game. When LJ did finally get the ball in the third quarter is when the Aussies were able to play even with the US.

The US won the game, a little more easily than either of us had anticipated it would be, and we got to see our first and only medal ceremony.

The teams were led off the court — the US was in full celebration mode and the Aussies were consoling each other — and teams of workers brought out carpets to line the edges of the court and then the sets of yellow risers for the athletes to stand on. There was about a half hour or so wait before the teams were reintroduced and brought back out to the court. I’d say that about a third of the people in the stands stayed to watch.

The Russians, probably because they had more time to prepare, seemed to be a lot more okay with Bronze than the Aussies did with Silver. Their loss was still very fresh and you could really see the dejection in their faces and tears. Lauren looked like she just wanted to go hide someplace.

The Russians stepped up first and received their medals and flowers. They were all smiles, except for #15. She was not happy at all. She wasn’t crying or anything, but once I noticed how irritated she looked I kept an eye on her and didn’t see her smile at all. The others did and were pointing to their friends or family in the crowd, doing the bite-the-metal thing and generally looking happy to be there. Not her.

The Aussies were next and they really made it look like second is the worst place to be. Someone from the crowd threw in a stuffed kangaroo and Suzy Batkovic put it in front of her on the stand. With the army of Aussies behind the basket doing chants and cheers, the Opals received their Silver medals. They were crying or fighting it really hard. Tully looked sad and happy at the same time, this being her first Olympics and first medal. Penny was barely keeping it together. Right before LJ got her medal, she looked back to her parents who were sitting below us and to the right a bit and said, “I love you.”

The US team went last and stepped up onto the stand. They were waving their arms, gesturing to friends and family up in the stands or posing for photos. Kara Lawson looked a little dumbstruck at the whole thing. As soon as Leslie got her medal, she whipped out the three others she’s won. I’m sure she’ll hear some criticism for that, but she won them. Hopefully this will be the last one.

The flags went up and our national anthem was played.

Afterwards, as the players started to celebrate or commiserate, someone pulled Team USA together so someone in the stands could take a team shot. Luckily, that was right in front of us. Eventually, all the players, coaches and at least one of the players’ children got into the shot. The Russians did the same thing and I was able to get them too. The Aussies didn’t until much later and they were facing their fans in the stands, so I missed that group shot.

LJ left the floor right after the medal ceremony. The rest of the Aussies went over to their fans and met with their families. Penny full on broke down when she got to her husband. There were a lot of hugs, tears and pats on the back.

The US players continued to celebrate. Leslie, Milton-Jones and Parker were posing together Charlie’s Angels style. Ugh. Sue and Svetlana Abrosimova and one other Russian player met for congratulations and then were posing for photos. There were a lot of congratulations going on between the Russians and Americans, mostly because so many of the US players are on Russian teams in the WNBA off season. Lawson still looked dumbstruck.

They all started to filter off the court so we headed out. Thus concludes our scheduled Olympic experience.

Photos

2008-08-22T17:20:00.001-07:00

I didn't think I'd be able to keep up with posting photos in a timely fashion, but it's been killing me that I haven't had the time to post anything from China yet. So, I powered through a couple sets last night.

Great Wall

Basketball semifinal — USA vs Russia

Track & Field

Beijing Day 7

2008-08-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

Today was an open day. We had nothing planned and no Olympic events. So first thing we did was sleep in some. After getting up at 6 am or earlier every day, regardless of having been up until midnight or later the day before, we slept in until 8 am. We then had a leisurely morning getting up and going and finally left the hotel by about 10:30 am.

Our plan for today was to re-visit some of the areas we had visited on tours but hadn't been able to spend an adequate amount of time at. So our first stop was the Luilichang Commercial District and some hutongs. We grabbed a taxi in front of the hotel and headed off. This was by far our worst taxi ride yet. We've become used to the crazy close calls while driving so it wasn't that. This taxi driver kept sharply braking for no reason. We'd be going down an open stretch of road and he'd just brake hard for a second or two and then keep going. It was a very jerky ride and very annoying. We couldn't decide if he was doing it because he was a crappy driver or just didn't like foreigners. Anyway, no tip for him.

We arrived at Luilichang and began our stroll. This area is full of interesting shops full of handicrafts and arts and we were both interested in taking a look around. Unfortunately, the Chinese have no concept of window shopping or browsing. If they notice you even slowing down in front of their windows to look, a sales person will rush out and push the hard sell. No peaceful browsing for us. We didn't even go into any of the stores because of the hard sell. Too bad for them. Neither one of us are very big shoppers, but without the added annoyance of the hard sell, we would have bought stuff if we could have looked around in peace. I'm actually looking forward to getting back to the U.S. where you can wander a store (like Home Depot) for hours without being bothered or helped for that matter.

When the Luilichang portion of the street ran out, it dumped us into a hutong. We wandered around. Scott took lots of pictures. We were as much of a tourist attraction to the locals as their homes were to us. There were food stalls which were scary. Normal type food, but no refrigeration. Fresh eggs and meat sitting out in the sun in 80+ degree weather. We saw several pet dogs but due to warnings from the health nurse, we didn't try to pet them. Scott, of course, took pictures.

Scott had one older man sitting out selling shoe parts and repairing shoes indicate that Scott should take his picture. Then he wanted money. Nice. We also had a little boy, about 3 or 4 years old, playing in the street ham it up for Scott and then come running over each time he took a picture to look at the back of the camera. Apparently, not a new thing for him. He didn't ask for money though. His grandmother was watching us closely, but with a smile.

After about an hour, we'd reached a major road and decided we'd had enough. We were just across the street from Tianammen Square, so we decided to head over. We had to go down through a pedestrian underpass and go through a security check. They kept closing off the underpass to slow down traffic coming through the x-ray machine at the security check and left us all standing out in the hot sun. Scott mentioned after we got through that if they'd just let us go with the flow, like other security checks, we'd all have made it through in about the same amount of time, without all the fuss. Go figure.

Once in the Square, we just wandered around taking pictures. Scott offered to take pictures of at least a couple of families with their cameras. We then ended up being in photos like we were an attraction. Weird. Mao's tomb was closed that day and at the south gate, they were setting up some fireworks. Maybe for the Closing Ceremonies? The funny thing was that they had put up police tape or do not cross tape surrounding the fireworks. Because it was in a shady area, people were crawling over and under the tape to go sit in the shade. Right in front of the police that were supposed to be keeping order. You'd get tazered for that kind of behavior in the U.S. these days, so you have to ask, who's really living in a police state?

Next, we wandered over to the Forbidden City via another underground pedestrian underpass. Again, Scott starts taking pictures. It's much more crowded over here, but we are getting used to the pushing and close quarters. We enter the outer courtyard of the City and are immediately approached about going on a tour to the Great Wall, asked if we want a tour guide for the City and told there is a student art showing if we just had 5 minutes (this one is a scam that is so prevalent, it's listed in the tour books). Then, of course, there are at least a dozen "souvenir" shops before you reach the inner gate. Yikes. I did manage to find some postcards that I will get out when we return to our hotel.

We pretty much spent the next four hours wandering around the City at the speed we would have liked to conduct our tour during our first visit. We ate at a "fast food" restaurant. The dish we ordered was "Two meats with vegetables and rice." It appeared to be beef cubes and pork meatballs. Rather tasty. I grabbed chopsticks thinking we'd have no real choice in utensils before we headed outside to eat. One of the bus boys came out a minute or so later and brought us spoons. I'm not sure if they see us having difficulties or if they just assume Westerner can't use chopsticks. We aren't ever going to get any better if we don't practice. We were sitting on the ground, eating with our spoons and noticed that every single Chinese person passing us was looking at us and laughing. We weren't sure if this was beause we were sitting on the ground instead of squatting like they do or because we were using spoons to eat. Apparently, it was the spoons. Scott made a comment that he was tired of being stared at like a sideshow freak just because they used sticks to eat with instead of civilized eating utensils. I snorted some rice laughing. We had set down our trays, mine still had a significant amount of food on it, and some woman came passed and threw her trash right into my plate. She didn't even look to see if I was done eating. I made a comment about how rude and apparently, she noticed my tone and gestured an apology to Scott. What's with these people? We were standing less than 5 feet from a garbage can.

We then continued on our tour and tried to stay off the main meridian of the City an check out some of the side buildings. We came across a display (air conditioned, yay!) of the elaborate clothing the Emporer and the Emporess wore. Very beautiful stuff. No photos because they were prohibited. We next stumbled upon a display of anciet calligraphy writings. Nice but we couldn't read it. There was a beautiful display of a room screen that was made of wood and had the characters carved in jade and embedded in the wood. It was amazing just contemplating the artistry and skill that would have been required to achieve that.

Scott was having troubles getting photos in places due to the number of photographers trying to get similiar shots. Most would take their shots and move on allowing the next person to get a shot. However, there was more than one that just stood there taking shot after shot for like 5 minutes. Annoying, especially in this heat. We did see this one guy who had a special camera that would allow him to stand in one spot and take a panoramic 360 degree photo. It only used film, but was pretty cool. We watched him use it from a distance a couple of times.

Overall, my impression of the Forbidden City is one of granduer that has seen better days. They seem to be having troubles with the upkeep and this national treasure is crumbling with age and use around their ears. I think they would have been better off spending the money they spent on the Olympics on restoring the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

We left the north entrance of the City across from Jingshan Park. Now we began our search for a taxi. We ended up walking east and then north for about 20 minutes trying to find an open taxi. Every one that drove passed was full. We eventually spotted one that was dropping off someone almost right in front of the bike tour company's offices. We nearly got hit crossing the street to snag the taxi. However, we weren't the only ones. We've noticed that with the Chinese, it doesn't matter how long you've been waiting for a taxi, if you are the first one at the taxi, it's yours. There are no lines, no taxi stands. It's chaos and first come, first serve. Aggressiveness is rewarded. But, they don't fight over them. If you miss out on one, you just move on to finding another one.

With this in mind, we started getting into the cab while the other guy was still at the front fender of the car. This guy, another American, was really pissed. He said he had been waiting 5 minutes for a taxi and this was his. We explained that we'd been walking and waiting for nearly 20 minutes and we were taking it. Scott told me to get in the taxi. As I started to do so, the guy grabbed the door and pushed it closed on me. I'm going to have another bruise on my arm. He then took a swipe at Scott and knocked his glasses on the ground all the while cursing at us. That got Scott going and he started cursing back in spectacular fashion and telling the guy that after a week of being in Beijing, he had the distinction of being the rudest, most obnoxious person we had met and wouldn't you know it, he was an American. Despite all the drama, viewed very curiously by the Chinese I might add, we got in the taxi and left. That guy needs to chill out or he is going to have a very, very frustrating trip, especially if he thinks we were rude. I personally think he was just frustrated in general and we were the only ones that spoke English that he could take it out on. And honestly, the Chinese don't care if you are frustrated or pissed if you can't speak Chinese.

Back at the hotel, Scott finished up yesterday's blog and started working on his photos (they should be posted for your viewing pleasure). We had dinner at the restaurant on the second floor of the hotel. It was very good, more expensive than you would pay outside the hotel by about 3 times, which always pisses me off until I realize that it the equivalent of what you'd pay in the U.S. for a similar meal. We've tried to avoid eating in the hotel due to the prices, but it was 7:30 pm and we were hoping to watch the men's basketball semis which started at 8:00 pm.

So that's what we did, watched basketball, and worked on catching up on photos and blogging.

Tomorrow, we have women's indoor volleyball semi-finals and the bronze and gold medal match for women's basketball. We will also be having another scalper adventure.

Beijing Day 6 — Athletics and Basketball

2008-08-22T04:12:00.000-07:00

Our plan for today, since we again had tickets for a venue on the Olympic Green, was to go to the souvenir store first thing to hopefully beat the crowds. Neither of us was invested in the track and field events, other than being there and being in the Bird’s Nest, so if we missed a little at the beginning that would be okay.

The challenge for the morning though was the rain. The torrential, non-stop rain. If the previous days had been so humid that we felt like we were stepping into a sauna every time we went outside, today we were stepping into a water hose set on clear-out-the-protesters. We didn’t have any rain gear.

Our tour company gave us a ride to the venue, so we asked the driver to find someplace along the way where we could get a poncho or something (assuming that the no pointy stick rule for the getting into the venues would negate umbrellas). He found a small, hole-in-the-wall “supermarket” (about a quarter the size of a normal-sized US convenience store) and got us a couple ponchos. We had been seeing just about everyone on a bike wearing these big sturdy looking rain coats that covered them and their bikes. These were not them. They were basically plastic tissue paper with arms, a hood and snaps. Usable enough, except the Chinese are a very small people. Mine didn’t fit.

So we get to the Green and after running to and getting on the subway, we make it up to the Beijing Superstore.

It’s not open until 9, and it’s 8:15. It’s still raining like mad. There is about a 3 foot awning in front of the main doors and that’s it for cover.

We haven’t written much about the overall condition of the venues or city for that matter. The best two words I’ve come up with to describe the Olympic Green and all of the venues we’ve seen is hastily completed. There was clearly a get it done and screw the quality mentality involved with the construction of these places. Up to this point, the most annoying half-done feature of the parks has been the walkways. The pavers are very irregular, aren’t set flat in the ground, are loose, tend to rock when you step on them because the ground underneath them isn’t level. We’re constantly tripping or catching our shoes on them. Other things like the paint jobs on the buildings were slopped on (in lots of places, you can see tons of overspray on the sidewalk next to the buildings or find paint spills every where). One of the more disappointing things I saw was how dirty and dingy the Watercube is already. Once you get up close, it looks like the construction grime wasn’t cleaned off in places, especially inside where everything is translucent or white. None of this stuff is a deal breaker and understandable to a degree given the scope of what they tried to accomplish. But, I’ve been left asking if this is supposed to be the crown jewel in such a huge national effort why wasn’t there more attention paid to the details and quality issues?

Such as drainage. As in there is none. The area in front of the Superstore was a lake several inches deep. We pretty much had to walk through it, wet feet be damned. People started using the rope barrier stanchions as stepping stones to try and get through. It wasn’t just in that spot either. There was standing water every where. We gave up after awhile and tried to find spots that weren’t up to our ankles at least.

Anyway, we ended up standing under the little awning for 45 minutes or so waiting for the store to open. Luckily, there weren’t many people there until right before the doors opened, so we weren’t to crushed together.

We met and talked with Iris from Bristol, England. She was very excited about the day because she is good friends with one of the athletes on the Dutch Water Polo team, who were facing the US in the Gold medal match later in the afternoon. She described how the team’s goal was more to prepare for 2012 in London rather than medal here in Beijing. They were surprised to find themselves in the final and guaranteed a medal. As it turned out, we discovered when we got back to the hotel room after basketball, that the Dutch beat the US and won the Gold. While we of course would like to see the US win, after hearing Iris talk about her friend and the Dutch team, we are very happy that they were able to pull off the victory and that her friend was able to get the Gold to cap off her career. Iris, if you’re reading this, remember to send us an email if you ever come to Seattle.

The store staff were really slow in opening the doors. By the time 9:00 rolled around, there were about 50 people outside, most of whom were in the rain. People started banging or pushing on the doors. The building is temporary, so the whole wall tended to move when someone pushed on a door. Once the guy with the keys showed up and let us in, a number of Chinese went directly to the info booth and really started laying into the staff. We left that alone and went foraging.

Finally, an opportunity to spend money on stuff. We did pretty well, although the stuff we were looking for specifically didn’t seem to exist, so we found other stuff we liked. First thing, of course, was umbrellas… with the mascots on them.

After some successful shopping, we headed back to the Bird’s Nest. Once we got close, we found that the way was blocked because they had sectioned off part of the street to serve as the track for the Women’s 20K Walk final. I can’t imagine a more miserable day to have this kind of event. We had no way to know who was in the lead or even in most cases which country the athletes were from. Not all of their uniforms were very clear. What was clear was when the Chinese walker came by. The “Cha Yo” chant would start as soon as the crowd saw the red tights and yellow shoes.

We found our way around the track and around the Bird’s Nest (of course our entry was on the opposite side of where we were — we hit almost 10,000 steps this morning by 10 am). Our seats were in the top level so we climbed — no escalators — up and up and up.

Inside the superstructure, it feels very open while at the same time closed off to the rain. The cross-hatch design you see in the building’s shell is continued as a graphic element pretty much everywhere. Any place there are tiles or pavers, they are set in a that same random-like angular pattern. There are large panes of thick plastic panels set in the handrails along the edge of the walkways printed with the pattern, in red. There is red everywhere. The underside of the seating is painted red. The concourse is red. Everything, red, red, red. Even in the dim, overcast light, we could see that when this is lit up, the red really glows.

Inside the stadium, the superstructure covers most of the seating so we weren’t in any danger of getting rained on. The only people who were getting wet were in the expensive seats or in the press area. Half of the lower bowl was marked off for press. We could imagine, from the sight lines, that the Opening Ceremonies would have been great to watch from just about any seat. Our only problem was that we near the bottom of the top tier and there was a line of equipment ringing the arena, covered up with grey tarps. They must have been used for the Opening Ceremony or perhaps will be for the Closing. Today, they mostly obscured what was going on directly beneath us — the Decathlon long jump.

At the same time, we were watching the last of the 20K walkers enter the stadium, the prelims for the women’s high jump (groups A and B going at the same time on side-by-side high jumps, the men’s javelin throw and the decathlon long jump). Not having been to a track meet since high school, it took a little while to get the flow of things and make sense of it all.

I tried to sit back and take it in.

We were too far away to really see the individual athletes when they were doing their thing and had to rely on the big screens to see the reactions when an athlete succeeded or failed. The screens themselves were incredibly massive, maybe 50 feet tall and a hundred feet wide. There are similar screens on buildings around the city playing Olympic coverage during the day.

Because it was raining, the entire infield and track were wet with standing water in places. There were towel crews who attempted to dry off the spots that the athletes used to plant their feet — at the end of the javelin throw track for example. They also had this push machine that had a towel around a big drum. It looked like the towel would pick up water and deposit it somehow into a catch basin in the back. It took two people to push it and they were mostly using it on the long jump track.

The crew taking care of the javelin competition had a couple of remote controlled cars to retrieve the javelins and carry them back to the throwing area.

There are lots of birds in the Bird’s Nest.

The seat numbering seems to change venue to venue. We’ve seats that start low on the left and get higher going right and visa versa. The seats in the Bird’s Nest seemed to do both, with the high numbers meeting in the center of a section. It was a little confusing to come up the stairs to two rows on either side that started with seat 1.

The Chinese are sending a lot of school groups to the games. We’ve several at any of the day events we’ve gone to and there were a lot at this event today.

After watching the action for about an hour, I started getting the hang of keeping up with the separate events and how they were being displayed on the big screen and on the smaller displays on the field. Each apparatus or track had it’s own display that showed who the current athlete was, what their standing was, what attempt this was and how they did on previous attempts. Like the diving competition we saw earlier, the pace at which the rounds happened was fairly quick with little pause in between. The only time things tended to bog down was when someone had to go two or three attempts.

There are a lot of distractions that the athletes have to deal with. There is often music being played on the PA. The announcers were covering the action in English and Chinese (and I’m sure because so much was going on, the two announcers kept stepping on each other’s time). Along each track or approach to an apparatus, there are staff, cameras, signs, equipment for other events and a host of other things. I never really got a sense of how much crap there was littering the field by watching this kind of thing on TV.

We left before a little earlier than the when the session ended to try and get a jump on the taxi competition. It’s been getting harder and harder to get a taxi outside the venues after an event. Today, we tried spot after spot and had no luck. We finally gave up and decided to walk out a few blocks to find another main street and try there. We ended up having lunch before finally being able to get a cab.

We got back to the hotel room and took a nap in preparation for the late night of basketball. We got to the venue about an hour before the doors opened so we would have enough time to work the scalpers and try to get better seats. The tickets we had were for the upper deck and we would have been about half way up that section. It took us about a block or so before we started seeing scalpers. At first, most of them were holding baseball tickets. The baseball fields are right next to the basketball arena and closest to the subway we just used.

Once we got up to the basketball scalpers, capitalism started to happen.

Now, the two of us were a little nervous about doing this. As I wrote earlier, there are signs everywhere forbidding it and there are police and army soldiers patrolling the streets often. No matter. As soon as it became clear that we were looking at the tickets the scalpers were holding up, we became the center of ring of people want to make a deal.

At first, we kept seeing tickets that were just as bad as ours. It took a couple times before the scalpers understood we were looking for the good stuff. Soon, this one bald Chinese guy took over the negotiations and made it known to the other scalpers that we were his to deal with. Any time someone new would come up to us, he or his helper would shoo them away. He would go out to his crew and come back with tickets to which we would say yes or no. We were having a hard time getting him to understand that we wanted two tickets together in the A level.

While he was out trying to round up suitable tickets, a Chinese couple came up to us, speaking pretty good English and dressed a little too much like tourists wanting to know if we wanted to buy tickets. I got a bad vibe off them and said no. Before our bald friend came back, they left so I never found out if they were cops or not. But if even I could sense they weren’t right, I’m pretty sure they were fakes.

He kept trying and we kept saying no. Meanwhile, another guy showed with exactly the tickets we wanted and seemingly for a price we were willing to pay. That made bald guy pretty mad and after some quick Chinese, the new guy wouldn’t talk to us.

Then a Korean guy showed up and said that he had friends willing to sell tickets if we could wait. I told him to hurry since baldy was really working his contacts. The Korean’s friends showed up and their tickets were as bad as ours, again. Sheesh.

After standing there for a good 10 minutes waiting, trying to communicate what we wanted and feeling like we were about to get screwed, negotiations got underway and it was a non-starter. Once we got down to business, they wanted 2500 Yuan for each ticket, which is five times the face value. No freakin’ way. As we walked off, another guy came up with two tickets that seemed legit. I asked how much. He said 2000 each. We said 1500 each. He said yes.

As Angie was counting out the money, I saw baldy making a bee line for us. I told her to hurry, hurry. I wanted to get this transaction completed before baldy could butt in. Just before he got there, the money was exchanged, the new guy counted it and we had our A level tickets in hand.

All we had to do was get past the ticket check and we were good. Sure enough, the scalped tickets scanned and we were in the plaza. Success! Our first attempt to buy scalped tickets. We ended up paying three times face value, but when you break it down we paid about $200US for each ticket. That’s it for the semi-finals at the Olympics. Hopefully, we can repeat this again for the finals.

Once we got inside the arena, we discovered that the seats were really good. They were on the end which had the US and Australian bench. We were just about on line with the benches, maybe a little behind them, so the basket really wasn’t a visual distraction. And, I was in great position to yell brick at the Russians.

Game 1 — USA vs Russia

The crowd was not on our side.

There were a ton of Russians in the stands. They were congregated in a couple groups with the main on at the top of the lower bowl behind the US bench. There was another smaller ground down in front of us and then numerous small groups around the arena. The main group pretty much made noise the whole game. They were a mixed group, but their combined voices were big, deep and booming. I’m sure you all heard them on the broadcast.

Along with them, the Chinese crowd was definitely pro-Russian. The US was getting no love beyond the indiscriminate golf claps the Chinese give everyone. That was not so surprising as the Aussies who were also pulling for Russia. I can understand the Communists banding together, but come on now. The Aussies and the Americans are like half-brothers. Family. Blood. Give it up, at least a little bit.

No, it was left to the smattering of Americans to cheer for Team USA. There were, finally, some “U S A” chants, but they really didn’t start until the Russians had gotten rolling and were dominating the air with their incessant “Rus Si Ah” chant. As I’ve written previously, the Americans have been conspicuously quiet and reserved when it comes to supporting their team, at least compared to the rampant nationalism we’ve seen from every other group. Tonight, it was almost a defensive measure and because they Americans stayed in their assigned seats (funny that we’re the ones following the rules in a police state), we couldn’t get any real volume. Well, “we” being the whole group. I had some volume.

After listening to the non-stop heckling coming from the Russians and boos from the Chinese, I felt no hesitation in going after the Russians during their free throws. Like a road game in the WNBA, the arena tended to get very quiet for the home team. In this case, for the Russians. I was 50 feet or less away from the foul line on our side.

On the first Russian free throws, I cut loose and scared the crap out of every Chinese, Aussie and Russian sitting in front of us. And oh yeah, the Russian player missed both free throws. I can’t claim credit for the Russians’ 50% free throw shooting, but their percentage has been in the 60s or 70s for the rest of their games at the Olympics. I’m confident in saying I got those first two and maybe one other miss later on.

The Chinese around us thought it was funny and applauded when it seemed to work. I actually got dirty looks from the Aussies and down right evil looks from the Russians. I actually had one Russian stand up and tell me to be quiet. My irony meter exploded since at the time he was saying that, 50 Russians were chanting a section away from us. I told him that as soon as they were quiet, I’d be quiet.

The game was frustrating to watch, at least early on. The US was playing very tight and hesitant while the Russians seemed to be getting the ball into the middle at will. Lisa Leslie was really stinking up the joint. She was being dominated by Stepanova at both ends of the court. Finally, Coach Donovan brought in Sylvia Fowles and things calmed down. The US kept the Russians within reach with rebounding and second chance shots and three-pointers.

During the second half, the Americans clamped down on defense and started to hit the bunny shots they had been missing in the first half. On the Russian side, Becky Hammon got decent playing time, but was taken out of the game by the US guards. Becky was able to work over her opponents from the other countries, but the US players know all her tricks and I bet they wanted to put a little something extra on this one.

The result? US beats Russia and fairly handily at the end.

Game 2 — Australia vs China

We came ready to cheer for Australia. We even bought an Aussie flag to wave, but to be honest we were a little disinclined to do so after the cold shoulder we got from the Aussie fans in our section. We decided that we were there to support our players, current and past and would do so now regardless.

It’s a good thing we decided to not be pouty about it because as the tip-off loomed closer, the rows in front of us filled with the big Aussie group we’ve seen at the other games.

The first thing we noticed about the Aussies, being this close, was how much beer they drank. There were maybe 30 Aussies sitting in front of us, maybe a few more. They were ordering so much beer, that the arena staff started bringing it down to their seats by the tray load, 20 at a time. There was literally a non-stop rotation of 20 beer trays coming down to our section the whole game. With what individual Aussies brought down themselves, we figured that nearly 300 beers were consumed by 30 or so people. I thought for sure they would get cut off, but nope. The beer continued to flow.

At least they didn’t stand the whole time like the Russians were. The Aussies stood at appropriate times and stayed seated during game play.

This game was much more one-sided that the US and Russia. The Aussies took out the Chinese pretty easily. It really wasn’t much of a contest. I’m not sure if that is good or bad for the US in the Gold medal match. Russia was a tougher opponent than the Chinese and I think it might have been a good wake-up call for the US. The Aussies really haven’t been tested yet. They look extremely focused and if the US makes too many mistakes, like the 20+ turnovers they had against Russia (Leslie, I’m looking at you), Australia is going to have a field day.

I talked to Penny Taylor’s husband a bit and he said she was doing really well and should play in the final. He said she probably could have gone in this game but wanted to rest the ankle and “let the other girls pick up for her.” He also said something that made my blood run cold.

He said LJ isn’t coming back to the US. I said that sure, she needs to take care of herself first and get her ankle taken care of, but she might be able to make it back for the playoffs if the Storm makes it out of the first round. He kind of did an “Um, yeah, maybe.”

I don’t want to read anything into what he said, but I kind of can’t help it. He seemed like he was backpedaling a bit when I acted like it was just a matter of time for her to come back after the surgery healed. I could be wrong and he was pretty drunk. I don’t want to start anything, but I felt what I felt. I’ve been worrying for the last year or so that if Australia wins the Gold in Beijing, LJ would retire from the WNBA. This surgery and his reaction did nothing to dissuade me from that worry.

One way or another, we’re set for the final game. Angie and I need to work the scalpers once again to avoid sitting in the nosebleeds. We now have a Chinese flag to wave during the China/Russia Bronze medal match and I plan to enlist as many Chinese as a I can in doing brick for the Russians.

At the end of this game, the Aussie fans started chanting, “We want USA, we want USA.” Be careful what you ask for. I hope.

Beijing - Day 5 Great Wall and Forbidden City

2008-08-20T14:36:00.001-07:00

We were both very excited about our day long tour today. We were going to see the Great Wall and then on to Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City. I had some concerns that with an hour and half drive to the Wall each way and the tour only being from 9 am to 5 pm that we would be able to spend enough time at the sight to actually see everything. It was actually worse than I expected. Our tour guide, Shall, meet us at the hotel at 8:30 am. She used to be a teacher and her English is quite good. She's also a very chatty person. She spent the day asking us what we knew about the various sites and then lecturing us on what we didn't know.

I had read that tour guide often make side trips to "factories" where you can basically buy direct from the factory. You have a little tour and then dump you into a massive store. Who knows if the stuff is actually made there are not. I had assumed that our tour company would screen their tour guides and at least ask if we wanted to go shopping. No such luck. In fact, we didn't even make it to the Wall without stopping at a factory.

The first one, the Jade Factory, wasn't so bad and I had wanted to get some jade jewelry, so I didn't mind so much. We had a short tour about where jade came from, the types of jade and how they carve it as well as viewing some extremely awesome carvings. Scott has some pictures. The store was massive and we did buy some jade. This stop cost us approximately an hour out of our day.

We then headed to the Great Wall. We were going to the section at Badalang. I had read in the tourist guides that this section got fairly heavy tourist traffic, but the reality was hard to envision. The drive up was quite nice with some amazingly beautiful scenery. Once there, it was a bit like an theme park from the 70s that hadn't been maintained very well. Lots of souvenir shops (and I do mean lots - like wall to wall from the entrance of the place to where you started walking up to the Wall. And some zoo-like pens with black bears. The funny thing was that there were a ton of signs that said don't feed the bears or throw things at them. However, everyone was doing so and in fact the bears were standing with their mouths open to encourage people to throw food at them. There were no park workers to stop them.

We elected to take what we thought was a trolley/tram to the top. It wasn't a trolley, more of carts on a conveyor system. Think kiddie roller coaster up a very steep hill. They don't actually stop the cars, you just have to jump in really quick. Not so easy when you have a backpack on. When we got to the top, again the things didn't slow down and the guy just reachs in and jerks you out. I'm going to have a bruise the size of my "rollergirl" bruise on my thigh tomorrow. Once off the carts we still had a decent climb to get to standing on the Wall. The stairs weren't that well maintained and it was more like hiking on a rocky hill that walking on stairs. However, you are also surrounded shoulder to shoulder with about 200 people all trying to get to the same narrow walkway. My favorite is having someone put their hand in the middle of my back and just start pushing. Like I wouldn't be moving forward if I could! My other favorite is those people that just stop dead in the middle of traffic to take a picture, get in their bag, whatever. They can't pull over and get out of traffic, they just stop right in the way and then give you a dirty look when you run into them because they stopped without warning. Cheesh.

We climbed some very steep stairs and made it up to a guard house. Very close quarters with people trying to go both directions in a walkway that was wide enough for about one person. Typical. Once through, we were actually standing on the Great Wall. That was pretty awesome. It was very foggy due to humidity and being up in the mountains, so I'm not sure how well Scott's pictures turned out. We continued hiking towards the next guard house. The stairs are all very uneven. You will have a couple of steps that are about 3-6 inches high and then the next one will be nearly 24 inches high. Man, I was thankful of all the squats and lunges that our trainer has been making us do. Additionally, it was very steep, I would guess about 30 degrees and still packed with people. The shoving and pushing at this point just becomes dangerous.

The sad thing was that we noticed a lot of graffiti carved into the wall. It didn't look terrible to us because it was all in Chinese and their characters are just pretty, however the defacing of such a national treasure is just sad. Another sad thing was there were several spot where it looked and smelled like someone had peed on the Great Wall. I've never been to Wasington, D.C. to see any of our national monuments, but I have to hope we treat them better than this.

The tour guide had only given us about an hour and twenty minutes before we were to meet her back at the entrance. Unfortunately, with all the people, we barely made it to the first high spot in the Wall before we needed to turn around and head back. We were delayed because the line for the pulley cars was quite long. I took some video of coming back down, if it turned out. You could smell the brakes on the front car all the way down. Did I mention it was very steep? Fortunately, on this ride, they did actually stop the car and allow you a second to climb out without injuring yourself. We were late in meeting back up with Shall and then had to walk down passed all the pushy vendors one more time to get back to the van. As it was about noon, we drove off to get some food.

Imagine our surprise when the restaurant was connected to another factory. We ended up touring the factory before we got to eat. It was a cloissene (sp?) factory which was interesting I suppose, but none of these items were on our shopping list and I doubt any of them would make it back to the States in our luggage.

Lunch was good. I have no idea what Shall ordered except that there was no fish. She was gone when the food started coming and we were hungry, so we just started eating. It turns out, the first dish was eggplant. I did fine eating it until I found out what it was. Then I started having a gag reflex. Go figure. I passed on the bean curd this time, but I tried everything else and it was tasty. Again, there was too much even for the three of us to finish. It seems very wasteful, but Shall says it is expected that you leave food or they will think they weren't good hosts.

By now, it was nearly 2:30 and we headed out to Tianamen Square. However, Shall had been spending a bit of time on the phone while we were driving and we ended up stopping and waiting for someone to meet us for about 15 minutes. He was dropping something off. Did I mention the hard sells? Shall gave us a talk about the Olympic running man logo and Chinese stamps on our way to the Wall. She then said she knewn a guy who carved name stamps and asked if we'd like one. Scott said sure and so she had him write our names and the year we were born on a piece of paper. It turns out that we were waiting for this guy to bring our stamps and to take another order. Shall had gotten a call from a previous tour participant who wanted additional stamps. They were pretty cool - watch for your next postcard. However, Scott didn't ask how much and they were more expensive than I think they are worth given how much we will probably actually use them.

We were finally dropped off at the Square at about 3:30. Shall mentioned that we needed to hurry so that we could get to the Forbidden City before the ticket office closed. We essentially ran through the Square and the Forbidden City and "finished" both in an hour. Every time Scott tried to take pictures, Shall would hurry him along. Not at all satisfying, especially given that we had no time due to shopping excursions we hadn't wanted to take. I'm definitely saying no shopping for our tour on the 25th. Scott and I also agreed that we are going to use one of our free days to come back and actually look around the Square and City at our leisure.

Neither of us were that impressed with the service on our tour. To top it off, I could remember the standard tip amount and we massively over tipped for a tour we weren't at all happy with. On the plus side, we will be with Shall again on the 25th, so I'm not tipping again.

We had about 15 minutes left to our tour and Shall wanted to rush us off to a silk factory. We lied and said we had arranged to meet people at the Night Market (mmmmm, scorpion) and needed to be there at 5:00 and asked that they drop us off at the market so they, Shall and the driver, did. It was kind of a relief to get away from the non-stop talking and selling.

We had actually wanted to stop over at the Night Market and the intersecting shopping street because Scott wanted to visit the Nike store and see if he could find a Yau Ming jersey. They had them, but nothing of a size that would fit Scott. They also had some nice country related wear, but it was very expensive in comparison to the Olympic swag we had seen so we passed. Next, we spotted a store that had a ton of Olympic stuff. We braved the massive crowds and purchased a chunk of Olympic history.

Ladden with bags, we headed over to the Night Market and had some dinner. Scott had more pot stickers, a beef mixture wrapped in a thin pancake, a stuffed pork sandwich and supposedly a ball of fried banana. I had a pancake wrap, an ear of corn (which I thought would be spiced up some but it wasn't) and the fried banana. At which point, we were full and just grabbed a taxi back to the hotel. It was about 6:30 pm, one of our earliest nights yet so we'll take the opportunity to post to the blog, download pictures and get a good night's rest. Tomorrow we have the women's basketball semi-finals: China vs. Australia, USA vs. Russa. It ought to be good (if we can buy some better seats!)

Beijing — Day 4 Diving and Basketball

2008-08-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Today was another full day of Olympic action. We've settled into a good routine in the mornings and are able to get ready and get out pretty quickly. Our first event today was the Men's 3M Springboard semifinal at the National Aquatics Center, aka the Watercube, on the Olympic Green.

Finally the Olympic Green!

I've been dying to get in there since we got here, but as I wrote previously access is restricted to people who have an event ticket for one of the venues on the green. No ticket, no entry.

We got a shuttle from the hotel and got there really fast, so we had a little more time to walk around before the diving began at 10 am. No cars or buses are allowed on the Green, so we had to get out a good half mile away or so at the main entrance. Yes, the main entrance is a half mile from any of the venues. The park itself is maybe 2 miles long or so. It has it's own subway line with 4 stops. We decided to good ahead and catch the subway and go farther up than the arenas and walk back so that we could look around.

The complex has a total of 9 sport venues, pavilions for the broadcast companies including the huge broadcast pagoda next to the Bird’s Nest, pavilions for all the major Olympic sponsors, concert areas, fountains and tons of sculpture. We didn’t have a lot of time, so we didn’t do much more than walk back from the subway stop to the Bird’s Nest and Watercube. One other piece of information you need to fully paint the picture is how hot it was this morning.

It was jungle hot, as in watch out for the anacondas and poison blow darts Amazon hot. And if it were any more humid, we would have needed snorkels. A walk that took us about an hour ended up leaving both of us… moist.

Anyway, the center of the Green is a wide median with streets on either sides and then additional walkways outside the street lanes. Many of the sponsor pavilions are on this median. We crossed over to the side with the Bird Cage and started walking towards it. We noticed that this side had an sunken area that was about 2 stories deep that ran parallel to the main median and streets. There are more sculptures down there — we saw one that caught our eye that looked like drips of liquid mercury with one drip caught just as it was landing. When we got down there to take a closer look, the vertical drip was actually a rabbit. I have no idea why it is a rabbit. There were no explanatory plaques or info anywhere. There was also a McDonald’s down there, a performance area and additional large art installations.

Back up to the main level, we found a cross street that gave some great angles on the Bird Cage and Pagoda broadcast building. We did some tourist poses. Pretty much any time we stop to take pictures, people ask me to help them with their cameras and/or to use their camera to take pictures of them and whichever landmark they are interested in. As I wrote before, the Chinese people seem to love getting their photo taken in front of stuff. With the Bird Cage, I can understand since I did it to. They tend to take it to crazy town level though. There are wall posters in most venues that show a group of people having fun at the events. I think it is meant to encourage people to be courteous to others — one of those Chinese mass behavior modification efforts. Chinese people are constantly getting their photo taken in front of those posters. They do it in front of pretty much anything that has any possible tie to the Olympics. I chalk it up to them being totally new to this whole big event thing and to being honestly proud to have the Olympics in their city. It’s still pretty comical at times.

Once we got to the base of the broadcast Pagoda, I was finding it hard to get a good angle to shoot it. There is a lot of crap around it and it’s heavily guarded. We thought we’d try to find the NBC booth since the Today Show has been broadcasting live. We found it, and even though we were there during normal show hours, nothing was going on. Of course, 8 am in the morning Beijing time is not really normal broadcast hours in the US. We are 12 hours ahead of NYC. Duh.

On final approach to the Bird Cage, I noticed a large walled off area right outside the plaza around the stadium. On tip toes, I was able to see that it was the warm up track and field. I’m not sure why they would wall it off. All it did was make people come over to look and half climb the fence.

The Bird Cage itself is a huge building. It basically is a full-size stadium with an exposed superstructure. You’ve all seen it on TV, I’m sure. Up close and personal, the beams are truly massive and seem to twist and roll in ways that don’t seem architecturally sound. One of the really cool things about it is how the sunlight bounces around. I hope the photos I took accurately show what I mean. There’s almost a facetted look to it. We came in on the side in shadow. I took a few shots and decided to walk around to the sunlit side to get some shots over there. Did I say this building was huge? It took almost 15 minutes to walk around. Since we’re going to be back here for at least one more day (we have track and field one morning), I didn’t get too crazy with the Bird Cage photos. We did decide that on one of our remaining free days we would come down to the Green and see if we could buy some scalped tickets so we could get in for a night event and see how it all looks at night. We almost don’t care what the event is and may not go to it. I just want to get in at night.

On to the Watercube. This has to be one of the most unique buildings in the world and is certainly one of the most amazing Olympic venues. It certainly puts the basketball arena to shame. By now, everyone has seen what it looks like from the outside — a grid of interlocking, irregular bubbles. Inside, that theme is continued. There is a main wall next to the entry way leading into the seating area that uses the same bubble shapes, but is made up of flexible plastic and has to be inflated with air.

There are also interior water walls and reflecting pools that keep the interior much cooler than other air conditioned buildings we been into. Everything is designed around the bubble theme. There are bubbles in the counters at the info booths. The walkway is configured to undulate like a wave. The seating includes blue seats at the bottom with white seats at the top. In between the white seats start from the bottom in a random pattern increasing in frequency as they go up, like rising bubbles in water. It is by far the most thoroughly thought out building we’ve seen so far.

Men’s 3M Springboard semifinal

The seating area inside the Watercube is really relatively small. I would put it at 7500 or so max. One side of the seating is set aside for media, photographers, TV cameras and all the other specialized sections for dignitaries and athletes (that rarely get used except for final rounds). For the diving competition, only one end of the building was being used, so I estimate a quarter of the seats were being used. The seating is very steep and Angie and I found ourselves 3 rows from the top. You can’t get much more nose bleed than that. For the most part, the building was very cool due as I said. Unfortunately, none of that refreshing coolness reached the top of the stands. The seats were small, full of people and it was stifling… for an hour and a half. More of the moist.

While we weren’t surrounded by Americans like we have been previously, we were surrounded by other English speaking nationalities — Canada and Australia. The Canadian group was fairly large and all related in some way to one of the Canadian divers, Reuben Ross. They all had t-shirts that had their relation to him on the back — Reuben’s Cousin, Reuben’s Brother, etc. Unfortunately, he did fairly badly. He didn’t come in last of the 18 divers, so they had that going for them. He came in 17th.

The competition itself was fairly straightforward. There were 6 rounds of dives with 18 divers. There wasn’t much of a pause between each round, so the competition continued at a fairly even pace. Not ever having been to a diving competition and only having seen it briefly on TV, I was a little underwhelmed. Most of the dives looked the same. I get that a back 3.5 somersault is harder than a front one, or doing a twist one way might be harder than doing it the other way, but when you have 18 divers all doing some slight variation of 3 somersaults with a pike thrown in, it gets a little repetitive.

That repetition did help us in spotting the good dives in later rounds. It started to become more obvious when the dive was good or not after having seen 60 versions of them.

Since we had a late night at soccer last night and mixed in with the hot, close quarters, I started to nod off a bit. I know, how can you fall asleep at the freakin’ Olympics? I fought it, I really did.

Things started to perk up in the last couple rounds. One of the Chinese divers was so far out in front that the lower placed divers weren’t even besting his score after they completed an additional dive. His place in the final was set early on. Others’ positions were more up from grabs. If I remember correctly, the 4-12 spots changed sometimes fairly dramatically round to round. One of the American divers, Troy Dumais, had a lock on the top 4 spot through most of the competition. He had a couple bad dives at the end and fell almost out for qualifying for the final. The other American diver, Chris Colwell, did the reverse. He nailed his last two for some big scores and pulled himself out of the basement and into the final round.

All of the divers tried to pull out the stops for their last dives and a couple really nailed it. The leader, He Chong, went last and popped the highest score for any dive of the day. He could have fallen backward off the springboard and lost his speedo on the way down and would have still gotten first place. Instead, he let the other divers know he was boss. He wasn’t the only one who really uncorked one, which left me wondering why some of these divers couldn’t have performed better on their earlier, easier dives. If you can pull of a 90-100 score on your final dive, why are you hitting 70 point dives early on?

The one thing that I need to mention was the music played at the end of each dive. Right as the diver’s feet passed through the surface, the music would start blaring over the speakers. At first, it seemed like the person manning the iPod was trying to find music related to the nationality of the diver. That ended pretty quickly since there are only so many pop music songs which evoke Finland or Ukraine in some way. Unfortunately, the next playlist on the iPod was disco. Apparently, Dmitry Sautin is a Dancing Queen in his spare time. Angie, who was also nodding off, mused that they do the music that way to keep people awake.

So our grand plan was to leave the Watercube, catch the subway to the final stop on the other end of the Green, check out the main souvenir store that is supposed to have everything in one place (the arena-based souvenir selections SUCK), and then try the massive McDonalds for lunch.

Right.

First off, the line for the subway extended all the way up and out of the station, which meant there were several thousand people ahead of us. We decided to walk. Did I say the place was 2 miles or so long, maybe longer? Did I mention how hot and humid it was?

Once we got to the store and McDonalds, our normally people-loving attitudes were right out the damn window. Then we find out that the line for the store is being measured in hours. Forget that. So we head to the McDonalds. The ordering counter was maybe 50 feet long with a register every couple feet. The mob of people was 10 deep. After standing there, being pushed, jostled, getting cut in front of and sweating like Nixon in a televised debate, I was ready to initiate an international incident. And on top of that, the menu was limited to just a few items, none of which were localized in any way. Feh.

We ate outside and needed to find a cab to get us over to the basketball arena on the other side of town. Of course, we discover that no cabs are allowed at the back entrance to the Green and we have to all the way back to the main entrance. Since the last subway stop was nearby, we went down there hoping that the crowds weren’t too bad. We were able to get a seat before the masses got on, so that was decent. We’re getting pretty used to the subway here, so we were able to navigate around and get to our cab in about a half hour.

Now, as I wrote previously, our tickets for the night’s games included one session of two games with us sitting behind a metal bar and glass panels. Unacceptable. We had talked about finding some better seats via the scalpers and did a quick walkthrough of them before going in. They all had tickets for the first session and not the second, so we went to plan B — seat hopping.

I’ve described the process before. The Chinese seem to have no regard for what their tickets mean. An open seat in a better location is on open invitation. At times, upwards of a third of the people in a given section don’t have tickets for the seats they are sitting in. We decided to give it a try for the second session, which included the US/Korea game. Before that, we had Belarus vs China and Australia vs Czech Republic.

Game 1 — China vs Belarus

Again, the Chinese crowd was really into the game. The flags were everywhere and the Cha Yo cheer was almost non-stop. The Chinese women did really well, although they had some rough spots that I think a more skilled and talented team will do better at exploiting than Belarus did. The Belarus team looked out of their depth a bit. They were fouling like crazy and could not keep the ball under control. Add to that inconsistent shooting and they never really had a chance.

The interesting thing about this game was that Donna Orender was sitting just a few seats away from us. Someone with a USA Basketball shirt came down and got her after awhile and I didn’t see her come back.

Game 2 — Australia vs Czech Republic

Damn. Talk about a statement game. The Aussies dominated the Czech. The Czech team only had 27 points after three quarters. Truly amazing defense against a mediocre offense.

The bigger story is, of course, Penny Taylor going down with what looked like an ankle injury. I don’t know if the broadcast picked up her scream, but man did we ever hear it.

She got fouled under the basket and let out a little yelp with the foul — the Aussies were already up pretty big and about half the Chinese fans left after the first game so it was fairly quiet — and then let out a scream when she came down and suffered the injury. They don’t show any kind of replays on the big screen (in any venue we are discovering), so it wasn’t clear to us what happened. All I know is that she was down for a long time and had to be helped off.

A couple of the Czech players were standing over Penny while the trainers worked on her. One reached down to either pat her or offer a hand. LJ came over and really bitched the Czechs out, telling them to leave her alone and back off. She was pretty steamed the rest of the way and took it to the Czech team. Don’t piss her off, even if it seemed like they were trying to be nice.
Even without Penny, the Aussies easily handled the Czechs. In the stands, the Aussie contingent was still large, but a lot more subdued. Even before Penny’s injury, they weren’t nearly as loud as they were during the last game. Maybe they are saving it up for the next rounds.

Game 3 — USA vs Korea

Ok, so we got back into the arena (they kick us out between sessions), and went to our ticketed seats. As we sat there strategizing where we might go — we were thinking about moving back a couple rows and offering our seats to anyone who we had taken seats from — and spotted that the mid-section usher was gone from his post. We looked around and though to go for it. We kicked it down into the cush seats at about row 10 or so. Just to be extra bold, we went for the aisle seats at mid-court. We sat there nervously for about a half hour. Our plan in case we were challenged by the actual ticket holders was to play dumb like we misread our own tickets and move to nearby seats. We decided on where we’d move to ahead of time so it didn’t look like we were searching for open seats, not that the Chinese who do this really care about that.

The game got underway and so far, no problems. We actually made it to the half before the two people with tickets showed up. Luckily for us, there were still 4 empties right next to us in that row, so we just moved down. We made it the whole game with no problems. It wasn’t until the period between games that the rest of the actual ticket holders showed up. By that time, most of the people in the seats in our immediate area were seat hoppers. We ended up moving sections, but still in the lower area. We made it through the second game as well. The next round of games has us up in the nosebleeds. There won’t be any easy seat hopping for that situation. We’ll have to go the scalping route and plan on getting to the arena earlier than normal so we can work the line.

The game itself was a lot of fun to watch. The US was rolling and was able to do what I thought might happen once Korea got to play a really good team — slow down their shooters. Korea has some great shooters, but not much else. Their defense isn’t all that strong and they don’t have anyone who can really play center or power forward. Given that, Fowles had a monster night. Leslie was on the verge of doing so, but got into foul trouble. The US as a team put on a solid show and easily won the game.

A couple of in-the-stands items.

For a short time, Candace Parker’s mom was sitting in front of us. She had to move because she was in the wrong section. We tried to get her to take the seats next to us, but she didn’t and moved over with a group of Americans on one side who included a lot of coaches, including former Storm assistant coach Heidi VanDerveer, and other players’ families.

The trend I was watching concerning how demonstrative US fans are at the games continued. There were many more US fans at this game, but still no where near the rabid support we saw from the Aussies. A few flags were waving, but no organized chants. Are we so afraid of being seen as rude or arrogant? Angie and were yelling like we normally do — at the refs, for some of the players, normal stuff — and we were getting looks. I’ll keep watching how this plays out as the games get bigger leading up to the Gold medal match (if the US gets there).

Speaking of yelling things, I kept having to stop myself from yelling stuff about the Storm. I also had to stop myself from heckling Leslie and Milton-Jones when they were complaining about calls or imagined calls to the refs. The uniforms are different, but the anti-Spark conditioning is strong in this one.

The US men’s team came to watch, although I didn’t see Kobe. He might have been there since my view was partially blocked. A crowd of Chinese came down to take photos, but there were only half or less than how many came down with the Chinese men’s team showed up the other night.

Game 4 — Russia vs Spain

Finally, a close game… well most of the way.

Spain really came out hot, but Russia outlasted them and was able to dig themselves out of the whole in the second half and win handily. Unlike the last game we saw, the Russians played Becky Hammon as a starter instead of an off-the-bench shooter and gave her tons of playing time. She was really the difference in the game overall. The looming US vs Russia game will be very interesting indeed. I don’t think the Russians have the bench to hang with the US and they are very inconsistent. I think the US will find a way of capitalizing on the Russian’s rough shooting spots.

In the stands, I think we may have found a group who could give the Aussie fans a run for their money — Russian fans. They were out in force and making a ton of noise, all game long. It’s too bad these two teams won’t be facing each other in the next round. Seeing the Aussie fans go mano y mano with the Russians would have been a lot of fun (when the game means something, the final pool play game wasn’t really in doubt).

Well, tomorrow is our first day off from Olympic events, so we’re heading up to the Great Wall.

Beijing – Day 3 continued

2008-08-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Back from football. USA v. Japan, Women's semi-finals and ...
USA WINS! 4 to 2.

The Workers Stadium is huge. It hold 60,000 and I believe it was full to near capacity. We had meant to pick up something to eat before heading in, but by the time we reached the arena, it was 7:30 and the match started at 9:00 pm. While the security and ticket takers have been amazingly efficient so far, we had concerns so we skipped dinner and decided to have arena food (hoping they'd have different arena food) instead. That was a mistake. Not only was it the same arena food, but they didn't have anything available that was substantial. I don't think bread, popcorn and a Snickers bar constitutes a well rounded meal. The other bummer was that they were pouring all the drinks into cup without lid. Apparently, they had concerns that we'd all throw our plastic bottles at each other and on the field.

We had relatively good seats. 3 rows up behind the USA bench. The shelters for the teams were blocking part of our view of the opposite end of the field, but they were showing the game up on big screens at either end, so we just watched up there when we were blocked.

It was looking pretty grim at the beginning. Japan drew first blood and USA just wasn't getting past their defense. I don't know if you all are aware of this, but every time I leave my seat during a Storm game, the Storm go on a run. Sometimes a little run, sometimes a big run. Apparently, this works in soccer too. USA was down 1-0 and I decided to go to the bathroom with a few minutes left in the half. Before I made it up to the stairs, USA scored. With 5 minutes, they scored again. Our seatmates were prepared to send me back to the bathroom if Japan scored and tied up the game. Fortunately, USA scored again twice in rapid succession in the second half. During the extra 3 minutes (for stoppage), Japan scored one more time, but it wasn't enough.

After the game, Scott and I tried to walk about the Stadium to a McDonalds, but miscalculated the distance and got turned around. We ended up catching a cab back to the hotel instead. We had fun riding the subways, but have learned that it's a minimum of an hour to get to anywhere and you can ride in a taxi for about $5.00 US clear across town. When we are in a hurry or it's late, it just makes more sense to take a taxi. None of the drivers speak English, so we try to have someone at the hotel write out the name of our destinations for the day before we leave and of course we always take something with the name and address of the hotel with us.

A couple of additional notes. We were surrounded by Americans again. A couple from San Francisco doing their 6th Olympics, a couple from Chicago, and a family from Sammamish. Scott had someone take a picture of all of us and I'm sure he'll post it soon. The couple from San Francisco had plenty of good insights on how to afford going to the Olympics without it costing so much. Ann and Mack, we need to talk. There were several large American flags and we ended up on the big screen more than once. That seems to be becoming a trend.

The bathroom was not fun. There were western style toilets, but they were icky and muddy for some reason. There was no toilet paper (for which I was prepared), but there also were no towels for drying your hands and there weren't even the hand blowers. I don't think they thought that one through!

It is also interesting to note that the crowd at the Stadium definitely seemed to be favoring USA. While they would cheer regardless of who scored, they continually started chants of USA and there was some booing of the Japanese team in spots. We also had several Chinese people come up and want their pictures taken with us, even more so when the other Americans showed up with the flags. They seem to love having their pictures taken with foreigners.

Lastly, we say a building marked Beijing Lawyers Association. I mention this because the acronym would be BLA and I think that's funny.

Tomorrow we have diving and more basketball.

Beijing – Day 3

2008-08-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

Since we didn't get back to the hotel until 12:30 am this morning, we decided to take it easy this morning. The only things on the agenda were a hutong bike tour and a soccer match tonight.

We woke up and showered about 6:30 am and then hit the buffet. Then we just hung around the hotel taking care of stuff. Scott worked on downloading the photos and I went back to sleep.

Around 11:30 we went out and got some food. The Beijing Olympic Committee printed up several restaurant guides and a shopping guide. We selected a restaurant that wasn't too far from our hotel. It was really nice. The server offered to help us pick out food and we took her up on her offer. Scott got Kung Pao chicken. I got a Spicy Chicken dish which was more or less chicken skin deep fried with lots of sesame seeds. Doesn't sound that appetizing, but it was actually pretty good. The server also added a tofu dish and some vegetables. It turned out to be way more than we could eat, but we did our best to eat enough to show we enjoyed the food.

The funniest part was after watching us eat for a few minutes, the server offered to bring us forks. We thought we were doing pretty good with the chopsticks but apparently no so much. We toughed it out for a while longer, but then Scott accepted a fork. They also brought us a purple ice cream for dessert. I have no idea what flavor it was, but it was tasty enough.

Then with very fully stomachs, we headed over for our bike tour. Our group turned out to be fairly large, 18 people, I think. There were people from Germany (but now living in Belgium and Shanghai), an American family that was currently living in Tokyo, a family from Holland and a couple from Hawaii. It was set to be a 3 hour tour through the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, through several hutongs, past the canal and the Bell and Drum Towers and then back to Jingshan Park where we started.

First off, it's freakin' crazy trying to ride a bike here. Yes, there are bike lanes, but they are used by bikes, motor scooters, pedestrians and occassionally cars and in the hutongs, the streets are so narrow that sometimes it is hard to pass two abreast. There is no clear right of way except on really busy streets and everyone just goes when they want and tries not to hit anyone. There is no 3 foot rule like it Seattle. It was a bit nerve-wracking. I was nearly creamed several times and I just missed hitting pedestrians and other bikes multiple times. You really couldn't sightsee while riding too much or you'd hit someone. Because the group was so large, it was often hard to hear the tour guide sometimes.

The hutongs are fascinating looks into the old way of life for the Chinese. Many of the houses don't have bathrooms, so they share a public restroom. Lots of shops and people hanging out in the street. We were closely watched, but many people said hello or waved. There were even so dogs. Mostly small pug like dogs. One thought about chasing the bikes but was called back by its owner.

We had to stop in one of the hutongs because Scott ended up with a flat tire. Our guide took us to a road side shop where the man replaced the tube and tire in about 10 minutes and then we were back on our way.

There was at least one fascinating area we will probably go back and visit on our own. It was called Antiques Street and was full of shops selling handcrafted items, paper products, art supplies and I suppose some antiques but I wouldn't bank on it. It looked like an interesting place to do some shopping.

We also biked on a street next to a canal that runs through the city. It was very pleasant, but very busy. It was interesting to note that it mostly had cafes and restaurants alone the street with couches and tables for sitting out and enjoying the evening. Since it was the afternoon, they were mostly empty. One of our fellow tourist said that up until about 3 years ago it had been a "bar" street that people loved to come to and sit out in the evening. Now, it's been turned into mostly an overpiced tourist trap. Go figure.

At the end of our tour, we caught a taxi back to the hotel so we could freshen up and pick up Wendy before heading to the soccer game. More later.

Beijing Day 2 — Angie's Turn

2008-08-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

I was so excited to be going to basketball yesterday. It was the whole reason I got talked into this trip. However, it was a long, long day especially considering we've been waking up at 3:00 am local time and then falling asleep by 8:00 pm. Hopefully, this long day will adjust our schedule.

The son and Mother from Seattle Scott mentioned are actually a young man from Seattle and his parents from Phoenix. He hasn't been to too many Storm games, but his parents are quite the Mercury fans. They are another set of Americans that are just relying on "alternate sources" for their tickets.

The toughest part of yesterday, besides it being such a long day, was that there were no restaurants close enough for us to make it to in-between sessions. So, we were forced to rely upon arena food which is bad enough in the U.S., but is a whole different animal in China. The had plenty of soda, water and beer but for the snacks, they had noodles (that I never saw a single person eating), little loaves of cinnamon raisin bread, youghurt, popcorn (which was a bit like kettle corn), sausage on a stick, crustless sandwiches (very tasteless) and the hot dogs that Scott mentioned from the handball games. They also had some ice cream and snickers bars. It was just an odd mix of stuff. It'd keep you going, but you didn't get too excited about it.

The best part of the day was getting the attention of Coach Donovan and Sue and then getting to speak with Tully. She's such a nice person. Oh, and hanging out with the Aussie fans. They were all very friendly and happy to talk with us.

Now on to today's activities.

Beijing — Day 2 Basketball

2008-08-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

We’re already old pros at this. We got up, hit the buffet and did the bus/subway combo to get over to the Beijing Olympic Basketball Gymnasium at the Wukesong Sports Center. A short walk from the train station (which by the way was Line 1 which, as logic would have it, was the first subway line built in Beijing. It shows, especially compared to the much newer lines just completed for the games. Lines 1 and 2 look like they are straight out of the 70s and not in a good way. They also have that old basement smell, ugh.) got us to the spectator entrance and security.

Before we get to the security check, because let’s face it — I’m packing large with my camera and all and at this point in our trip was feeling a little anxious about what might really happen when I get to the check point — I need to describe what it’s like outside the venues.

Every 20-30 feet or so, there are people selling small trinkets, mostly Olympic and Chinese flags, temporary face tattoos (which happen to be more Chinese flags), red headbands and sometimes mascot imprinted stuff like… flags. Basically lots of flags. Most of them seem pretty bored and will be standing there lazily waving their flaggy goods. Others, however, have fully embraced the capitalist attitude and are hyper aggressive. They step in front of you waving their goods at you (that sounded bad) and usually following you a bit, unless the crowd is large enough so that they can quickly focus their market-driven attention on someone else. We just hold up our hand and say, “No,” until they give up.

The other group of people we’re seeing more and more are the ones selling tickets. We were told before we got here and have seen several signs warning about how seriously ticket scalping would be punished. When we left the handball venue the other night, we walked past a subway entrance that had a decent representation of security, police and army personnel on one side and a huge sign warning about scalping, while the other side was literally lined shoulder-to-shoulder with Chinese people waving around event tickets. A lot of business was being done.

Outside the basketball arena, there were fewer people selling tickets, but they were there. Inside, we talked to a handful of Americans who have been taking advantage of the scalping to get into events. A couple people we talked to didn’t even have event tickets purchased before the got to China and have relied completely on scalped tickets to get in!

We’re not really looking to add more events, although we’re going to check a couple “sources” to see what’s available, but we will be seeing if we can upgrade our tickets for the Bronze and Gold medal women’s basketball games. After being in the arena and seeing where our current tickets will put us, we will be looking to do some bartering.

Today though, we bypassed all of that and reached the security checkpoint. Going through security has actually been very easy so far. The volunteers manning the checkpoints are polite and intent on keeping the flow of people moving smoothly. They do only let a couple people through the metal detectors at a time so that each person can be scanned with the walk-through detector, checked with a hand-held wand and have their bags go through an x-ray machine. Being that this was my first attempt with my camera gear — and I brought all of it, no sense in going small — I was apprehensive. My worries were unfounded. No one even blinked. In two minutes, I was through the machine, wand and x-ray and waiting for Angie who once again had to empty out her bag for a more thorough inspection (she’s carrying a lot of stuff).

The exterior of the basketball arena is kind of normal looking, compared to some of the other venues we’ve seen. The original plan, according to what I’ve read, was to have the entire exterior surface of the building to be giant video screens. It was going to either be too expensive or take too long to complete, so they covered it instead with undulating, perforated metal strips. Eh. The plaza outside the arena is also fairly bland. I guess we’re not really here to be wowed by the venue, right?

Inside the arena, unlike the handball court, the concourse went all the way around. There was only one souvenir stand through and the stuff they were selling wasn’t what I was expecting. I was hoping for, you know, event related stuff — jerseys especially. Nope, they had lots of towels, crystal things, mascot toys, books, but nothing that was tied to either basketball or the venue. Missed opportunity. If the souvenirs you can buy are the same arena to arena, chances are you’re going to buy the two or three things you want and then not buy anything else. Maybe this whole capitalism thing hasn’t sunken in all the way yet.

The arena itself is about the same size as KeyArena. Same capacity and similar setup with a lower bowl and upper bowl separated by a suite section. The upper bowl looks a lot more steep than the Key and the lower bowl is a little more flat at the bottom. The middle section of seats is at a great angle — unless someone was standing we had a clear, unobstructed view. This won’t be the case in the near future. At row 17, there is a concrete wall separating the permanent seats from the temporary bleachers near the court. It looks like the entire section of lower seats can be removed depending on the event. The wall itself is short enough to not pose a problem. The metal and glass section above the concrete will be a problem. There is a thick metal bar right at eye level held up by vertical supports every other seat or so, with thick, dirty and scratched glass in the open areas. I understand that they needed something there to keep people from falling over the wall when the lower seats are removed, but there was some extraordinary poor planning when it came to executing where the tube and glass section sat. We’re going to try and move our seats for that game, I think. It’s not just that taking photos will be out of the question, simply watching the game itself will be screwed up.

A good third of the seating is sectioned off for media, dignitaries and other athletes. With as much of the seating blocked off as there is, I’d estimate that a full house may only reach 12,000. For the most part, the blocked off sections stayed empty the entire day. There were only ever a handful of press or photographers present at any one time. The only time the athlete section saw any action was during the China/Czech Republic game when most of the Chinese men’s basketball team showed up. That sent the crowd into a tizzy. When people saw Yao Ming come in, there was a huge roar from that end of the building and a mob ran down to get as near as possible to him and his teammates to take pictures. All day long up to that point, there had been a line of volunteers sitting at the end of each row in the athletes’ section, even though the section was also roped off. It didn’t make any sense why they needed to be there until Yao showed up. It was like a thin, blue-shirted wall against the masses.

Another thing we saw right off were the sections of Chinese people who were being led to cheer. It was pretty obvious during some of the more poorly attended games. You would have sparsely populated seating and then a full section, all of them armed with thundersticks and pom poms. They were mostly indiscriminate about for whom they cheered, but they were very enthusiastic.

First game: Spain vs Mali

We had a couple of Americans on our left, Ken and his son Kevin from Green Bay, and an elderly Chinese woman and her daughter on our right. We chatted quite a bit with Ken and Kevin. Of course, as soon as they identified themselves as coming from Green Bay, any other Americans, us included, started asking questions about Brett Favre. I’m sure they are probably getting sick of talking about Favre. They were the first Americans we’ve gotten to talk to since we started our trip, so we kind of talked them to death a little bit.

At the beginning of each game, the players are introduced one at a time and form a single file line at the free throw line in front of their bench. The faced us because the flags for all the countries competing in the tournament were ringing the arena above and behind us. Something I hadn’t noticed before is that each player uses a number by position and not by choice, meaning the same position on each team has the same number. After each team is introduced, the national anthem for each country is played. The arena is has one of those ring video screens around the top of the suite section, again just like KeyArena, and the scoreboard itself has 4 massive video screens at the bottom with a small ring video screen under it, along with eight smaller screens at the top. During a national anthem, computer animated flags for that country are displayed on all these screens. It was impressive to be suddenly flooded with the color of each country as it’s anthem was performed. After the anthems, the teams trade small gifts from their homes with each other as a sign of good will. Once they both go back for one last pregame huddle, the starters come out to center court, each player shaking hands with the refs and then with the other team. Then it’s all left to the jump ball.

As the game began and Mali showed that sometimes being at the Olympics might have to be enough — they were really, really bad — the older Chinese woman next to me was getting more and more irritated. Every time Mali missed an easy basket or lost the ball on a bad pass, she would groan or spit out some line of Chinese that didn’t really need a translation. The two of us started to have a conversation of sorts, expression our exasperation at Mali’s futility. There would be a missed, open layup and we’d look at each other and shake our heads. She obviously knew basketball and was thoroughly unimpressed by Mali and Spain. I think, like us, she was there to see some good basketball.

As it became painfully clear that Mali was totally outmatched, even by the mediocre Spanish team, the Chinese crowd started to cheer for Mali more and more. Any time a Malinese player looked like she had a chance to do something positive, the crowd would start to make some noise and then either groan when she failed or cheer when she succeeded.

A word, or several, about the timeout and halftime entertainment: the Beijing Dream Dancers, followed by the Beijing Dream Performers. The dancers were split into two groups: an eight-woman Chinese group that did most of the performances; and a larger group of Caucasian women who did more of the later games (I say Caucasian, because they weren’t necessarily American. I think they might have been Eastern European). The Chinese group performed several times during each game. Over the course of 6 games, they wore the same costumes once. Picture lots of long hair being whipped around, bare gyrating mid-riffs and loud dance/techno music. Oh, and smiles, smiles, smiles. The dancing itself was a mix of the normal arena dance team moves and not-so-arena-like traditional Asian dance moves. The other group likewise was a mix of the normal stuff with what I would call Russian or Eastern European traditional dancing.

The Beijing Dream Performers were all men and were either what I called the Shaolin Basketball Troupe or more standard cheerleader types. The Shaolin group came in and did that kind of mock martial art fight dance thing, which was impressive, but did it while working in a basketball and dribbling. It was a little odd. Under the title of Dream Performers was also a group who did the circus dunks off a trampoline.

The last group of dead time performers were the mascots. Now most people think the Olympic mascots are cute. That may be, but seeing them in action as people in mascot suits jumping around, throwing t-shirts, doing the hand-to-the-nonexistent-ear I can’t hear you thing, well, it was disturbing.

Anyway, Mali lost horribly. We chatted and/or grunted with our seatmates, and then the Aussies showed up.

Game 2 — Australia vs Russia

Oh boy, did the Aussies show up.

We’ve seen 8 Olympic matches so far — 2 handball and 6 basketball — and I can say with confidence that no one does being a fan like the Aussies. The Germans were impressive during handball and the Chinese have overwhelming numbers for everything else, but the Aussies have a presence that can’t be denied or ignored.

We ended up sitting with of a small group, including LJ’s cousin, that was relatively calm compared to the one massive group who sat behind the Aussie bench. They have to have made it on the broadcast, because they were full on decked out with wigs, costumes, flags, face paint, blow-up kangaroos — you name it. Several big strapping guys were dressed up AS the team, complete with unitards and blond wigs. Now I know the players don’t necessarily like the unitards and I thought I had read that they were ditching them for normal basketball shorts and jerseys. Maybe later, because they’re still in them. Unfortunately for the rest of us in the stands, so were these guys… and they were going commando. Commando.

All I can say is that they grow them big down under.

Next to me (now between me and the elderly Chinese woman) was a young Aussie woman (I don’t recall her name, sorry) who was sporting a couple flags. In front was LJ’s cousin and a couple of her friends. All of them had on the Aussie colors. We ended up on the big screen 3 or 4 times because of the flags.

Ah, getting on the big screen. The Chinese are CRAZY about getting on the big screen. They go nuts when they get on and go to great lengths to get noticed by the camera people. It was a lot of fun to watch how excited some of them got, especially the very young kids and the older folks, and if whoever got on the screen actually did something like start dancing the rest of the crowd cheered like mad. The biggest cheers actually came when non-Chinese got up on the screen and either danced, like one Latvian guy did, or held up a Chinese flag. During the China/Czech game, that happened and the place erupted. An American guy sitting about 10 seats away from us had an American flag draped around his shoulders and was holding up a Chinese flag. The place went freakin’ nuts.

Back to the game.

We were sure to tell the Aussies around us who on their team we were cheering for and why. They of course agreed that LJ and Tully were brilliant, and that Penny and Snell were pretty good too. Once the game got underway, any of you who watched it know that it went from bad to ugly for the Aussies pretty quick. The Russians have always been accused of sandbagging in the early rounds to mask their game and to ambush their opponents in the later rounds. It certainly felt that way today, at least in the first half.

Becky Hammon, when she finally came in, took control and was hitting everything. The Aussie fans kept up their chants and cheers, but it didn’t seem to be helping much. It was about this time that the fairly large contingent of Russian fans made their presence known, chanting “Rus She Ah, Rus She Ah” (Russia pronounced as three, distinct syllables — something the other Eastern European fans did for Lat Vi Ah and Bel Ah Rus. I guess there’s something to be said about having a country name with three syllables ending in “ia.”). The Russians weren’t as garishly dressed as the Aussies, but they were flag waving fools to be sure.

Anyway, Russia was up at the half by 12, mostly on the shoulders of Hammon and Abrosimova.

Angie and I intended to yell “Brick” at Becky Hammon during any of her free throws. We totally blew our chance. She had two free throws in the second quarter and we were too busy watching the crowd or chatting with our neighbors and didn’t realize we missed our opportunity until she’d already shot the second free throw. There will be a next game.

The issue of Hammon getting on the Russian team came up with the other, non-US fans. They may not have known the specifics, but they all thought it was fishy at best and wrong at worst. They were mostly irked that she was the reason Russia was doing as well as they were. No short, blond, gum-smacking American on the team and the Aussies would be in control.

Well, even Becky couldn’t hold the whole game, especially when she ended up being benched most if not all of the third quarter. The Aussies came out and destroyed Russia in the second half 50-28. All of the Aussie big guns went off, including Snell who was red hot from the outside. All our attention was on LJ and Tully, but Snell came out firing. After the game, we got a chance to see some of the Aussie players up on the plaza and I talked to Snell a bit. I told her she needs to send a game tape of this game to the Phoenix coaching staff and tell them “See what I can do with some playing time.” She laughed and agreed.

After the game, LJ’s cousin took us over to LJ’s parents and we got to say hello to her mom, Maree who recognized us from the Storm games they’ve come to. All the Aussie fans congregated outside the arena in the plaza and were having a great time. There was a news crew from Australia there talking to the guys in the unitards. Chinese people were mobbing any Aussie in costume and wanting to get a picture taken with them. It was a little comical that any foreigner who had a flag or even the slightest bit of home color on them — face paint, shirt, flag, whatever — instantly drew a crown of Chinese wanting to get their photo taken with that person. The Aussies, who were be far decked out more than anyone we’ve seen, literally had Chinese lining up for photos.

Later, when some of the players started filing out to find their friends or family in the group, I thought they would get some attention from the Chinese. Not even a little bit. It was flag man with the tights for a souvenir shot, not Penny Taylor or Suzy Batkovic. As I said, I went up and talked to Snell a bit. I said hello to Screen and Suzy. We waited around until Tully came out and talked to her a bit too. I asked her what Jan Stirling said during half time and Tully smiled and said “We all needed to kick ourselves in the butt a bit.” As we were talking to her, I noticed Becky Hammon coming out.

She was alone — no other Russians came out through the plaza — and I think was meeting her family up there. She was pretty upset with how the game went and was talking about how the rest of the team wasn’t paying attention to defense or what she was telling them when she was in. I asked her about being benched when she was the one who really sparked them in the first half and she just shrugged and said she couldn’t do anything about the rotations. She left with her family, both knees covered in huge bags of ice.
We also spotted Lucianne Bertieau, a player who was at a Storm training camp a few years ago but didn’t make the team, or was on the team for a very short time (I can’t remember which year). She was there to see a friend play and had her 8-month old daughter with her. She says that she’s quit playing basketball now that she has a daughter.

Game 3 — Korea vs Latvia

For this game, our seats were down much closer to the court and were much nicer and cushy, although the leg room was still pretty tight. We were again sitting next to Americans, this time on both sides. There was a couple from New York next to me who were WNBA fans. Next to Angie was a mother and son from Seattle. They were a couple of the people who didn’t have all their tickets purchased ahead of the games and were getting them on the street as they went. Angie talked to them more so I’ll let her relate their story.

With the ladies next to me being big WNBA fans, it was almost like sitting at the Key watching a Storm game. Sarcastic comments were flying about the refs and horrible calls — and I do mean horrible. There were several out-of-bounds calls that were flat out missed, including one right in front of us and a ref in which a Latvian player bounced the ball fully outside the line. No call. They would allow body blows under the basket but call hand checking out on the perimeter. It was a mad house. MAD HOUSE.

This was actually a very important game for both teams. Win and you’re into the medal round. Lose and you’re out. Both the American and Chinese coaching staffs were scouting the game. Before the game started, Angie stood up (we were within about 2 sections of the athletes’ section where the coaches were sitting) and yelled for Coach Donovan. Angie had on a green Storm shirt with a big logo so she’d be visible. I think it was Dawn Staley who saw Angie and pointed her out to Coach D. All four coaches waved to us.

The game itself was dominated by the Koreans in almost every way early except for free throw shooting. If the Latvians hadn’t been getting to the line as often as they did, they would have been blown out. The Koreans are excellent shooters and were playing really tight team ball. The Latvians, not so much.

We were excited to Sung Jun Min playing for the Koreans. The season she spent on the Storm was mostly wasted due to injury and very little playing time. I can see now what Coach Donovan saw in her when Anne signed her. She is a strong court leader and besides her shooting was in there scrapping for rebounds and setting up plays.

The Latvians made a push late in the game, probably realizing they were playing themselves out of a chance for a medal, but couldn’t overcome the Korean lead.

Fan-wise, there were a few, vocal Latvians. There were more Koreans of course and they were pretty loud. The interesting thing about this game and crowd noise was when the Chinese started to boo during Korean free throws. It was the first boos any of us had heard and it was a little shocking.

The other thing that we really noticed during this and the next game, more so than before because we were in much better seats, was the amount of seat hopping that was going on. The Chinese seemed to think that their tickets were more of a suggestion than any real indication of where they were supposed to sit. If they saw an empty seat in a better position than where they currently were, it was a rush to see who could get there first. The ushers, who were plentiful, checked tickets every time we left our section or left the seating area for the concourse. Let me be more specific. They checked OUR tickets. They weren’t checking everyone’s tickets. I can tell you we’re looking at this experience a lot differently.

On the one hand, the Chinese officials are trying to control everything, but they actually control very little. There seems to be a game going on in which the rules are plentiful and carry heavy punishments if broken but are only enforced if you are really obvious about breaking them. The goal of the game is to see how far you can go before getting noticed. If you can do something, everyone around you sees that and start doing it too. Before the officials can react, it’s too late to do anything without going overboard. With so many outside eyes watching, overboard isn’t an option. So, you have blatant ticket scalping going on under the No Scalping signs. You have 5 ticket checks to go through to get to your assigned seat only to find three people pushing each other out of the way to take your seat.

After the game, I went down to right behind the scorers’ table and got the attention of the Chinese woman doing the public address work in Chinese and asked her if I could get a shot of her and the guy who was doing the English version. She thought it was a little odd, but I explained I was trying to take in the whole experience and wanted to get their photo since they were a big part of the games all day long. While we waited for the guy, who turns out to be the announcer for the Cleveland Cavaliers, she asked me questions about where I was from and how our stay in China was going so far. She had never heard of T-Mobile, my magenta overlord and client I work on most at the agency. Anyway, after finishing an announcement, the guy came up, was a little perplexed why anyone would want his photo and posed for me.

Game 4 — Brazil vs Belarus

Brazil got their first win and even though Belarus is still going into the medal round, I think they are going to get swallowed by whomever they play. They looked really bad. Brazil looked relieved to win a game. Who knows what might have been if Iziane hadn’t taken herself off the team.

Game 5 — China vs Czech Republic

They kick us out of the arena after each pair of games, so we waited out front once again. The crowds started piling into the plaza, eager to see their national team play. The Chinese people that we’ve seen at the events are almost giddy about their national team. Lining up outside to get in, scores of people were having their pictures taken with the basketball arena in the background to prove they were here. Again, any foreigner with a flag was getting stopped. I got stopped by a group of guys who may have thought I was a pro photographer since they were eyeing my camera and wanted to get their photo taken with me.

Inside, it was a sea of red. When the Chinese national anthem was played, the whole arena sang, some of the Chinese around us sang the song with a lot of force and emotion. This is a huge deal for them. Then Yao Ming showed up, as I described earlier, and the crowd went crazy.

They had one main cheer they did. It was a call and answer. One person would start and say the call phrase and the crowd would answer “Cha Yo.” I’m not sure what it meant, but it was going on all game long, sometimes in small groups and sometimes with the whole arena in unison. I felt a little sorry for the Czech players who had to face that. It was impressive and had to be daunting.

The Czech team didn’t really have a chance and, although they made a push at the end, got rolled by the Chinese.

During this game, we were surrounded by Chinese with some Aussies there to cheer for their “9th state” as they called New Zealand and an American guy from San Diego. This is his seventh Olympics, and he’s another one who is relying on street tickets to get into events. He was also an old hat at the seat hopping game. Once the China/Czech game was complete, he made a beeline for some new seats a little closer to the action for the US/NZ game.

Game 6 — USA vs New Zealand

I’m almost sorry to say this was the most boring game of the day. New Zealand played well to start, but the US steamrolled them. Angie and I both were pretty exhausted by 12 hours of basketball. She fell asleep and I was nodding off.

About half the crowd left, especially once the US got up by 20+. In terms of fan presence, there were a lot of Americans there, but very few were dressed up or waving flags. I’m going to keep an eye on that to see if there might be a trend. It definitely seems so far that just about every other country is perfectly comfortable being as nationalistic as they want to be, but not so much with the Americans we’ve seen. It will be interesting to see if that holds out with other events.

After the game, we yelled for Sue who gave us a wave. We found a taxi and headed for the hotel. 15 hours total from start to finish, our longest day yet (I’m writing this Monday morning).

I shot 2700 photos — about 40GB. I’ll try to post some highlights, but I’m already two days behind now. I knew this would happen, but with this kind of quantity and no days off it is inevitable.

Day 3 brings us a bike tour of the Hutongs near the Forbidden City and a semifinal women’s soccer game tonight. More basketball tomorrow.

Beijing Day 1 — Angie's Turn

2008-08-16T14:50:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm not sure what to add to Scott's mammoth post but here's a few comments.

I'm very proud of us for figuring out the subway system, especially after all our trouble in Tokyo. It has been made easier in that we have just been able to show our Olympic tickets and not have to buy a ticket. But still I'm proud we haven't gotten lost.

At the park, I bought us some folding fans to combat the heat. One has tiger pictures on it and the other has the word Dragon in Chinese and has pictures of the emperors. While we were walking around, a Chinese man (who spoke no English), stopped me, pointed the fan and kept repeating a word. I think he was reading the fan. With much pantomiming, it came across that he was asking if I was a Dragon. Funny. I said no.

And here's something for Alex. The air quality is quite good. I have no idea what the newscasters were talking about. Sure, there is a little haze, but nothing that bad. The weather is not as muggy as Tokyo but is as hot. Also, the city smells different. Not just food smells which you would expect, but the exhaust, etc. just smells different than you smell in Seattle.

Despite Scott's mocking tone, I'm proud of myself for going to the Night Market and just pointing to something and eating it. Sure, it was noodles, so it was a little safe, but for those of you who know me and know that I never eat anything that I don't know the exact ingredients, it was a very big step. Plus, walking and eating with chopsticks at the same time - harder than you'd think.

Oh, and by the way, I've only been able to find Diet Coke once since we've been in Beijing... and Coke Zero is not the same.

Well, it's time to head out and grab some breakfast before heading over for basketball. I'm so excited!

Weekend America link

2008-08-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to the Weekend America, the web site for the NPR show I talked to before we left on the trip. There might be an audio link, but I'm not seeing it yet.

Beijing Day 1 — A Great Day

2008-08-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing what a little positive thinking can do for you.

As we got ready to go this morning, I kept telling Angie that today was going to be a good day. I was wrong.

It was a great day.

We started out at the breakfast buffet downstairs. The one good thing about our room here is that we get free breakfast each morning. After loading up (Angie stays with the western style foods, I’ve been trying some of the local stuff), we stopped by the Olympic info desk to check our directions for getting to the handball venue later in the afternoon and to get directions to our intended sightseeing stops for the day. Our goal was to use the subway and bus system to get around and not rely on taxis.

The nearest subway station is about a half hour walk from the hotel, so we set out. There is also a bus that can take us there, but since we’re not working out we decided we need the walking.

We found the subway station and successfully boarded the correct train going in the correct direction. In order to get to our first sightseeing spot of the day, we needed to transfer subway lines and catch a bus. With a little help from the ever-present volunteer info stations, we made it to our destination: Jingshan Park.

The main reason we picked this as our first excursion was mostly because it borders the back of the Forbidden City and allows you to see into that complex. We also felt like we needed a little calm and easy going relaxation after the frustrations of the day before. We really picked the right spot.

First off, this park is huge. It’s actually built on the earth excavated to create the moats around the Forbidden City. Those moats are massive, and so is the hill at the heart of the park. So massive that the temple pavilion at the top is the highest point in Beijing, not counting modern skyscrapers. The view was fantastic and you can indeed look down and into the Forbidden City. This spot seems to be a favorite for the locals as well as the tourists because the pavilion at the top was packed with people taking photos of the skyline.

On our way up and on our way down from the summit, we kept hearing chanting or singing coming up from the base of the hill. It is all heavily forested, so we couldn’t see what the sources of the sounds were. Once we got down, we found out.

All around the periphery of the park, there were pockets of people dancing/exercising, fan dancing, dancing with giant flowing ribbons, singing, playing what looked like hacky sack with giant shuttlecocks and other similar sorts of activities. None of it looked like it was scheduled entertainment. It looked like people just showed up and started dancing, or whatever. Very spontaneous, like this was the spot for community performing and anyone was welcome to join in.

The best group was on the back slope of the hill, amongst some boulders. There was a tight circle of people surrounding a small handful of women dancing to prerecorded music being broadcast on a small portable speaker. We watched for a couple songs and were about to move on when something wonderful happened. The next song started up and literally everyone pulled out a harmonica, drum, tambourine, maraca-type shaker or song book and joined in. The harmonica players even had personal amplifiers around their necks that we hadn’t noticed before. Even the kids were playing along. It was crazy. Both of us just kind of stood there with big grins on our faces, amazed at the sudden orchestra. We stayed for maybe 4 more songs before leaving.

A short distance away, we found a large open space in front of one of the gates leading into the park. There was a large group of people dancing/exercising to music. The odd thing about this group was that they were dancing to western music, like the Backstreet Boys. When “Bye, Bye, Bye” came up and they started doing some of the dance moves you normally find in boy band videos, Angie and I could only smile and shake our heads. It was by far the weirdest thing we saw today.

Next to these dancers were groups of people playing, for lack of the correct term, hacky sack with a giant badminton shuttlecock. These people were wicked good with that thing, doing kicks off their heels, from behind their backs and other moves that looked more like world-class soccer footwork than leisure exercise. Men, women, young and old were all playing.

One old guy that had me transfixed had a giant brush and was doing calligraphy on the paved walkways using water as his ink. The characters lasted until the water dried. It looked like he was doing people’s names, but I can’t be sure. At one point, he let a spectator give it a try. She didn’t do very well and once he got the brush back he started to tease her a bit. We couldn’t understand what he was saying, but from the reactions of the people watching, he was pretty funny and it seemed to be aimed at his “helper,” who was taking it with good humor.

Another group that was really fascinating was 5 older men who were twirling what looked like giant tops with a long length of string. As the tops spun faster, they started to make a low growl noise a lot like deep chanting. They were doing all sorts of tricks and really giving each other a lot of ribbing when one would mess up. It was pretty funny to watch them picking on each other. They obviously have been doing this together for a long time and were just waiting for each other to screw up so they could talk some trash.

After strolling through the park for a good three hours or so, we decided to hop back onto the buses and subways and make our way to our first Olympic event: 2 Men’s Handball matches at the Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium — France vs Spain and Germany vs Russia.

Getting there really was a snap. Getting through security was no big deal. The hardest part was the long walk from the subway to the venue. There is a special subway line that goes into the Olympic park, but our venue was closer to the beginning of the subway line than the next stop, so the volunteer guides told us it was easier and quicker to walk. Still, it felt like a good mile or so. Speaking of which, all together we logged almost 30,000 steps today according to Angie’s pedometer.

Of course, the whole time we were closing in on the entrance to the park, I was getting more and more excited. Angie had to ask me to slow down a couple times because I kept walking faster and faster. Right before we got to the main gates for the OSC, I spotted a piece of the Bird Cage poking above some trees. I was all like, “Ooh, ooh, the Bird Cage!” and started snapping photos even though I could only see an end of it. Then I noticed the Olympic Torch was there too. “The Torch! The Torch!” Yeah, I’ve got it bad.

Anyway, through security like I said – easy shmeasy. Angie did have to pull everything out of her back and pantomime a couple explanations for the bottle of ibuprophen she had in there. They understood enough to know it wasn’t lethal and let us through.

I was all like, “Dude, we’re at the Olympics!” and got a little verklempt. A little way up the path, I caught a better glimpse of the Bird Cage and had to stop and take some shots. Other people saw what I was doing and had to stop and shoot as well. At least I’m not alone in having it bad.

We had to go up next to the OSC Stadium which is all decked out for equestrian events and wind our way around to the Gymnasium. On the way, I saw a man walking past us with a big, fat Nikon on his neck and a camera bag on his hip. I stopped him and asked him about his camera — did security give him any problem getting it into the venue, how big was his lens, did he have other lenses in the bag? He answered no, big and lots. I shook his hand, explained how devastated I was to be told that I couldn’t bring my camera into the venues and thanked him for his time.

I did a happy dance. A spontaneous expression of glee. Literally, I danced.

This frightened my wife a bit.

It was such a blow to be told I couldn’t use my camera. One of my coworkers commented that taking photos is my thing, it’s what I do. To not have that, while not spoiling this trip because this trip was about so much more than photos, did put a wet blanket on everything. To have my camera back was worth a little jig on the pathway to the gymnasium.

Buoyed by this news, we hurried to our venue. After a short wait, we entered the Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium and our first Olympic event.

First thing we did (and by the way, I was second in line to get in), was to do a quick walk around the concourse. This was not a western style arena. The concourse was really all on one side. The ends of the arena and back side only had a small walkway and restrooms. The only concessions or souvenir booths were next to the front entrance. This made sense once we got into the seating area. Most of the spectator seating was on one side. The opposite side was sectioned off for media, the many TV cameras, photographers and what I assumed to be dignitary seating. There was really very little room for spectator seating, so no reason to have a lot of amenities on that side of the building.

We went back out and cruised the merch booth. Definitely some possibilities with some t-shirts and magnets. We have to have our magnets. We ended up getting a set of the mascots as magnets. Keen.

The concessions were… interesting. Their concept of a hot dog gets a little lost in translation. I didn’t think to photograph the hot dog. I will next time because describing it won’t give you the full impact. Let me say that it was served cold, in packaging with the ketchup already squirted on. Like I said, you need to see it.

They also offered bread. Not a bread roll or a bun without the burger, no an actual small loaf of bread.

Of course, you could get beer. The Germans were double fisting the stuff.

Once inside, we found our seats — up high and in a corner. That’s B level seating for you. The arena was small enough that we still felt like we had a good enough view. It was analogous to being in about row 14 above the tunnel where the Storm enter the court at KeyArena. We had a German couple in front of us, a Thai family next to us, more Germans behind us, a group of Chinese school kids to the other side and an Indian couple in front next to the Germans. Excellent.

Before things got underway, I noticed that the Germans in front had a DSLR camera with a big ass lens. I went down and talked to them a bit and sure enough they got in with no problems. Life is good.

The pregame entertainment was a group of Chinese kids playing handball along with a cheerleading group called the Beijing Honeys — I am not kidding — and the Olympic mascots dancing about. While that freakshow was going on, the big scoreboards on either end of the arena had computer animated clips of the mascots dancing around and leading cheers. On top of that, the announcements were given in Mandarin, as expected, and English… with a Texan accent.

Believe me when I say it was all a little surreal.

Finally, the first two teams were introduced and the match began.

I won’t go into a play-by-play since this was televised and is available to view online. Plus, I didn’t take notes. All I can do is give you some impressions.

Having never seen handball before, I can say that it was pretty exciting to watch. A mix of basketball, soccer and hockey played with a small, palmable ball and a big net. There is a ton of physical contact including bone-jarring picks, high flying leaps with Jordan-quality hang time and lightning fast scoring. These guys were just throwing their bodies around and were able to get the ball into the net with incredible accuracy. Sometimes it seemed like it didn’t matter whether the goalie was paying attention or not, the ball went into the net.

France was heavily favored in the first match and really put a hurting on Spain through most of the game. Spain made up some ground in the second half but couldn’t get it any closer than 4. They kept piling up the penalties and France took advantage. The French team won it fairly easily.

There weren’t a lot of French or Spanish fans in the stands, at least not obviously so. I would say there were maybe 20 French fans with flags or costumes and about half that for Spain. After the match, two of the French fans who were dressed up with blue afro wigs, red clown noses and French flags as caps were real hits with the Chinese spectators. Everyone wanted a picture with those guys and they were happy to oblige. One Spanish fan who was also sporting a flag cape kept butting in, but was doing it out of fun. The French guys were giving him a bad time and he was joking back at them. Everyone was smiling, even those who didn’t understand what was being said because it all looked so silly.

The second match was Germany and Russia. The Germans came with a huge group of fans, probably a good couple hundred with flags, hats, capes, horns, giant foam hands, and just about anything with the German colors on it. They also did a lot of chants. Most of them sat in the section right behind the German bench. While that was good for the Germans, it was a little interesting how they all ended up there since the tickets were supposedly given out by lottery. There were fewer Russian fans, but there were also really vocal. All of that coupled with a tight match made for some exciting handball.

Germany came out strong and in control, but Russia kept finding ways to score and didn’t let the Germans get too far out in front. The game was tied or close to it most of the way. Both teams were really good and were really pushing each other. There were some flat out amazing shots with the offensive players getting mugged by two or three defenders, going down to the court and still finding a way to squirt the ball in past the goalie. Or the offensive player extending full horizontal to the floor and flipping the ball in just before hitting the deck. They were bouncing it between the goalies’ legs, looping it over their heads and doing all sorts of acrobatics to get the advantage.

One play by the Germans sticks out. One guy went in full blast and was cranking back to fire the ball into the net just as a second player jumps up with a different attack angle to the goal. The first player, right before he fell to the floor, flipped the ball up to the second player who was just then at the top of his jump who then did a cannon shot into the net right past the goalie who was still recovering from trying to block the first German shooter. It was like a handball alley oop and had the whole arena rocking. It didn’t matter if you knew anything about handball or not, that was one pretty play.

The two teams traded goals down the stretch, but no one could take control and the game ended in a tie. Angie was looking for overtime, but since this was pool play they took the tie and that was it.

What a good way to start our Olympic experience — watching a sport neither of us had ever seen, surrounded by people from 5 countries and getting a match that was down to the wire pushed along by hundreds of flag waving crazies. Seriously cool.

I almost forgot the last camera sighting. During the second match, I saw not one, not two but three people in a group each with a big freakin’ lens — two of which are exactly like the big freakin’ lens I have. I went down to talk to them. They were a Thai family and yes each had their own DSLR with 70-200mm lenses. Again, I asked if they had any problems and they said no. They had been to the Bird Cage the day before with no problems and had no issues getting into this venue either. All in all, I saw at least 10 people with big cameras and lenses at this event.

A pattern has emerged when it comes to the rules. If you ask, they will say no. If you just do it, they won’t bother you. At the match, there were two German fans with enormous flags that stretched across 5 or 6 seats. The spectator rules state very clearly that oversize flags and signs are not permitted. Sure enough a couple ushers came down and tried to take away the flags. The Germans argued and the ushers left. The flags stayed.

Earlier, we noticed that there were a lot of open seats. I went down and asked if we could move down once the match started an no one took the seats. I was told no. Of course, half the people around us got up and moved closer during the match.

When I asked about my camera, I was told no. All of the people in the stands with cameras took them in and didn’t act like they weren’t allowed to. They got in.

I don’t know if I’m ready to generalize this, but the pattern is real. Don’t ask permission, just do it like you know what you’re doing and they’ll leave you alone.

Anyway, back to my ginormous post.

Sounds like a full day, right? Getting around on the subway, going to the park, our first Olympic event — a great day. Well, it wasn’t quite done yet. There was still a little matter of finding some scorpions on a stick. That’s right. After the matches were complete, we went looking for the Night Market and some bugs on sticks.

Again, with a little advice along the way from a helpful passerby, we found the Night Market. It was packed, but we were able to stroll from stall to stall, looking for the scorpions and deciding what to try. Good lord it all smelled so good. The vendors were all hyper aggressive, trying to lure us in to buy their specialties. True to the advertising, there was all sorts of weird stuff on sticks: silk worms, snake, starfish, crickets, normal kinds of meat like chicken or beef, octopus (and not that little stuff that you usually get as calamari, I’m talking full on take-down-the-Nautilus squid), intestines, testicles and just about every other normally non-edible substance. As long as it fit on a stick and could be fried, you could buy it.

First off, because I was starving and it smelled way too good, I got a pile of pot stickers. I may never have pot stickers again back home. They can never taste as good as these ones did. Angie was being picky and unadventurous and went for some noodles. Whatever, rookie.

We got about 3/4ths of the way down the row before spotting the scorpions. Only one vendor had them, and he had two varieties — the small tan ones and the big black ones. The big ones were 50 Yuan, which seemed a bit steep, so I went for the smaller ones. He fried up a stick, which had three scorpions on it, and handed it over.

I’ll admit to being a little apprehensive. After all, these were scorpions with their claws and stingers attached. In fact, the first time I put one up to my mouth, I poked my lip with a claw. With Angie snapping away with the camera, in the first one went.

Crunchy. The claws and legs kind of poked the inside of my mouth as I chewed. I had to work the body off the stick a bit, and then the tail. Overall, not bad. It tasted a little like the skin off of fried chicken. I polished off the other two, making sure Angie was able to get a shot of one of the stingers sticking out between my lips, just for visual impact.

Mission accomplished, my friends. I ate scorpions on a stick.

Photos to come (and since I have to get up in 4 hours to get ready for our first full day — full meaning 15 hours worth — of basketball, photos will be coming much later, sorry). I’ll try to post a few highlights as soon as I can.

That was a great day.

Thwarted

2008-08-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

Let us count the ways:

No camera in Olympic venues, which means I'm only going to get about 4 days worth of use out of my rig since we only have that many non-event days. We just won't have enough time to go out sightseeing and get back to the hotel to drop off the big camera and still make it to the event venues.

Hotel exercise facilities, unusable. They are open from 1 pm to 11 pm. Who the hell works out between those hours? Our plan to work out every day is out the window.

No access to the Olympic Green complex unless you have credentials or an event ticket for that day at one of the arenas on the Green.

Power adapters aren't working very well. We keep getting big sparks every time we plug something in.

A lot less English being spoken than we expected. We're staying at a hotel that is basically run by one of the main tour companies for the Olympics and the staff barely speaks any English. This is China after all, but we were being told to expect a decent level of English proficiency.

We do have internet access, obviously, so that's at least one thing going in our favor.

Camera Drama, The End.

2008-08-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

So we got to the hotel. We got unpacked. We're all set to rock and roll and want to go out tonight and head over to the Olympic Green to kick off our Olympic experience. First thing though is to stick to the plan and show my camera to the Olympic info desk in the hotel lobby and get a final ruling on whether it is legal, or if any parts of it are legal (I'd started to convince myself that the body and small lenses might be okay).

The answer is an unequivocal NO.

No to taking it or any part of it into Olympic venues. No to taking it onto the grounds of any Olympic venues, like the Olympic Green.

Crap.

I knew this was coming, but I'm still pretty disappointed. Time for Plan B, which we are calling Tinkerbell (my camera is Wendy — Canon 1D... one dee... Wendy). It has some mad optical zoom action, so we'll see what we can get.

Sigh.

WE'RE IN CHINA!

2008-08-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

We woke up early this morning to be sure we could pack and catch the shuttle bus to the airport. We had set the alarm for 4:30 am, but we both woke up earlier than that.

With the help of our travel agent’s representative, the ride to the airport went off without a hitch. We got a little confused figuring out where to go after checking in, but managed to make it though Security and Immigration without difficulty and without having to remove our shoes. Our flight was on time and while most of the announcements were in Japanese, there were enough in English that we managed. The flight wasn't full so even though we started out with three people in our row, the flight attendant moved the third person to another row so we could all be more comfortable.

The snacks were traditional Japanese type snacks. I have no idea what it's called but it was good. For the meal, I had a pork curry which was tasty. Scott was laughing at me because I wouldn't try anything until he tried it first and told me what it tasted like.

Trip was shorter than posted because we must have had a tailwind. We arrived more than 15 minutes ahead of schedule. The terminal we landed at was beautiful. Apparently, it is newly constructed. It's huge and has lots of glass so it's very bright. We made it through Immigration and Customs with no problems. One thing that was different is that they re-X-Ray'd our carry-ons before we were allowed to go pick up our bags. Our guide was waiting for us after we had claimed our bags.

It was a fairly short ride to the hotel. Of note is that there are Olympic banners and other swag everywhere on the way into town. We even saw a whole building wrapped in a gigantic banner. The freeway had flower boxes on both sides nearly all the way into town and there is a special lane on the freeway for cars with Olympic credentials so they can bypass traffic. Riding in a car around here is a bit scary. No directionals are used and people switch lanes in less than a car length. Rather nerve wracking. I'd be too afraid to drive.

Despite all the reports about the bad air in Beijing, it appears at least as clear as Tokyo was. The sky is a pale blue with some streaky clouds. We haven't been out breathing the air much yet, but can see pretty far into the rest of the city. I'm not sure what all the fuss was about.

Our hotel room isn't quite as nice as the one in Tokyo, but it is much roomier and has a huge bathroom. I think it will do just fine for our stay. We have finished unpacking and now it's time to go explore!

Tokyo Day 2 a la Angie

2008-08-15T00:14:00.000-07:00

Our second day in Tokyo was very full of sightseeing as you can see from Scott’s post. I won’t repeat his descriptions but just add some of my own insights.

I did have one adventure on my own. We needed some more cash and Scott wanted to spend time working on his photos so he wouldn’t fall behind, so I set out to find a bank or ATM with some instructions from the hotel’s information desk. I was very nervous and told Scott if I wasn’t back in 30 minutes to send out a search party. As it turned out, the “Post Office” which also had a bank branch in it was about two blocks from the hotel. Because I had a foreign debit card, I was required to use the ATM which only had prompts in Japanese. Fortunately for me, in true Japanese fashion, the clerk was more than willing to go with me to the ATM and interpret the prompts so I could withdraw funds. She was very nice and I couldn’t have managed without her.

I enjoyed going to the shrines and they were very beautiful, but it feels kind of weird basically sightseeing and taking pictures at a place of worship. It feels quite disrespectful. I suppose if they minded, they wouldn’t charge admission and let you in, but it still doesn’t feel right to me. While there, I did have one gentlemen tell me to take off my cap before giving my respects. There were many other Japanese people with hats, but apparently me wearing my hat was more offensive. I didn’t mind being told, but felt kind of stupid for forgetting I had it on. I would have taken it on at a Christian church. Doh!

I meant to post this yesterday, but today is good enough. I’ve been wearing my pedometer to track how many steps we take in our sightseeing. Yesterday, we walked 19,214 steps. Today, because of trains, taxis and subways, we only walked 9,033.

We’ve had a basic American breakfast all three mornings in Japan which usually includes scrambled eggs. I’m not sure what they do to the eggs, but they have a weird texture and are kind of slimy. Edible but very different from the way they are made in the U.S.

One thing I regret missing in our stay in Tokyo is that we never managed to try Ramen. I guess that means we will have to make another trip. I think it would be nice to try to learn at least a little Japanese before doing so. We managed without on this trip mostly due to the kindness of the Japanese people and Aiko, but without that it would have been very hard. I think it would be easier and I would be more comfortable if I could understand a little of what people were saying and/or be able to read some of the characters.

Something I think is awesome about Tokyo is that there are cold drink vending machines like every 3 to 4 blocks. They are ubiquitous as Starbucks in Seattle. You can get a variety of drinks: water, soda, tea, coffee, juice. The price is reasonable so there is no reason to stock up and pack your water as you are sightseeing. The machines aren’t just in the touristy areas either. They are all over the city. Unfortunately, they don’t have Diet Coke in them. I’ve had to make due to Coke Zero. Not quite the same, but it’s carbonated and has caffeine.

Another thing I really appreciate about Tokyo is how clean it is. Despite having a large number of people in such a small area, the streets are tidy and the alleys don’t smell. Now that may be that most of the alleys have shops in them and therefore can’t be used as they are in Seattle. I also never noticed any people I would have pegged as homeless and only a couple of spots of graffiti. Whatever they are doing in Tokyo, they need to share with Seattle to help them clean things up!

Tokyo Day 2

2008-08-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

Led once again by Aiko along with her daughter, Sally, we headed out on a train for Kamakura, one of the ancient capitals of Japan and home to several important temples and shrines. Kamakura is about an hour or so south of Tokyo near the west coast. Aiko had thought about having us go down to the beach after visiting the temples, but we discovered that there was an all-day music festival going on down there so we decided to avoid the crowds.

With Aiko's help, getting on the train was no problem. However, even though we are reasonably intelligent creatures, I'm not sure we could have done it on our own. Our utter failure the night before wasn't feeling so bad after Aiko led us through a maze of people, gates, stairs and finally onto the train platform. Doing all of this is so natural for the people who live here, but with never having any real experience with such an extensive public transit system (I'm looking at you Seattle, with your one freakin' stretch of not-yet-finished light rail) it was a little overwhelming. The funny thing is that once we got on the train, the next stop was Shibuya — the place we were trying to reach last night. This wasn't even the train line that we thought went to Shibuya. When the stop was announced, Aiko gave us a little smile and eye-roll to tease us.

The train itself was fairly comfortable and we were able to chat and watch the city fade away to more open places (a few anyway), lots of industrial areas and finally the suburbs. There was a little kid sitting across from us for a while who was concerned about us. I tried to smile, but probably only scared him.

Once we got to Kamakura, we decided to have lunch before heading to our first stop, the Great Buddha. We were going to find a ramen place, but the one Aiko found didn't have their favorite type so we went instead of tonkatsu fried pork cutlets. It was very good. I rocked the chopsticks and made it through the whole meal without fumbling around or needing a fork. As I was warned by some co-workers, people started lighting up cigarettes around us. To make things worse, the air conditioning in the restaurant wasn't working very well. We had our hand fans going on high.

After lunch, we headed back to the train platform and Aiko found us a taxi driver who could drive us around (everything was in decent walking distance, but all of our calves were hurting from yesterday's climb down the Tokyo Tower) and act as a guide. He was great and if the city of Kamakura isn't paying him to be a tour guide, they should be. He knew just about everything about the city, its history and all the temples we visited.

One thing he told us about the city that neither of us knew was that during World War II a group of people from Kamakura and the three other sites that had been the capital of Japan in the past petitioned the American government not to bomb these areas in order to preseve the temples and culture. The Americans eventually agreed and all the ancient capitals of Japan were spared.

This guy was great and talked the whole time with Aiko translating. It did get a little white-knuckly because he was also driving the whole time as well. The streets in Kamakura are very narrow and wind around like crazy. Every intersection was an adventure. I don't know what visual cues drivers use around here, but when they decide to go ahead and turn through an intersection, everyone else pauses and lets them go even though it seems like right of way is wrong. We decided to try to not watch the other cars too much and save our anxiety levels.

Our first stop was the Kotokuin Temple, home of the Great Buddha. Before entering the main part of the temple, there was a small cistern with large metal cups where everyone was rinsing their hands. Aiko explained that it is customary to wash your hands before entering the presence of the Great Buddha (these same kinds of cisterns were at every temple, so we repeated this each time). It was actually very refreshing to pour the cool water over our hands. It also made entering the temple area feel somehow cooler than the outside.

Once inside, the path turned around some trees and we got our first good look at the Great Buddha. It's huge, maybe 30-40 feet tall. Our driver explained that it was built and cast in bronze in place. It was originally gold plated. That would have really been a sight to see. Like at the Asakusa shrine, there was a spot at the foot of the statue where people could toss a coin and make a prayer for good luck. Most of the tourists, including us, went up and made a ham-fisted attempt to do the ritual. You could tell when a local person went up to do it and do it with some belief behind it. There was a little boy who was trying really hard to do it right, but was mostly looking pretty comical. Even his family was laughing at him.

We strolled around a bit and went into the garden area behind the Great Buddha. Even on another hot and humid day, the garden area was relatively comfortable. We browsed a gift shop and found a couple neat souvenirs. We had a little trouble communicating to the shop keeper that we wanted something out of a display case, but with some pointing we got the transaction made.

Our next stop was the Kencho-Ji Zen temple. It is a complex of gates and buildings and is the oldest Zen training monastary in Japan. It really was very beautiful and peaceful. Our guide pointed out the tall wooden beam that we had to step over to enter the grounds and explained that it was a border between the human world and the pure, sacred world. Anger, desire and other evils of the human world are kept out and you leave that all behind when you pass over the wooden beam.

The buildings are beautiful dark wood with little in the way of colorful decoration, on the outside at least. Inside, they are decorated lavishly with lots of color and touches of gold. The most impressive temple, to me, was Hatto, the Dharma Hall. It is dedicated to Senju, who is featured with a staute in front of the Buddha. The Senju statue is carved in his likeness after he had fasted and refused water in order to purify himself (I think I'm getting this correct), so the statue appears to be emaciated. Besides the striking statues of the Buddha and Senju, the other breathtaking feature of this building is the giant dragon painted on the ceiling. The picture doesn't do it justice by any measure.

This location was not mobbed by so many people, so we were able to slowly stroll around and take in the scenery. There were a row of three massive juniper trees, one of which is 750 years old. Next to that is a row of boulders, each one different from the others and all of them full of folds, color and details. Aiko pointed out one that looks like a giant clump of gravel and expalined that it is a famous rock and is featured in the Japanese national anthem. She said that it is the only one that was native to this spot and was found as it was, extruding from the ground.

Of the places we visited during this short trip, this temple was my favorite. Unlike the other shrines and temples we saw, this one didn’t feel as much like a tourist spot. There weren’t any shops or signs or mobs of people. It was peaceful, ordered and felt like a temple and not so much like a chance to sell food or memorabilia.

Our last stop was at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine. We came in a side entrance and again washed our hands at a cistern. Unlike the Kencho-Ji temple, this shrine is brightly decorated inside and out. Bright reds, yellows and white on every surface. Once we got to the main area, it was packed with people. As we were walking around, an elderly Japanese man came up to us and started talking to us. As he explained, he started learning English after he retired, he is 68 now, because it is used all over the world. He asked us a lot of questions about where we were from and what we thought of Japan. He asked a couple of times if we knew how much larger the US is than Japan. He of course had the answer when we didn’t — 25 times larger. He followed us down the stairs that lead up from the shrine’s main entrance, talking the whole way. I veered off to take some pictures and heard him start to sing the American national anthem to Angie. When he finished, he lifted his hat and said, “Play ball.” After that, he thanked us for talking to him in English and left.

This shrine had a couple vendor stalls along the pathway leading to the to main building. They were mostly selling drinks or treats, except one that was selling masks of cartoon characters. Very odd.

Our driver/guide took us back to the train station and we headed back to Tokyo. The train was more crowded going back, so we had to stand much of the way. Once we got back to Shinjuku station, Aiko led us down to the subway to ride back to our hotel — only one stop away and well within walking distance, but she wanted to make sure we got the entire Tokyo transportation experience.

She and Sally came up to our hotel room to see our Olympic tickets, which Aiko attempted to steal.

After we said our goodbyes and thanked her and her husband for their generosity during our stay, we intended to head back out and again try to make it to Shibuya. Well, two days of walking and walking and walking along with the hot weather had us both falling asleep in our chairs, so we decided to stay in and get everything ready for our flight to Beijing the next morning. We are leaving fairly early and we didn’t want to rush. Besides, we’ve both decided that this trip has only given us a small taste of Japan and that we need to come back for a much longer stay soon. We can hit Shibuya then.

More of Tokyo Day 1

2008-08-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

It's pretty amazing how every sliver of space is put to use in this city. We were walking around in the Akihabara district and I notice a line of shops was built into and under an overpass and bridge. The bridge supports formed the main walls of the buildings. Also, every alley way, no matter how narrow or winding, had shops and signs just like the main streets. The taxi driver that Aiko hired for us took a couple short cuts through some of these back alleys as he drove us around the city. I'm sure he did it to avoid heavy traffic on the main streets, but both Angie and I were glad he did so we could see a little more of what city life is like here in Tokyo.

I posted earlier that while it was hot and humid, it wasn't oppressively so. Wrong. It was crazy hot yesterday and felt like a sauna at times. Everyone had small hand towels or handkerchiefs to keep the sweat at bay. Hopefully today will be a little more comfortable. On the other hand, we know Beijing is going to be hotter and more humid. I don't see that we could ever get used to this kind of weather. I don't think the Japanese are all that used to it either. Every shop, car and indoor space had the air conditioning on high and cold.

One of the things Angie and I both noticed about being surrounded by so many people but not being able to understand what they are saying is that it is very easy to allow the din to become almost white noise and ignore it. It was interesting when we'd be walking around and all the sudden hear a snippet of English conversation. Even if it was quiet and from a distance, it would grab our attention.

A couple other things:

The taxi doors are automated and controlled by the driver. I kept opening and closing them out of habit and the driver seemed to be getting a little irritated with me. It took 3 or 4 times before I started to remember to let the door alone.

The crows sound different. They look the same, but aren't as harsh sounding.

While we were walking around Shinjuku last night, there were people standing out in the walkways handing out flyers and menus trying to get people into their shops. We weren't the target market apparently because we didn't get handed anything.

There was a 3-person jazz group performing outside one of the entrances to Shinjuku station. They were actually pretty good. It was a little odd to be hearing soft jazz in a crowd of people with construction going on and heavy traffic on the street.

Today, we're heading out into the suburbs on the train. Hopefully it will be a little cooler.

First Day in Tokyo

2008-08-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

Well, we had a good night's sleep, but still were up at 3:30-4:00 am. We tried to go back to sleep, but ended up getting up and going to the Fitness Room at 5:00 am ish. It's a small, not very well ventilated room, but it has a great view, a water vending machine and we managed to get in a good workout on a combination of stair stepping machines and treadmills.

We had no idea what to do for breakfast, so we wimped out and ordered room service.

We had made arrangements to meet up with Scott's friend from high school, Aiko, at 10:00 am. She surprised us and showed up with a hired car for the day. Air-conditioned, thankfully. Her husband works for a large company and often entertains foreigners and insisted that she do so. It was wonderful! It's so hot and humid here that it was nice to drive around, see stuff, get out and walk around but have the nice air-conditioned car to come back to. Plus the driver was extremely knowledgeable and was able to help Aiko out with our questions.

First, we drove around a district famous for being full of tech shops. We got out and walked through a couple of shops. One was for toys and was awesome. I love the way shops are here in Tokyo. They seem to focus on one single item and line both major roads and alleyways. They are also bright, colorful and crowded with merchandise. It's fun to go in and browse. The shopkeepers don't seem to need to know English if you are holding merchandise in one hand and yen in another. They get what you want!

Next we drove over to Akakusa Kannon Temple and Nakamise Shopping Arcade. Scott has some nice pictures. The Temple gate has a huge lantern and is protected by the gods of Wind and Thunder. Once you pass the gates, you enter the shopping arcade. It's a little like Pike Place Market on steroids. Plenty of stuff to buy, snacks to try. Aiko bought us some fresh made rice crackers and some sort of sweet that had batter on the outside and some sort of sweet bean paste on the inside. Yes, I tried both. I liked the rice crackers best.

Past the market, we entered the actual Temple. It is a working Buddhist Temple. They had a "wishing well" sort of area where you could toss in coins and make a wish. We wished to get our hands of some Closing Ceremony tickets! Scott also had his fortune told. You shake a container of sticks with numbers on them and then pull one out. Scott's literally flew out of the container and hit him in the face. He received a good fortune that said his wish would be granted. Yay!

Next, because Scott had expressed an interest, we stopped by an arena where small sumo competitions are held. They don't have any matches going on now and all the matches in September are completely sold out. Scott has a great picture of him as a sumo. We went inside to a small sumo museum and Scott got an autograph handprint of the grand champion sumo.

Next we went to the Toyko Central Train Station. It's being a bit remodeled, but it was built based on a train station Amsterdam according to Aiko. Very traditional European design. Speaking of architecture, Tokyo has some very eclectic architecture and some very amazing buildings. It's interesting to see a cutting edge building right next to one that's been around for hundreds of years. More European designed stuff than I would have expected.

Next we had lunch. We had tempura and it was good. I managed to use chopsticks for the whole lunch. Scott had to switch to a fork. Scott ate raw tuna and I, da-da-da, ate shrimp. It was very nice. I've noticed that a lot of the restaurant seem to serve a single type of food and are very small - maybe seating 20-30 - and then there will be like 15 different restaurants in one place. They also have you sit on chairs outside the restaurant if they don't have a table available.

After lunch we walked around the Imperial Palace. They don't let you go very far into the grounds because the Imperial family lives on the grounds. The ground are extremely well maintained. There are a series of gates, walls and moat-like ponds throughout the grounds.

Lastly, we headed over to the Toyko Tower. It looks like the Eiffel Tower just painted bright orange and white. We rode the elevator to the first observation area and Scott took pictures. The line to go up to the top observation was way too long. After looking around, we went to go ride the elevators down. However, the line was very long so we decided to walk down the stairs. Not our brightest idea given the heat, but we made it to the bottom. My legs were shaking and weak when we made it down.

Aiko then dropped us off at the hotel. She needed to get home for something. We arranged to meet up again the next day. Her daughter, Sally, may be joining us tomorrow. We are going to take the train to the old Capital (we think).

We both were in need of a shower. So we went to our room, showered and fell asleep. I think maybe the remains of jet lag.

We got up about 6:00 pm determined not to utilize room service and went out to forage for food. We had hoped to catch the subway and head to Shibuya, where a famous intersection is. It is the neon crazy intersection you always see on T.V. We did pretty good in that we eventually found the station for the subway, however, we were unable to determine how to buy a ticket or where to go to actually get on the subway. There were no English ticket vending machines to help us out and everyone looked too busy to help us. Being still kind of tired, we elected to pass on Shibuya and headed to a local shopping mall, Times Square. It's like 14 floors of stores, booths, and food. Kind of overwhelming and all the salespeople are extremely deferential and it made us a bit uncomfortable.

We tried to find food, but it was very difficult to find a menu in English and I'm way too picky and timid about food. We ended up making our way back to the hotel and eating at one of the restaurants in the basement of the hotel. It was a buffet style restaurant and I ended up eating a lovely white curry that was extremely tasty. I tried some other things but didn't find anything else I liked. I even passed on the desserts (I know!). I tried a couple, but they weren't very sweet and tasted a bit funky to me.

It was then off to bed so we could rest up for tomorrow.

Japanese Commercial Weirdness

2008-08-12T16:31:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post before we leave for the day.

Watching Japanese TV while we get ready to go. Scarlett Johannson has a commercial for Mt. Rainier latté, with images of downtown Seattle in the background.

Whew, I can breathe a sigh of relief

2008-08-12T16:18:00.001-07:00

I've been very worried about our kitties because the pet sitter wasn't sure if she still had keys to our house. Last I talked to her, she was going look for them and get back to me. I didn't hear from her before we left. I've been worrying off and on that she couldn't get into the house, didn't get my email with Jenny number for backup keys, etc. I sent two emails with no response and then in desperation this morning, because my cell phone isn't working, I called directly to her and left a message.

About an hour later, I had a flash of insight. I could log in to the web management for our alarm system and see if she had used her code. I logged in and she was there to check on them at 11:00 Seattle time. Whew. It means they missed dinner last night, but at least they should be good from here on out. I can relax now.

Good Morning Tokyo

2008-08-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

The view outside our hotel room. I'm not sure what this building is, but I do recognize it.

Angie's Turn

2008-08-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Well, as Scott said, it was a long flight, made longer by sitting at the airport for 5 hours before getting on the plane. My fault, I should have checked our flight status before we left the house. We breezed through Seattle traffic and security at the airport and ended up waiting around for our troubles.

The flight wasn't bad, but I had to resort to earplugs to drown out the schoolgirls. They were still going strong with the laughter and giggling until we landed. I'm sure they were happy to be heading home. I'm also very glad we were able to upgrade to Economy Plus seats. The extra leg room came in very handy. Service and food was remarkably good on the plane and there was a neat in-seat video monitor that tracked the speed, altitude and progress that was interesting to watch.

Clearing customs and immigration in Narita was nice and easy even though I don't think my Immigration guy spoke English, we managed. As Scott said, it was very nice and reassuring that the travel company had figured out our delay and was waiting for us. We were both very concerned about getting to the hotel on our own. One thing that seemed very wrong, was on our way to the hotel, we passed a AM/PM, a 7-11 and a Sizzler. In Tokyo! It just seems wrong.

The hotel is VERY nice and huge! I has two towers, on is 39 floors and the other is 34 floors. The staff mostly speaks English and are very helpful. We have a bidet.

Possibly because of our long day yesterday, we went to bed at 10:00 pm Tokyo time and managed to sleep until about 4:30 am before getting up to work out. Yes, we worked out. The fitness room had very little ventilation and it was very stifling, but we managed to do cardio for an hour. They had some weird machines that looked kind of like tiny mechanical bulls. We managed to get one going but couldn't for the life of us figure out what muscles it was supposed to be working. Limited weights so we will probably forego our weight/resistance training until we see the facilities in Beijing.

We are now getting ready to spend the day with Scott's friend, Aiko, visiting the touristy sites in Tokyo. I hope to have some form of noodles for lunch.

Made it to Tokyo

2008-08-12T04:52:00.001-07:00

We've been up for almost 24 hours straight, but we're in our hotel room in downtown Tokyo (Shinjuku).

Our flight was delayed 2 hours leaving Seattle, so that kind of sucked. Then, we shared the plane with a large group of Japanese school girls complete with uniforms, Hello Kitty and Hannah Montana stuff. We were pretty happy to have our seats on the side of the plane in a row of 2 all our own. We didn't want to think what it would have been like to be in the middle of one of the 5 seat rows, surrounded by Japanese school girls.

We got up Monday morning at 4:45 am to hit the gym. It's now 8:57 Tuesday evening in Tokyo which translates into 4:59 am Tuesday morning Seattle time. Angie slept on the plane a bit. I dozed for about an hour unsuccessfully. We're tired and hungry and as soon as room service gets here, we're going to bed.

It was already dark by the time we got into the city from the airport, most of the freeways have high noise abatement walls, and we were sitting in the ass of the airport bus so we didn't see a whole lot. I can say that the freeway system through this city feels like it was built well after all the buildings were. It feels like it is forced to curve around, go up, go down and generally wind in and out without displacing any preexisting buildings. The thought of trying to navigate all of that in a rental car almost seems like an impossible task and one I'm glad we're not trying.

A couple of other first impressions:

It's hot and humid, but not oppressively so. It's not Austin hot. More like Ohio hot.

There is more English on signs and such than I expected.

Everyone has been very polite and helpful so far — cliché perhaps, but true. I was most nervous about getting from the airport to our hotel because our flight was delayed and put under a different flight number than what we told our tour company. They were supposed to have someone meet us at the airport and help get us set up for transportation, but we were pretty sure they wouldn't find us. They did and the woman who helped us was so quick that we didn't really get a chance to tell her how much she eased our anxiety.

Well, room service is here. I'm out.

Weekend America on NPR

2008-08-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Be sure to listen to the Weekend America show on NPR next Saturday, the 16th. I did an interview with them last week about our trip to the Olympics and the photos of our tickets I posted on Flickr. I'll post a link to the web archive of the interview once it is on their website.

And so it begins...

2008-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Today's the day. All the items on the list are checked off. The puppy is off to her extended sleepover with Kasmo. The bags are packed. We're heading to the airport in a little while and then this thing we've been talking about for years will begin for real.

And so it begins.

I need a Yao jersey

2008-08-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

We're watching the US men's basketball team play China right now. I'm digging the jerseys and really want a Yao Ming jersey. Somehow, I think I'll be able to find one when we get there.

Oh, and am I watching this game live on one of the NBC channels? Nope — CBC again.

Live Blogging the Opening Ceremony (Tape Delayed)

2008-08-08T19:36:00.001-07:00

12:00 — This was a great show. It was beautiful and jaw-dropping at the same time. Congrats to the organizers and all the people who performed. We can't wait to get there and be part of that energy.

11:56 — Just realized it's been awhile since there were any commercials. At least a half hour. I guess NBC doesn't suck totally.

11:54 — Now the fireworks really get going. Angie and I intend to be outside the stadium for the closing ceremonies to get as close a view of this kind of show as we can.

11:53 — The fact that the torch itself kind of appeared out of nowhere is pretty cool. The flaming arrow still wins though.

11:51 — It will be interesting to see how they finish this. The Barcelona flaming arrow shot across the stadium will be hard to beat — still the best in my opinion.

11:49 — ...and up he goes to make a running circuit of the upper inner ring of the stadium roof, with the scrolling paper unrolling in front of him.

11:48 — Here we go. The final torchbearer is hooked up to cables...

11:43 — What an honor it must be to carry the flame into and around the stadium in your home country.

11:42 — The flame enters the arena. I'm all goosebumpy.

11:37 — Now let's light this candle and get it rocking.

11:37 — And the game are official! Cue the fireworks!

11:30 — The painting. What an incredible idea to have a painting brought to life by the footsteps of the marching athletes. I really hope that it is on display somewhere so that Angie and I can see it up close when we get there. Simply a great concept and illustration on how all these diverse people are both great as individuals — their singular footsteps leaving a mark — and even more powerful as a group — their collective footsteps creating a rainbow of color and completing the painting that the Chinese started at the beginning of the ceremony.

11:26 — Really weird to have what sounds like Mexican music playing behind the Chinese team's march around the stadium. 639 members of the Chinese team.

11:22 — Nice shot of Yao and a little boy running along side him, a 9-year old survivor of the earthquake. Awesome story about him going back into the rubble to look for classmates because he was a class leader.

11:21 — And finally, China. A dramatic pause, the flag still flying, and here comes Yao Ming as the flag bearer. He's freakin' huge!

11:20 — Australia enters. 450 athletes — one of the biggest teams by far. No sign of LJ yet. And they are off. That was quick.

11:18 — Aussies on the way!

11:16 — I love Morgan Freeman (another Visa commercial).

11:14 — Nowitzki with the rings cut into his hair. Nice touch.

11:11 — The Serbs aren't lacking in the hot quotient either. Maybe I'm getting a little punchy after nearly 4 hours of this.

11:04 — Not to be stereotypical, but damn the Swedes have some hotties on their team.

11:01 — Wow, North Korea gets a warm welcome. I have to say that when the North and South Koreans marched in together for the first time at the last Olympics (or maybe it was a two Olympics ago), it was a powerful moment. It would have been nice to see that again.

10:57 — They are talking about the mingling groups of athletes who have marched in and taken their places. The colors of all the uniforms are mixing a bit so that each group is not all that distinct. You see shots of athletes getting together and taking photos of one another. Everyone has smiles on their faces, truly happy to be a part of something this huge. This really is what the Olympics is all about and it is something I hope Angie and I can experience in some way in the stands with fans from all over the world.

10:53 — Okay, another new country for me: Kiribati. My knowledge of island countries seems to be lacking.

10:49 — Is this a Dino Rossi commerical or Papa Murphy's? They could be twins. Oh, and Rossi is a tool. No Olympic truce for me baby.

10:44 — Bush, try not to look so bored. Looks like he would be happy with a beer and some peanuts in a cup.

10:41 — Angie's giving up the ghost and heading to bed.

10:39 — Okay, enough with the NBA players. They've shown them like 8 times. We get it already. Sheesh.

10:38 — I like the US team logo. Looks like uplifted wings above the Olympic rings. Might have to pick me up some Team USA gear once we get there.

10:37 — Lisa Leslie and Tina Thompson get some screen time.

10:35 — The US enters and gets a good cheer. It's only courteous to be nice to the people who you lend money to.

10:35 — Okay, I'm losing Angie. The soft sound of snoring is wafting up from the other side of the couch.

10:33 — First country I've never heard of: Comoros. Looked like an island north of Madagasgar.

10:28 — Poland with the mother of the bride dresses. Ouch.

10:27 — France, where's Carla Bruni?

10:20 — GINOBLI!

10:19 — Halfway point? I guess it takes awhile for 204 countries to march in.

10:08 — Fashion mistake by Hungary and the pant suits worn by their female athletes — looks like they are all victims of horrible stabbing attacks.

9:52 — Just heard that the order of the countries is based on the number of brush strokes used to write the Chinese character representing the country. It makes for confusing order, but it is kind of cool nonetheless.

9:51 — Back from commercials. I like that NBC is showing each country at least a little bit so that even though the broadcast is broken up by commercials all the countries get screen time.

9:47 — So they talk about "country hopping" in which athletes go from country to country to find the ones with the lax citizenship requirements in order to get to the Olympics, and then didn't mention Becky Hammon.

9:38 — So Chicago is up against Rio, Madrid and Tokyo for the 2016 games. Hmmm.

9:34 — Nice, Taiwan gets a big cheer.

9:23 — I like the graphics at the bottom of the screen. They list the current country entering the stadium and have the upcoming countries listed since there is no real order to the entries. Certainly not English alphabetical.

9:20 — I love how many athletes are carrying cameras, trying to capture as much of this experience as they can. Just underscores how big this is not only to the spectators, but to the athletes too.

9:19 — The athletes enter! Greeks first, China last. Still, the Chinese flag flies with its own wind source.

9:16 — Just had to sit and watch that. Two singers, one English and one Chinese singing the theme song for the games atop the globe while pictures of smiling children on the massive screen around the top of the stadium and thousands of images held up by performers on the stadium floor. One world, one dream.

9:09 — Another jaw dropping moment — a massive globe is coming up out of the arena floor. It has to be 50 or 60 feet tall, if not taller. There are people running around it and each is perpendicular to the globe so that each looks like he is standing on the surface even if they are at the "equator" or southern hemisphere. They are tethered in some way as they run and do handstands. Incredible and a fantastic visual.

9:08 — Now we're getting all spacey. I really like that the crowd has small flickering lights to add to the star-like atmosphere.

9:06 — We're leaving in 2 days and it's still a little unreal that we will be sitting in that arena in just a few days.

9:04 — They run around, the perfect circles become chaotic and then in a flash the massive circles reform out of the joined efforts of the individual dancers.

9:01 — Pressure's off I guess. Now there are 2008 Tai Chi performers at work. Nice camera shot from above showing the precision spacing and structure created by the performers' bodies. Again, the individuals combine to make something much larger when seen as a communal (pun intended) whole.

8:58 — A Tai Chi demonstration. Just a few performers doing Tai Chi amidst gauze-like screens with video projected on them. Unlike some of the other performances that utilized thousands of people, to have just a few perform this has to put incredible pressure on the few, especially since Tai Chi is something that so many Chinese know how to do it. You'd better be a master to be doing it on this stage.

8:55 — For crying out loud. More commericals. I want to kick Bob Costas in the nuts. Just let us watch the show.

8:54 — Okay, this is nothing short of incredible. The performers have constructed a human replica of the Birdcage stadium. The people of China have come together to create this place out of themselves and it is beautiful.

8:52 — It's almost of sea of light particles flowing around the arena floor, undulating and forming images. Now the lights are turning on and off — has to be computer controlled. Yet another example of massive people power joined in harmony with high technology.

8:50 — Jumping ahead to a much more high tech section. Hundreds of performers in body suits surround a pianist. WHOA — they are all lit up with lights on their suits, and it looks like they are all networked like the earlier sets of performers.

8:48 — More fireworks taking us to commercial. I think the NBC broadcast has a lot more commercials than the CBC broadcast. Not a little more — a lot more. It feels more choppy and the commentators aren't doing as good a job describing what is happening on the arena floor as the CBC commentators. NBC tools.

8:45 — This show needs to be seen with the widest angles so that you can see the whole tapestry, but also zoomed in to see the amazing costumes. The performers on the stage now are in incredibly detailed and colorful dresses. Now the LED screen has been expanded to 500 feet as huge red and gold columns rise from the floor.

8:33 — Blooming flowers come out of the type characters. Beautiful, and then the tops pop off and the people power driving the display is revealed as each person under the grid gets to wave to the crowd. Each of these segments are really hitting on the contrasts that China represents - tradition vs modernism, the force of sheer numbers of people vs the power of the highest technology.

8:30 — More tradition juxtaposed with the modern. I giant moveable type grid with digital displays to either side while performers chant and drum in the background.

8:28 — Okay, I absolutely love the Visa Go World commericals. They have completely nailed what it is that makes the Olympics so special. We cheer because we are human and when the athletes succeed, we all succeed.

8:23 — Matt Lauer says it's a giant LED screen that is a couple hundred feet long. Cool.

8:20 — Is that a giant digital scroll of paper being unrolled on the stadium floor? Again, how are they doing that? And now doing calligraphy with dancers' bodies? Wow.

8;19 — Commercials. Sorry Ford, 25 miles to the gallon is NOT fuel efficient. Bastards.

8:17 — The Chinese national anthem. You get the feeling that the people had better know the words? And did they have a special fan to make the flag fly and ripple like that once it got to the top of the pole?

8:15 — A shot of Putin and Bush talking to each other. How about watching the adorable little kids with the big flag you jerks. At least the kids handed the flag off to some jack-booted soldiers — something Bush and Putin can understand.

8:12 — That is freaking awesome. The Olympic rings rising up off the floor of the stadium in what I'm sure will be one of many "how the hell did they do that" moments.

8:11 — The fireworks begin. I expect a lot from them with the fireworks.

8:07 — Okay, the lighted drum sticks was a nice touch. I really like what seems to be a theme at work — traditional Chinese culture enhanced with high technology. Ancient drums, having just recently been discovered in an archeological dig, networked together with lights and turned into pixels on a world stage. I think we may be seeing more of this.

Oh, and please forgive any spelling errors. I'm not spellchecking this as I go and it's my first attempt at live blogging something, even if it really isn't live.

8:04 — The drummers reciting Confucius, welcoming everyone. Seeing the precision and synchronicity between 2008 performers is amazing. It's also great see them close up and to see the joy on some of their faces. For exciting it is for us, this has to be incredible for these people.

8:02 — so we're off by 6 minutes since they started at 8:08. Fantastic countdown with the crowd counting out with the digital drummer display. Just for the record, I would have given my left nut to be in the arena right now.

8:00 — 2008 drummers, synched with lights getting the countdown started. They look like a giant LED sign with huge pixels. Angie says its a seizure waiting to happen. Now they are counting down the seconds...

7:59 — HERE WE GO!

7:58 — Here's one big difference between the CBC and NBC broadcast — President Bush is getting more face time than the Chinese president.

7:52 — Ahhhh, more commericals. I JUST WANT IT TO START.

7:50 — I like the analogy the NBC China expert used to describe this as China's moon shot — a huge risk that they've put everything into and needing success.

7:49 — The show cost $300 million and features 15,000 performers. Holy crap.

7:48 — Costas!

7:46 — Freaking commercials. I'm already tired of the anti-Dino Rossi spots. Not because I'm a republican, but they are just annoying.

7:39 — Brokaw is giving an overview of what the Chinese have done to get ready, going all the way back to 1971 and "ping pong" diplomacy.

7:35 pm — the show is about to start, tape delayed half a day plus three hours. We actually just finished watching Australia beat Belarus on Angie's laptop in the first round of women's basketball pool play. Go Lauren!

We watched a good portion of the ceremonies this morning on CBC at the gym and while getting ready for work. The Canadians, of course, kept the cameras on their team when they entered the arena. The US got about as much attention as everyone else. It's always fun to see the differences between the Canadian broadcasts and the US version.

Thank God for CBC

2008-08-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

CBC is, of course, showing the Opening Ceremonies live right now. Why NBC can't broadcast this live and then replay it in normal US primetime instead of only showing it on tape delay is beyond me.

I will be live-blogging the broadcast on tape delay, however, so check in later tonight for more.

Camera Drama, pt. 2

2008-08-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

So we still haven't gotten any additional hard information about getting my camera into the Olympic venues. We're pretty sure the whole "confiscate cameras at customs" thing was something completely unrelated to us (there is a rule about how many cameras you can bring in, but one is fine). The plan remains to go to the Olympic Info desk at our hotel as soon as we get there and show them my camera and get a ruling first-hand.

We have a contingency plan — a Lumix DMC-FZ18 point and shoot digital camera... with an 18x zoom lens that translates into a 24-500mm equivalent lens. One way or the other, I will be taking shots inside the Olympic venues.

On his photography blog, Best Seat in the House, Seattle Times photographer Rod Mar is detailing his own trip to Beijing. In a post from a couple days ago, he listed all the equipment he's taking. It's all drool worthy (even if it's mostly Nikon stuff, meh), but one section made me feel pretty good:

Canon EOS 1D Mark III
Canon 70-200mm f2.8 zoom
Canon 24-70mm f2.8 zoom
Canon 16-35mm f2.8 zoom
Canon 15mm f.8 fisheye
Canon 1.4x extender
Canon 550 ex flash

I've got everything on that list except the 16-35mm and fisheye, and if I had gotten paid on a freelance job I finished more than a freakin' year ago, I'd have the 16-35 too.

It's going to be kind of hard to argue I don't have professional-level equipment if I have the same stuff in my bag as a professional sports photographer. The fast-talking I usually use to get into KeyArena all the time is that I'm not making any money with the camera, so it's not really "professional." I don't think I'll be getting away with that with any Chinese security forces.

Olympic event schedule

2008-08-06T21:00:00.001-07:00

Here are the Olympic events we have tickets for. All times are local Beijing time — no, I don't know the math for converting to Pacific Time.

8/15

Arrive in Beijing

8/16

2:00 pm Men's Handball, Prelim Group A — France vs Spain

3:45 pm Men's Handball, Prelim Group B – Russia vs Germany

8/17

9:00 am Women's Basketball, Prelim Group B — Spain vs Mali

11:15 am Women's Basketball, Prelim Group A — Australia vs Russia

2:30 pm Women's Basketball, Prelim Group A — Latvia vs Korea

4:45 pm Women's Basketball, Prelim Group A — Brazil vs Belarus

8:00 pm Women's Basketball, Prelim Group B — Czech Republic vs China

10:15 pm Women's Basketball, Prelim Group B — New Zealand vs USA

8/18

Bike tour of Tiananmen Square, Dongjiaomin Lane, Qianmen (Hutong)

9:00 pm Women's Football, Semifinal

8/19

Morning at Olympic Green

10:00 am Men's 3m Springboard, Semifinal

2:30 pm Women's Basketball, Quarterfinal

4:45 pm Women's Basketball, Quarterfinal

8:00 pm Women's Basketball, Quarterfinal

10:15 pm Women's Basketball, Quarterfinal

8/20

Great Wall, Forbidden City

8/21

9:00 am Athletics — Women's 20K Walk (Final), Men's Javelin, Men's Decathlon 100m, Women's High Jump, Men's Decathlon High Jump, Men's Decathlon Shot Put

8:00 pm Women's Basketball, Semifinal

10:15 pm Women's Basketball, Semifinal

8/22

Open

8/23

12:30 pm Women's Indoor Volleyball, Bronze Medal game

7:30 pm Women's Basketball, Bronze Medal game

10:00 pm Women's Basketball, Gold Medal game

8/24

Open

Closing Ceremony — we don't have tickets but expect to partying, HARD

8/25

Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven

8/26

Leave Beijing

8/27

Pass out from total exhaustion

Cue the bad 80's anthem rock...

2008-08-05T07:09:00.000-07:00

...because we're in the Final Countdown.

Angie's already got butterflies in her stomach and is predicting a complete inability to sleep this weekend. I'm not there yet, but I can feel it coming. I might last until Friday before freaking out.

We're both making our last minute lists of what needs to happen before we board the 747 at Noon on Monday. I have a lot more to do than I thought, so for anyone out there who might be waiting for me to do something non-Olympic trip related, you aren't on the radar. Sorry.

Public Transportation

2008-07-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

I found and was reading the Official Spectator Guide for the Beijing Olympics. It is a nicely designed 129 page booklet about attending the Olympics. It has some very nice information about the venues. I like that they describe where the security points are, how far you have to walk from the security points to the actual venue and all the amenities of each venue. I'm sure we will get more detailed information when we get there, but this guide is a nice start.

Another thing I noticed that impressed me a lot is that every venue has a minimum of 4 buses that stop at or near them and many have more and/or subway stops. Beijing has really ramped up utilizing their public transportation to move people. In addition, I found out that any day you have a event ticket, you can show it and ride any form of public transportation for free! I can't even imagine a city in the US doing that and I think it's freaking awesome!

Scott and I had planned on trying to utilize public transportation during our stay and this will make it even easier.

Camera Drama

2008-07-31T14:01:00.000-07:00

So for the past few months, both Angie and I have been scouring the main Olympic website, sending questions to our tour company and generally trying to find any information about possible camera restrictions at the Olympics.

Until last night, we had found nothing. There is a list of what not to do and what not to bring for attending Olympic events — apparently a lot of people bring crossbows to events in China because that particular weapon is specifically banned — and photography equipment is not listed. Video equipment is listed, but not cameras.

Thinking I'm in the clear, I've been building my dream camera bag for months, including a recent lens purchase (a Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS).

Last night, I was cruising around Flickr, checking to make sure I had joined a particular group dedicated to the 2008 Olympics because someone who might want to post images or stories from people at the games will be checking that group for potential submissions.

Months ago, I had posted a question in that group asking if anyone had any info about photo restrictions. I didn't get a response for awhile and quit looking back. I just happened to see the topic list last night and saw that I had a couple responses. One of them was from a writer for a photo magazine who had direct contacts with the Beijing Olympic Committee.

Professional photo equipment will not be allowed at any Olympic events, and from the sound of things won't even be allowed on the grounds of any venues.

He linked to a place on the Olympics web site that spelled out the rule. It was buried fairly deep and does not come up on any searches for "photography" or "camera" or any other reasonable search term you might think of.

I'm currently going through the 5 stages of grief. Angie has scrambled and gotten us a new point and shoot that should be allowed in according to what we've read.

There was also another article that stated the Chinese government is confiscating ANY photography equipment at customs. That might end up being false and only applies to people that have multiple cameras (you can bring one in, but not 5).

On the one hand, I was kind of surprised that they didn't seem to have any posted restrictions. On the other hand, I'm pretty pissed that it took an accidental read of a month's old question to find out that there are restrictions. I would have been even more pissed to get there and be turned back, so I guess this is better... or something.

Bottom line is no awesome shots of the actual sporting events. Bleh.

Note to self...

2008-07-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

no buying event tickets on the street:

Another 26 detained for Olympics ticket scalping

I'd like to avoid being "educated" by the Chinese officials.

And now a word from Angie

2008-07-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

I am nowhere near as poetic as Scott and I haven't had a life long dreams of attending the Olympics. In fact, my desire to attend the Olympics came in 2004, when a bunch of our Storm players went off to play in them. As Scott said, it was too late at that time to do anything about it that year, but that got the ideas flowing.

To give you some background, I’m not a real big sports fan. I’m more of a team fan. I never followed the WNBA until we got our own team. I didn’t follow the roller derby until I met a roller girl. I generally have to know someone or feel some connection before I become involved in a sport even as a spectator.

But then we started getting world class athletes on our Storm team. Our current Olympians are Sue Bird (USA), Lauren Jackson (Australia) and Kelly Santos (Brazil). But during our existence as a team, we’ve had 21 Storm players who have been on their respective countries National Teams and competed in either the Olympics or the World Champions. 21!

Suzy Batkovic (Australia)
Tully Bevilaqua (Australia)
Sue Bird (USA)
Sandy Brondello (Australia)
Edna Campbell (USA)
Swin Cash (USA)
Iziane Castro Marques (Brazil)
Simone Edwards (Jamaica)
Yolanda Griffith (USA)
Sonja Henning (USA)
Lauren Jackson (Australia)
Edwige Lawson-Wade (France)
Astou Ndiaye-Diatta (Senegal)
Florina Pascalau (Romania)
Kelly Santos (Brazil)
Alessandro Santos de Oliveira (Brazil)
Katy Steding (USA)
Jung Sun-Min (Korea)
Sheryl Swoopes (USA)
Kamila Vodichkova (Czech Republic)
Francesca Zara (Italy)

Even thought they aren’t all still playing for their national teams nor are all their countries competing in this Olympics, it seems to me that attending the Olympics to see our current and former Storm girls play is the ultimate fan experience. It will be awesome!

We've had to persevere though some long waits, overloaded website and lack of information, but we were able to score seats for every since women’s basketball game that is occurring between August 17th and the 23rd which includes the medal games. I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to obtain the gold medal game tickets though. We couldn’t get any information as to what time the second round of tickets would go on sale, just the date. I stayed up nearly all night checking CoSport's website to see when they’d go on sale. I even stayed home from work for the morning to make sure I didn’t miss it. Then when they did go on sale, there was so much demand and so much traffic that it took me 45 minutes to find the tickets, and get just to the point where I was paying for them, when the website canceled my order because I had taken too long to finalize it! It’s a minor miracle that both my computer and cell phone didn’t end up tossed across the room in frustration. After calling Scott in tears, I decided to try again. After all, what was the point in flying all the way to Beijing to miss the most important game of all? I was lucky that there were at least two tickets left and I managed to snag them. Then I called Scott again crying with relief.

Since that time, I have been reading guide books, researching on the internet and ordering things to make our trip easier and more secure. This is going to be the first time that I have ever left the continental U.S. except for a couple of trips to Vancouver, BC. In fact, we both had to obtain our first passports for this trip.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a tad obsessive compulsive and tend to plan things to death. See the below photos of the infamous binder including tabs to help make sure we have ever single scrap of information we might need on our trip. Despite Scott’s comments to the contrary, I have not scheduled every minute of every day, but it’s close. Of the 10 days we will spend in Beijing, we have approximately two and half days that are unscheduled at this point, but I do have lists of what we can do or where we can go that seemed interesting.

The cute little critters on the front of the binder are the official mascots of the Beijing Olympics. They were initially called the Friendlies, but the Chinese decided that was too close to Friendless so they changed the group name to Fuwa. Click here for a better picture and the press release regarding these cuties.

Scott has been a peach and left most of the details to me partially because I’m a bit of a steamroller when I get going and partially because he didn’t want to do it or would have left it to the week before we left and I’d be having panic attacks. It all works out well though. I plan and he ignores what he doesn’t want to do when we get there. Everybody’s happy.

Oh, I will NOT be trying scorpion on a stick.

Olympic Dreams

2008-07-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

The athletes aren't the only ones who have dreams of going to the Olympics. Since I was a boy, I've wanted to go to an Olympics. Before I was a fan of any individual sport — basketball, football or anything else — I was a nut for the Olympics.

It all started with the '76 games in Montreal. I was 9 and I got hooked watching the Man competing and winning the gold medal in the Decathlon — that's right, Bruce Jenner. He was almost a real live super hero and dominated the competition. I actually got to meet Bruce Jenner while I was in college in Portland, OR. I was working at the Montgomery Wards at Jantzen Beach in the sports and hardware department. He was in town for auto racing at the nearby Portland International Raceway and came into the store to buy tennis balls. I rang him up. I was almost comatose in his presence. He was huge, in great shape and tan tan tan. All I could get out was a "Thank you Mr. Jenner." It would be cool to somehow let him know what his impact was on me and how watching him in '76 ultimately led to our trip in 2008.

The '76 games also loom large for me because of the Japanese gymnast who performed and helped his team win the gold medal with a broken leg. I can remember seeing him land after nailing his rings routine and wincing in pain but still hitting the landing.

Then the '80 games in Moscow when the US boycotted over the Soviet's invasion of Afghanistan. I remember watching footage of American athletes who were gathered together at the US Olympic Training center in Colorado breaking down in tears and disbelief when the boycott was announced.

While I'm not a huge fan of the Winter Olympics, I was watching during the '80 games at Lake Placid and the Miracle on Ice. I still get goosebumps thinking about that game. I was also transfixed by Eric Heiden and speedskating. That man's thighs were like tree trunks. I remember putting on socks and trying to slide back and forth on the linoleum after seeing how Heiden trained.

The big event came in '84 with the Los Angeles games. One of the biggest memories I have of that Olympics was that every damn thing about it was sponsored by someone — rental cars, shoes, soda, luggage, underwear. There was an "official (fill in the blank) of the Olympics" everywhere. Of course, the Soviets boycotted this Olympics so the Americans wiped up. This was the first games using John William's Olympic Fanfare and Theme, now probably more recognizable than the actual Olympic march. I actually bought the Official Album of the 1984 Olympics and listened to it to death. I went so far as to work out how to play some of the music on my trumpet using trial and error until I got the tunes right.

Every 4 years since, I've been glued to the TV watching everything I could — sports I knew and liked to sports I'd never heard of or usually disliked watching. It didn't matter because it was the Olympics. The sports has never really been the thing for me, to be honest. It's the optimism that peaceful competition can be a bridge between people, that we can all set aside if only for a couple weeks everything that separates us so that we can come together and celebrate everything that is right about the human race. Ever since I started to understand that, I've wanted to be a part of it in some way — even as a spectator.

Atlanta in '96 was the first real opportunity for me to go to an Olympics, but Angie and I were still deep in being poor and it really wasn't a remote possibility. I also think I had a bit of a mental block about being able to do something that big. 2000 in Sydney might have worked, but still it really wasn't on the radar. In 2004, Angie and I started talking seriously about going to Athens, but the idea came too late for us to really make it real and we were a little spooked, rightly or wrongly, about how safe the games in Athens might be. 2004 came and went and we decided to make the 2008 games happen for real.

We put together a savings plan, estimating how much we though everything might cost. We jumped onto the waiting list for tours and tickets as soon as websites were up and running. We resisted the urge to do any travelling or make any large purchases like replacing our car. We downgraded our Storm season tickets. We did lots of big things and little things to make sure that we could not only pay for this trip, but do it without going into debt.

We stand here now, two weeks before we leave, and everything is indeed paid for. Our event tickets, our airfare, our tour package, everything. And we have a nice chunk of cash for food and souvenirs.

For me, the expectations for this trip are off the charts. This is truly a lifelong dream come true and I know it's going to be even bigger and crazier than I can really imagine.

I'm looking forward to meeting people from all over the world. I'm looking forward to seeing and experiencing things so far out of my normal life track that I'm not even sure what those things might be. And, I'm looking forward to watching the best athletes in the world come together and compete to be Olympic champions.

I can't wait.

Tickets

2008-07-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

I couldn't help but take a shot of our tickets when they came. They are great looking tickets with a lot of apparent anti-counterfeiting devices. After showing one around at work, the favorite feature is the grid of event icons on the left side. All the events are featured. I already have a couple requests for t-shirts with the icons on them, if I can find them.

Two weeks away

2008-07-27T11:57:00.000-07:00

Excitement is running high here at Chez Ntisocl. Our countdown stands at two weeks and one day before we get on that big jet plane for Tokyo and then Beijing.

Angie and I both will be tracking our trip here. Olympics here we come.

Oh, and the name. I intend to eat a scorpion on a stick at the Beijing Night Market. Wish me luck.