Wednesday, August 27, 2008
One year in China
I'm now into my second year here. I arrived on a Monday afternoon one year ago today - August 27, 2007.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The last of the Olympics
The Olympics are finally over, Beijing can breathe a big sigh of relief, and the television stations can go back to showing… highlights and reruns of the Olympics. It never ends! Well, there is somewhat of a break from the Olympics and most things are back to normal, but it’s really more of an gradual moderation of Olympic mania during the interlude between the closing ceremony and the kickoff of the Paralympics next month. In a way, I’m glad to get out of here soon, before the traffic and air quality reverts (deteriorates) back to the norm (the rule banning half the city’s cars – about two million – from driving every day will be lifted in a month).
The third and final weekend of the Olympics was another eventful several days. I tutored a few more times after my Chinese class ended, and started on some of the things that I had not gotten around to doing yet. I also saw three events over the final three days of the Games.
I was offered a ticket to some water polo games Friday night but it conflicted with the mountain bike event that I planned to go see on Friday afternoon. On Thursday there was a heavy rainstorm and I learned that the mountain bike race was rescheduled for Saturday morning so I got to go see water polo after all, another sport that I had never seen before in person. My roommate’s friend had two extra tickets, and we showed up at the pool together to meet him, while both of had no idea who was playing. It turned out to be the men’s semifinals, with the USA team playing for the chance to go the gold medal game.
The guy who gave use the tickets was a former college water polo player, and he upgraded our seats as soon as we got into the venue, so we were seated in the section of family and friend’s of the American team. I saw the end of a game between Germany and Greece, who were playing to advance to the 7th and 8th place game, and then I watched Hungary defeat Montenegro in a very close game. Hungary is the best team in the world and have won more gold medals than any other country in the sport so they were surprised to find themselves behind early in the game. It was a really close game and the players got pretty physical and rough with each other. In the end, Hungary won 11-9.
The last match of the night was the USA versus Serbia. The American team was ranked 7th coming into the Olympics and had a great tournament, winning all but one game. The Americans were up by just one point at halftime, but built a solid lead in the second half and came away with a 10-5 win. It was a blast cheering them on with dozens of other Americans and watching the players and their families and girlfriends celebrate after their huge win.
On Sunday morning, their successful run ended and the US lost to Hungary 14-10 in the gold medal game. Hungary won their ninth gold medal, while Serbia beat Montenegro (they used to be a single country until two years ago) to win the bronze medal.
On Saturday morning, I took the subway to the southwest side of the city, were the BMX track, mountain bike course, and velodrome were all built for the Olympics. I got a ticket for the women’s final cross country race from a Chinese friend for face value, which was only ¥30 (about $4.5 USD). There were several preliminary races to decide the mass start in the final race. About 30 riders raced six laps, which took nearly two hours, and the medals went to riders from Germany, Poland, and Russia.
Spectators were able to hike around the hilly and densely forested course to see the riders from almost anywhere along the course. It was a normal looking new-growth forest and often times you would find yourself deep in the trees and unable to see any sign of the city around the park. I haven’t been in that kind of setting in a really long time. It was, however, highly wired, as there were TV camera towers in some places, cameramen seated next to the course in other places, cables crisscrossing the ground, and even some cameras zipping back and forth on wires above the trees and others secured to tree branches, turning and zooming so they must have been remotely control by someone in a media room somewhere.
The riders quickly thinned out after the first lap and I was able to watch them go by in five different places, including some steep climbs and descents. Some riders were going extremely fast downhill and others seemed to struggle in the heat and were trudging along with great difficulty. After the leaders went by for the fifth time, the two guys I came with grabbed me to go find the finish line. It was pretty crowded there yet I was able to get a good spot right in front of the finish line and watch the first dozen or so riders finish, including the three medal winners who raised their bikes over their heads to celebrate.
The medal ceremony followed and I had a good view of that as well. We were kicked out before the men’s final race later in the day so we walked around the area and saw the other two venues, for the BMX and track cycling competitions, from the outside, stopped at a Trek store, which was a pleasant surprise to find, and ate at a restaurant in a huge housing development for the Capital Steel factory workers (it was an entire neighborhood built by the enormous Capital Steel company, and even the metro line was initially a private line for the company and it’s workers decades ago.)
On Sunday morning I headed out the door at 6 a.m. to go downtown. I parked my bike outside of a metro station on the northwest side of the city and had a detailed plan to race around the city and catch the marathon race at four different spots. I wasn’t sure if the timing would work, or if I would get lost or find myself stuck on the wrong side of a closed road, which is what held me up during the women’s marathon, but in the end, everything went smoothly.
Seeing Beijing early in the morning was nice, and the excitement around the race got me going at that early hour. It was fairly cool and the sky was clear and spotless; the air quality was excellent after the heavy rain on Thursday. I went to a metro station at the south end of Tiananmen Square, only to find that the entire square and the streets around it were closed so I couldn’t get very close to the start, which was near the northeast corner of the square. The route runs a couple of blocks east of the square, then turns south and goes through a big park before looping back to Tiananmen and then goes to the northwest, passing through the area where I live. Just before the race got underway at 7:30 I had to readjust my plan and I jogged east until I ran into a closed street and happened to get there just before the race arrived. I saw the runners go by in one big pack and several smaller chasing groups at the two kilometer mark, six minutes into the race.
I ran back to the south end of Tiananmen, where the first runners went by the ten kilometer point in just under 30 minutes (6.2 miles in 30 minutes!). Half a dozen African runners and one Spanish guy were in the first group and smaller groups, which included the three American runners, followed soon after them.
I hopped on the subway and went northwest, where the subway line goes above ground and I could see the subway train overtaking the helicopters that follow the runners. I jumped on my bike and went to a street in between my apartment and Tsinghua University, this time staying on the east side of the road, where I could quickly head to the stadium and see the race just before it enters the Bird’s Nest. Just three runners were out in front this time, about ¾ of the way into the race, looking strong and still running at a blistering pace. The morning air had warmed up considerably under the glaring sun. Samuel Wansiru of Kenya would soon push the pace even further and break away for good. I stuck around to watch a few more runners and they all looked pretty beat.
I grabbed my bike and quickly pedaled east towards the stadium, trying to beat the helicopters as they looped south to follow the leaders on their last 10-12 kilometers. When I reached the wide boulevard south of the Bird’s Nest, I settled in for one last glimpse of the runners. Just south of the stadium – I would guess one mile – Samuel Wansiru came by at just under two hours. Everyone roared but he seemed to pay no attention to us and kept running hard towards the stadium. He would finish in 2 hours 6 minutes and 32 seconds to set an Olympic record. I saw him briefly at four different points, for maybe one minute total, but I can say I saw a record being broken. It was an impressive performance, the whole race was fun to watch, and witnessing the best runners in their world running their hardest was incredible. It was definitely cool to experience some of the race in person.
There were a couple more great performances left to watch in the Olympics, including the USA men’s basketball team getting back to winning gold in a close game against Spain, and the USA men’s volleyball team winning an exciting gold medal game against Brazil. The closing ceremony was pretty good, too, and now it’s nice to came back down to earth after two exhilarating weeks.
Pictures are available here:
Water polo
Mountain biking
Men’s marathon
The third and final weekend of the Olympics was another eventful several days. I tutored a few more times after my Chinese class ended, and started on some of the things that I had not gotten around to doing yet. I also saw three events over the final three days of the Games.
I was offered a ticket to some water polo games Friday night but it conflicted with the mountain bike event that I planned to go see on Friday afternoon. On Thursday there was a heavy rainstorm and I learned that the mountain bike race was rescheduled for Saturday morning so I got to go see water polo after all, another sport that I had never seen before in person. My roommate’s friend had two extra tickets, and we showed up at the pool together to meet him, while both of had no idea who was playing. It turned out to be the men’s semifinals, with the USA team playing for the chance to go the gold medal game.
The guy who gave use the tickets was a former college water polo player, and he upgraded our seats as soon as we got into the venue, so we were seated in the section of family and friend’s of the American team. I saw the end of a game between Germany and Greece, who were playing to advance to the 7th and 8th place game, and then I watched Hungary defeat Montenegro in a very close game. Hungary is the best team in the world and have won more gold medals than any other country in the sport so they were surprised to find themselves behind early in the game. It was a really close game and the players got pretty physical and rough with each other. In the end, Hungary won 11-9.
The last match of the night was the USA versus Serbia. The American team was ranked 7th coming into the Olympics and had a great tournament, winning all but one game. The Americans were up by just one point at halftime, but built a solid lead in the second half and came away with a 10-5 win. It was a blast cheering them on with dozens of other Americans and watching the players and their families and girlfriends celebrate after their huge win.
On Sunday morning, their successful run ended and the US lost to Hungary 14-10 in the gold medal game. Hungary won their ninth gold medal, while Serbia beat Montenegro (they used to be a single country until two years ago) to win the bronze medal.
On Saturday morning, I took the subway to the southwest side of the city, were the BMX track, mountain bike course, and velodrome were all built for the Olympics. I got a ticket for the women’s final cross country race from a Chinese friend for face value, which was only ¥30 (about $4.5 USD). There were several preliminary races to decide the mass start in the final race. About 30 riders raced six laps, which took nearly two hours, and the medals went to riders from Germany, Poland, and Russia.
Spectators were able to hike around the hilly and densely forested course to see the riders from almost anywhere along the course. It was a normal looking new-growth forest and often times you would find yourself deep in the trees and unable to see any sign of the city around the park. I haven’t been in that kind of setting in a really long time. It was, however, highly wired, as there were TV camera towers in some places, cameramen seated next to the course in other places, cables crisscrossing the ground, and even some cameras zipping back and forth on wires above the trees and others secured to tree branches, turning and zooming so they must have been remotely control by someone in a media room somewhere.
The riders quickly thinned out after the first lap and I was able to watch them go by in five different places, including some steep climbs and descents. Some riders were going extremely fast downhill and others seemed to struggle in the heat and were trudging along with great difficulty. After the leaders went by for the fifth time, the two guys I came with grabbed me to go find the finish line. It was pretty crowded there yet I was able to get a good spot right in front of the finish line and watch the first dozen or so riders finish, including the three medal winners who raised their bikes over their heads to celebrate.
The medal ceremony followed and I had a good view of that as well. We were kicked out before the men’s final race later in the day so we walked around the area and saw the other two venues, for the BMX and track cycling competitions, from the outside, stopped at a Trek store, which was a pleasant surprise to find, and ate at a restaurant in a huge housing development for the Capital Steel factory workers (it was an entire neighborhood built by the enormous Capital Steel company, and even the metro line was initially a private line for the company and it’s workers decades ago.)
On Sunday morning I headed out the door at 6 a.m. to go downtown. I parked my bike outside of a metro station on the northwest side of the city and had a detailed plan to race around the city and catch the marathon race at four different spots. I wasn’t sure if the timing would work, or if I would get lost or find myself stuck on the wrong side of a closed road, which is what held me up during the women’s marathon, but in the end, everything went smoothly.
Seeing Beijing early in the morning was nice, and the excitement around the race got me going at that early hour. It was fairly cool and the sky was clear and spotless; the air quality was excellent after the heavy rain on Thursday. I went to a metro station at the south end of Tiananmen Square, only to find that the entire square and the streets around it were closed so I couldn’t get very close to the start, which was near the northeast corner of the square. The route runs a couple of blocks east of the square, then turns south and goes through a big park before looping back to Tiananmen and then goes to the northwest, passing through the area where I live. Just before the race got underway at 7:30 I had to readjust my plan and I jogged east until I ran into a closed street and happened to get there just before the race arrived. I saw the runners go by in one big pack and several smaller chasing groups at the two kilometer mark, six minutes into the race.
I ran back to the south end of Tiananmen, where the first runners went by the ten kilometer point in just under 30 minutes (6.2 miles in 30 minutes!). Half a dozen African runners and one Spanish guy were in the first group and smaller groups, which included the three American runners, followed soon after them.
I hopped on the subway and went northwest, where the subway line goes above ground and I could see the subway train overtaking the helicopters that follow the runners. I jumped on my bike and went to a street in between my apartment and Tsinghua University, this time staying on the east side of the road, where I could quickly head to the stadium and see the race just before it enters the Bird’s Nest. Just three runners were out in front this time, about ¾ of the way into the race, looking strong and still running at a blistering pace. The morning air had warmed up considerably under the glaring sun. Samuel Wansiru of Kenya would soon push the pace even further and break away for good. I stuck around to watch a few more runners and they all looked pretty beat.
I grabbed my bike and quickly pedaled east towards the stadium, trying to beat the helicopters as they looped south to follow the leaders on their last 10-12 kilometers. When I reached the wide boulevard south of the Bird’s Nest, I settled in for one last glimpse of the runners. Just south of the stadium – I would guess one mile – Samuel Wansiru came by at just under two hours. Everyone roared but he seemed to pay no attention to us and kept running hard towards the stadium. He would finish in 2 hours 6 minutes and 32 seconds to set an Olympic record. I saw him briefly at four different points, for maybe one minute total, but I can say I saw a record being broken. It was an impressive performance, the whole race was fun to watch, and witnessing the best runners in their world running their hardest was incredible. It was definitely cool to experience some of the race in person.
There were a couple more great performances left to watch in the Olympics, including the USA men’s basketball team getting back to winning gold in a close game against Spain, and the USA men’s volleyball team winning an exciting gold medal game against Brazil. The closing ceremony was pretty good, too, and now it’s nice to came back down to earth after two exhilarating weeks.
Pictures are available here:
Water polo
Mountain biking
Men’s marathon
Monday, August 18, 2008
Liu Xiang is out
I heard the news when walking through a subway station Monday evening. People were staring at television monitors, stunned into silence. China's most popular athlete, Liu Xiang, dropped out of the hurdles event during the first round with a hamstring injury. The 110 meter hurdles was the most anticipated event of the Games because Liu was expected to go head-to-head with the Cuban runner who beat his world record earlier this year. More importantly, he was going to defend his 2004 gold medal in this event, which was the first track gold medal won by a Chinese male athlete. I felt bad for him because of the immense pressure he was under and now he has suffered from a common injury at the worst possible moment and everyone is devastated.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Olympic events
I bought two tickets to a beach volleyball event off the Internet a while ago with some help from a Chinese friend. The event was Saturday night and was the first time I've attended a sporting event in China. The venue is a temporary stadium that was put up in a parking lot in Beijing’s largest park. Although there’s no real beach in Beijing, the setting of the beach volleyball arena was pretty nice.
You can see my pictures here.
I went with an American student I met through Chinese classes and initially we couldn’t believe we were at an Olympic event. We sat in the 11th row and later moved down the 6th row while watching a total of five matches. There was a sixth, but five hours of volleyball was enough. An American pair played in the first match, beating a team from the Netherlands. It was the first of three women’s matches, followed by matches between Germany and Cuba and then Brazil and Georgia. The two Georgian players are originally from Brazil and later this week they played a team from Russia.
The first men’s match was an American team versus a Latvian team. The two Americans were ranked second in the world and were a seemingly perfect pair – a shorter guy with years of experience and outstanding defensive skills, and a younger guy who is 6’9” and was a dominating blocker and attacker. The two Latvian guys were young, both 23 years old, and were very similar players, both with good all-around skills. The Americans started off strong but showed lackluster play through much of the match while the Latvians were always tenacious and energetic. It was a thrilling match and the Latvians were able to pull off an upset. We were more happy to see a thrilling game and see such spirited play from the Latvian team that we didn’t care that the Americans lost. In the next game a Swiss pair beat two experienced players from Argentina, including one who is the only player to compete in beach volleyball at all four Olympic Games that have included the sport.
On Tuesday afternoon I went to the subway station near the Water Cube and Bird’s Nest with my roommate and a Chinese friend. This spot has become the unofficial gathering point for ticket scalpers and we wanted to see what was available. There were really expensive tickets for popular events like basketball, soccer, and diving. It was impossible to find tickets to one widely popular sport – ping-pong. Tickets to final events were going for a lot of money – over $100 USD for a fencing final later that night and over $1000 for the 100 meter final in men's track.
We had no luck getting reasonably priced tickets from the serious scalpers until two Europeans approached us and said they couldn’t go to an event later that night and had to get rid of a pair tickets to two handball matches. Handball happened to be one of the sports we were most interested in seeing. I met an American guy who was attending his fourth Olympics and he said handball was his favorite sport, so it was near the top of my list. We offered ¥100 for each (about $14) and snapped them up as quickly as possible. They were pleased to sell the tickets to us because we were excited for the chance to see handball and told them we wouldn’t resell them.
Not long after, a Danish guy and then a German woman who were looking to buy handball tickets to watch their home countries play offered us several times the price we paid for them, but we turned them down. We still needed a third ticket and almost bought one from another Dane who offered us one for ¥400 but we decided to try our luck closer to the handball venue. On our way there we found a Chinese guy who had two tickets and was asking ¥300 for each; we got him to sell us one for ¥200. Our Chinese friend had low hopes of attending an event because prices were outrageous for so many events. She balked at the handball tickets because ¥100 means a lot more to her than it does to me, but my roommate and I didn’t want her to go home alone and miss out so we bought the third ticket for her. It was well worth it because she was ecstatic and came close to tears.
Handball turned out to be even better than we expected (pictures here). We saw two back-and-forth games full of action and high-flying goals. It was a really small arena packed with fans from the four countries playing that night. We knew nothing about handball and it was the first time any of us ever watched a full game. In the first game Denmark played South Korea. Denmark is one of the gold-medal favorites so we assumed they’d win.
The two teams had very different playing styles. The Danes were big and had some extremely powerful shooters and passed a lot. The Koreans were smaller and didn’t pass nearly as much, but they were faster and pulled off some highly coordinated attacks. They made a few tricky goals by leaping at the goalie and drawing him out with a fake throw only to softly float the ball over his head. They also scored the best goal of the night. It was like an alley-oop – one player passed the ball from one side of the goal arc to the far side (except for the goalie, no player from both teams can enter the goal arc until the ball first enters that area) with a hard bounce pass. A teammate on the opposite side anticipated the pass and leapt into the arc, caught the ball as it bounced up and turned and threw it in the goal before his feet touched the ground. Denmark was up more often than not, though never by more than three points. It was extremely close throughout the second half and Korea scored a goal in the last ten seconds to win 31-30.
Germany and Iceland played in the second match and we all thought that Germany looked like the better team. It was close in the first half but the Germans fell apart and they couldn’t stop a couple Icelanders who had flawless games and seemed to score at ease. We were surprised once again as the Iceland team won the second game.
It was a really cool atmosphere; the arena was very intimate – no more than 6,000 seats – and loud because of the rabid fans from each of the four countries. A few members of the Chinese men’s handball team sat a few rows ahead of us during the first game and a dozen or so Danish and Korean players sat in front of us to watch the second game. Some Danish fans near us knew a bunch of the players personally. And the games were non-stop action and fun to watch. There was lots of passing like in soccer, lots of scoring like in basketball (though only by single points), and it was very physical. The rules seemed to allow for a lot more contact than basketball does, but when a foul was called (using yellow or red cards), a player was given a 7 meter penalty shot. Those were cool to watch because the player would stand on a line and do several fake throws to get the goalie to jump before falling forward and whipping the ball towards the goal. I don’t think the U.S. has a team and it’s unfortunate that the sport is not more popular in the States because I wish I had more chances to watch and play the sport.
Like everyone else, I have watched a number of past Olympics on television, however, I’ve never given much thought to what it is like to see one in person and I never thought I’d have the chance to do just that so soon. It has turned out to be much cooler than I expected. There are so many visitors from around the world, which is a novelty after living here for almost a year and having very limited contact with foreigners. It makes me appreciate the multiethnic qualities of large American cities because it’s not usually that way here and all Chinese all the time gets old (I'd say the same for small town America). By the way, demographers project that the U.S. will no longer have a majority ethnic group in about 35 years.
There is a lot going on, from country-specific events sponsored by the embassies and various other groups, big corporate events like the Coca-Cola one where I saw the opening ceremony, and all the media (I’ve never seen more cameras before), and athletes (I've seen buses full of athletes and cyclists riding the streets around the Olympic village). And you get to attend events and watch sports that you’d never think of watching in person, not to mention see those sports played at the highest level by the world’s best athletes. Over 16 extraordinary days you are in the middle of history in the making (if only I could go to a swimming or track event and witness a world record-breaking performance), and the whole time people around the world are watching intently.
If you have any interest, make plans for London 2012 soon!
You can see my pictures here.
I went with an American student I met through Chinese classes and initially we couldn’t believe we were at an Olympic event. We sat in the 11th row and later moved down the 6th row while watching a total of five matches. There was a sixth, but five hours of volleyball was enough. An American pair played in the first match, beating a team from the Netherlands. It was the first of three women’s matches, followed by matches between Germany and Cuba and then Brazil and Georgia. The two Georgian players are originally from Brazil and later this week they played a team from Russia.
The first men’s match was an American team versus a Latvian team. The two Americans were ranked second in the world and were a seemingly perfect pair – a shorter guy with years of experience and outstanding defensive skills, and a younger guy who is 6’9” and was a dominating blocker and attacker. The two Latvian guys were young, both 23 years old, and were very similar players, both with good all-around skills. The Americans started off strong but showed lackluster play through much of the match while the Latvians were always tenacious and energetic. It was a thrilling match and the Latvians were able to pull off an upset. We were more happy to see a thrilling game and see such spirited play from the Latvian team that we didn’t care that the Americans lost. In the next game a Swiss pair beat two experienced players from Argentina, including one who is the only player to compete in beach volleyball at all four Olympic Games that have included the sport.
On Tuesday afternoon I went to the subway station near the Water Cube and Bird’s Nest with my roommate and a Chinese friend. This spot has become the unofficial gathering point for ticket scalpers and we wanted to see what was available. There were really expensive tickets for popular events like basketball, soccer, and diving. It was impossible to find tickets to one widely popular sport – ping-pong. Tickets to final events were going for a lot of money – over $100 USD for a fencing final later that night and over $1000 for the 100 meter final in men's track.
We had no luck getting reasonably priced tickets from the serious scalpers until two Europeans approached us and said they couldn’t go to an event later that night and had to get rid of a pair tickets to two handball matches. Handball happened to be one of the sports we were most interested in seeing. I met an American guy who was attending his fourth Olympics and he said handball was his favorite sport, so it was near the top of my list. We offered ¥100 for each (about $14) and snapped them up as quickly as possible. They were pleased to sell the tickets to us because we were excited for the chance to see handball and told them we wouldn’t resell them.
Not long after, a Danish guy and then a German woman who were looking to buy handball tickets to watch their home countries play offered us several times the price we paid for them, but we turned them down. We still needed a third ticket and almost bought one from another Dane who offered us one for ¥400 but we decided to try our luck closer to the handball venue. On our way there we found a Chinese guy who had two tickets and was asking ¥300 for each; we got him to sell us one for ¥200. Our Chinese friend had low hopes of attending an event because prices were outrageous for so many events. She balked at the handball tickets because ¥100 means a lot more to her than it does to me, but my roommate and I didn’t want her to go home alone and miss out so we bought the third ticket for her. It was well worth it because she was ecstatic and came close to tears.
Handball turned out to be even better than we expected (pictures here). We saw two back-and-forth games full of action and high-flying goals. It was a really small arena packed with fans from the four countries playing that night. We knew nothing about handball and it was the first time any of us ever watched a full game. In the first game Denmark played South Korea. Denmark is one of the gold-medal favorites so we assumed they’d win.
The two teams had very different playing styles. The Danes were big and had some extremely powerful shooters and passed a lot. The Koreans were smaller and didn’t pass nearly as much, but they were faster and pulled off some highly coordinated attacks. They made a few tricky goals by leaping at the goalie and drawing him out with a fake throw only to softly float the ball over his head. They also scored the best goal of the night. It was like an alley-oop – one player passed the ball from one side of the goal arc to the far side (except for the goalie, no player from both teams can enter the goal arc until the ball first enters that area) with a hard bounce pass. A teammate on the opposite side anticipated the pass and leapt into the arc, caught the ball as it bounced up and turned and threw it in the goal before his feet touched the ground. Denmark was up more often than not, though never by more than three points. It was extremely close throughout the second half and Korea scored a goal in the last ten seconds to win 31-30.
Germany and Iceland played in the second match and we all thought that Germany looked like the better team. It was close in the first half but the Germans fell apart and they couldn’t stop a couple Icelanders who had flawless games and seemed to score at ease. We were surprised once again as the Iceland team won the second game.
It was a really cool atmosphere; the arena was very intimate – no more than 6,000 seats – and loud because of the rabid fans from each of the four countries. A few members of the Chinese men’s handball team sat a few rows ahead of us during the first game and a dozen or so Danish and Korean players sat in front of us to watch the second game. Some Danish fans near us knew a bunch of the players personally. And the games were non-stop action and fun to watch. There was lots of passing like in soccer, lots of scoring like in basketball (though only by single points), and it was very physical. The rules seemed to allow for a lot more contact than basketball does, but when a foul was called (using yellow or red cards), a player was given a 7 meter penalty shot. Those were cool to watch because the player would stand on a line and do several fake throws to get the goalie to jump before falling forward and whipping the ball towards the goal. I don’t think the U.S. has a team and it’s unfortunate that the sport is not more popular in the States because I wish I had more chances to watch and play the sport.
Like everyone else, I have watched a number of past Olympics on television, however, I’ve never given much thought to what it is like to see one in person and I never thought I’d have the chance to do just that so soon. It has turned out to be much cooler than I expected. There are so many visitors from around the world, which is a novelty after living here for almost a year and having very limited contact with foreigners. It makes me appreciate the multiethnic qualities of large American cities because it’s not usually that way here and all Chinese all the time gets old (I'd say the same for small town America). By the way, demographers project that the U.S. will no longer have a majority ethnic group in about 35 years.
There is a lot going on, from country-specific events sponsored by the embassies and various other groups, big corporate events like the Coca-Cola one where I saw the opening ceremony, and all the media (I’ve never seen more cameras before), and athletes (I've seen buses full of athletes and cyclists riding the streets around the Olympic village). And you get to attend events and watch sports that you’d never think of watching in person, not to mention see those sports played at the highest level by the world’s best athletes. Over 16 extraordinary days you are in the middle of history in the making (if only I could go to a swimming or track event and witness a world record-breaking performance), and the whole time people around the world are watching intently.
If you have any interest, make plans for London 2012 soon!
Sunday, August 10, 2008
8/8/08
Most people had the day off on Friday but I had class in the morning and one hour tutoring English in the afternoon. A few people left right after class at noon to go by the Bird’s Nest. I went over there in a taxi with two other students at 4 pm. The traffic on the main road slowed and then came to a standstill about a mile west of the stadium. We got out and walked until we reached a human barricade – the security guards were only letting people with tickets and passes through.
We wandered the streets around the area and picked up Chinese flags and stickers from the locals who were out in force. It was extremly crowded and crawling with security and there were lots of dead ends. People had bags of food, cameras, and folding chairs, making it feel like the Fourth of July. There were no good places to watch on a video screen, and since we wanted to see the live video feed much more than the fireworks, we took off and went to another part of the city.
We met up with a group of students outside of a rundown sports bar – someone didn’t know that it was closed – so we stood around trying to figure out where to go. It was hard to decide with such a big group and someone with a bike went around to check public places that had big outdoor screens, but one place turned out to not have any screen and another place did but the video feed was not working. It was two hours until the ceremony began.
We all went to an outdoor mall that has a huge screen over a pedestrian street. It was a great spot but the mall was taken up by a huge Coca-Cola sponsored event and tickets were required. A group of American girls were there with red, white, and blue face paint and big 2008 sunglasses. They painted “USA” on our cheeks and we attracted a lot of attention. After posing for some pictures, a woman came up to us and asked us if she could take video of us for the NBC station in Atlanta. We said yes, of course, and before we knew it someone pointed a camera at us and she did a 30 second take asking us where we were from and typical and obvious questions like “are we having fun!?” A newscaster from NBC in Minneapolis (this guy) also shot a quick video with us. One of the girls, a Minnesota resident, recognized him from the local news, so he asked her to say hi to her family at home.
All that media attracted even more attention from onlookers and we still didn’t have tickets to get in so we slipped into the mall to get away from everyone, grab a bite to eat, and figure out what to do about being ticketless. The advanced tickets were sold out and there didn’t seem to be any other way in, so we asked whoever looked like a staff person for help and started begging. At first we had no luck, but somehow one woman surrendered to our pleas and came back with a crumpled stack of tickets and a warning not to tell anyone. We couldn’t believe it worked and we got in.
The Coca-Cola event was called the “Shuang Experience” (shuang means refreshment) and was basically one big advertisement around the Olympics. It was like we were in a Coke commercial.
There was some dancing and music and lots of Coke ads running everywhere you turned. At 8 o’clock the two big video screens switched to the national broadcast of the opening ceremony. The minutes leading up to start of the ceremony were extremely tense. I’d been waiting months for the Olympics to start, and the country had been waiting over fifteen years for this moment (Beijing led every round of voting for the 2000 Olympics, only to lose the bid to Sydney by 2 votes in a final round that later turned out to influenced by some unethical practices).
During the hour or so of performances, I was approached by two different Chinese TV stations for interviews on camera, once by a reporter and her interpreter from a Beijing daily paper, and once by someone with a camera but no TV affiliation. I’ve never been interviewed or shot on video like that before in my life and then it happened multiple times in one night. I was not the only one interviewed, dozens of people were, but for some reason I was picked out more frequently than the foreigners I was standing with. I didn’t dare move from where I stood because it seemed to be the lucky spot.
When ceremony was was all over and the torch was finally lit, a full four hours, we left for a bar street and had to walk quite a ways to get there because the streets were empty and the few taxis around were quickly nabbed by the huge crowd spilling out of the Coke place.
It was a huge party in the streets with tons of tourists, national flags, and drunken cheers. It was quite an experience and the night didn’t end until 5 a.m., just as dawn was breaking.
Pictures are up here.
Go Team USA!
We wandered the streets around the area and picked up Chinese flags and stickers from the locals who were out in force. It was extremly crowded and crawling with security and there were lots of dead ends. People had bags of food, cameras, and folding chairs, making it feel like the Fourth of July. There were no good places to watch on a video screen, and since we wanted to see the live video feed much more than the fireworks, we took off and went to another part of the city.
We met up with a group of students outside of a rundown sports bar – someone didn’t know that it was closed – so we stood around trying to figure out where to go. It was hard to decide with such a big group and someone with a bike went around to check public places that had big outdoor screens, but one place turned out to not have any screen and another place did but the video feed was not working. It was two hours until the ceremony began.
We all went to an outdoor mall that has a huge screen over a pedestrian street. It was a great spot but the mall was taken up by a huge Coca-Cola sponsored event and tickets were required. A group of American girls were there with red, white, and blue face paint and big 2008 sunglasses. They painted “USA” on our cheeks and we attracted a lot of attention. After posing for some pictures, a woman came up to us and asked us if she could take video of us for the NBC station in Atlanta. We said yes, of course, and before we knew it someone pointed a camera at us and she did a 30 second take asking us where we were from and typical and obvious questions like “are we having fun!?” A newscaster from NBC in Minneapolis (this guy) also shot a quick video with us. One of the girls, a Minnesota resident, recognized him from the local news, so he asked her to say hi to her family at home.
All that media attracted even more attention from onlookers and we still didn’t have tickets to get in so we slipped into the mall to get away from everyone, grab a bite to eat, and figure out what to do about being ticketless. The advanced tickets were sold out and there didn’t seem to be any other way in, so we asked whoever looked like a staff person for help and started begging. At first we had no luck, but somehow one woman surrendered to our pleas and came back with a crumpled stack of tickets and a warning not to tell anyone. We couldn’t believe it worked and we got in.
The Coca-Cola event was called the “Shuang Experience” (shuang means refreshment) and was basically one big advertisement around the Olympics. It was like we were in a Coke commercial.
There was some dancing and music and lots of Coke ads running everywhere you turned. At 8 o’clock the two big video screens switched to the national broadcast of the opening ceremony. The minutes leading up to start of the ceremony were extremely tense. I’d been waiting months for the Olympics to start, and the country had been waiting over fifteen years for this moment (Beijing led every round of voting for the 2000 Olympics, only to lose the bid to Sydney by 2 votes in a final round that later turned out to influenced by some unethical practices).
During the hour or so of performances, I was approached by two different Chinese TV stations for interviews on camera, once by a reporter and her interpreter from a Beijing daily paper, and once by someone with a camera but no TV affiliation. I’ve never been interviewed or shot on video like that before in my life and then it happened multiple times in one night. I was not the only one interviewed, dozens of people were, but for some reason I was picked out more frequently than the foreigners I was standing with. I didn’t dare move from where I stood because it seemed to be the lucky spot.
When ceremony was was all over and the torch was finally lit, a full four hours, we left for a bar street and had to walk quite a ways to get there because the streets were empty and the few taxis around were quickly nabbed by the huge crowd spilling out of the Coke place.
It was a huge party in the streets with tons of tourists, national flags, and drunken cheers. It was quite an experience and the night didn’t end until 5 a.m., just as dawn was breaking.
Pictures are up here.
Go Team USA!
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Pre-Olympics reading
Serving dog meat at restaurants and other practices that may offend western tastes are tightly regulated.
Transportation and entertainment is highly restricted and regulated because of security concerns.
I am starting to believe that the high level of security – the police and volunteer security people on every block, the cars that are searched upon entering the hotel near my apartment, ID checks, etc. – are not intended to stamp out terrorists, but rather to stop activists. Any disruptive protest or public criticism of the government would put them in a tough spot.
The government is attempting to manage every little detail to make sure that the Games go of without a hitch, even the weather. And, yes, there is rain in the forecast for Friday evening.
The sports and Olympic training system in China is widely different from that in the United States.
The New Yorker published a thorough discussion of Chinese nationalism and online activism. Several conservative young Chinese are profiled and they express many of their concerns for the rapid changes in Chinese society and the loss of traditional values.
Finally, some insight on what the Olympics mean for China and how it can bring the country closer to the world.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Eventful weekend
I packed in a lot of things because it’s the last non-Olympics weekend until the end of August. In some ways, it’s already not so normal; the Olympic Green is buzzing with activity and there is a noticeably higher number of visitors now.
On Friday evening, after a double session of tutoring, I went for a run down the street just north of my apartment complex and got to the Olympic Green in about 20 minutes. I took a much longer route the first time I ran there, not realizing that the street nearby runs at an angle directly to the Olympic media center, stadium, and Water Cube.
A lot more signs, fences, and barricades are up, not to mention hundreds of volunteers and some photographers and media trucks.
On Saturday morning I went to a dam in a steep river gorge near the Great Wall. Along with three other students, we rented a van and a driver for the day and drove out there on the cycling road race course. It is a really cool drive towards the mountains north of the city. We went by the Olympic Village and then up a winding highway towards the Great Wall. For whatever reason, our driver took the service road that runs along side the four-lane expressway. The road was lined with signs for the cycling race, workers were filing down the speed strips at each sharp corner, and the finish line was already up. It’s a great road for a race and the finish is at the top of a long and winding uphill.
At the Longqing Dam we took an escalator to get up and over the dam. It’s the largest dam in northern China and the only really big dam I’ve ever seen. Above the dam we hopped on a boat with a bunch of umbrella-wielding tourists and went on a slow ride that wound back and forth around steep mountain peaks. The water in the reservoir was a bright aquamarine and the sky was a deep blue color. It was beautiful.
And then all of us went bungee jumping, which was the highlight of the day. There was a long and narrow platform that extended from rock cliff out over the river and two bungee ropes and a motorboat that picked jumpers up once they stopped bouncing and ferried them back to tour boat dock.
We hiked some and then took a boat back to the dam, got back in the dam, and stopped at a place near the Badaling Great Wall, which is where Andy and I hiked around in March, took some pictures, drove further down the mountain, and then took more pictures near a section of the wall that was closed.
That night I meet a university student from Changzhou who was in town and took him and his friend to a cheap food court with tons of typical Beijing foods. It was a place that a local took me to once and I wanted to go back to try more of the local food.
On Sunday I spent five hours at the new Capital Museum, including one hour waiting in line. It was a Sunday and the museum had some new exhibits, so it was expectedly crowded, but this was extremely crowded, even by Beijing standards. When I finally got into the first exhibit, I couldn’t help but laugh because all I could see were clusters of people swarming displays and madly snapping pictures. I didn’t see much of anything in the first exhibit because they were obscured by too many heads and cameras. It wasn’t nearly as bad in other parts of the museum and I was able to see nearly all of it in four hours, including ancient Chinese painting, pottery, jewelry, calligraphy, a computer animated video of the history of the city, an exhibit on the ancient Greek Olympics, and a break eating a delicious buffet lunch.
I biked back to the Olympic Green Sunday night, which was even more crowded than it was on Friday, before finally getting down to studying later that night.
[UPDATE] more pictures are online.
On Friday evening, after a double session of tutoring, I went for a run down the street just north of my apartment complex and got to the Olympic Green in about 20 minutes. I took a much longer route the first time I ran there, not realizing that the street nearby runs at an angle directly to the Olympic media center, stadium, and Water Cube.
A lot more signs, fences, and barricades are up, not to mention hundreds of volunteers and some photographers and media trucks.
On Saturday morning I went to a dam in a steep river gorge near the Great Wall. Along with three other students, we rented a van and a driver for the day and drove out there on the cycling road race course. It is a really cool drive towards the mountains north of the city. We went by the Olympic Village and then up a winding highway towards the Great Wall. For whatever reason, our driver took the service road that runs along side the four-lane expressway. The road was lined with signs for the cycling race, workers were filing down the speed strips at each sharp corner, and the finish line was already up. It’s a great road for a race and the finish is at the top of a long and winding uphill.
At the Longqing Dam we took an escalator to get up and over the dam. It’s the largest dam in northern China and the only really big dam I’ve ever seen. Above the dam we hopped on a boat with a bunch of umbrella-wielding tourists and went on a slow ride that wound back and forth around steep mountain peaks. The water in the reservoir was a bright aquamarine and the sky was a deep blue color. It was beautiful.
And then all of us went bungee jumping, which was the highlight of the day. There was a long and narrow platform that extended from rock cliff out over the river and two bungee ropes and a motorboat that picked jumpers up once they stopped bouncing and ferried them back to tour boat dock.
We hiked some and then took a boat back to the dam, got back in the dam, and stopped at a place near the Badaling Great Wall, which is where Andy and I hiked around in March, took some pictures, drove further down the mountain, and then took more pictures near a section of the wall that was closed.
That night I meet a university student from Changzhou who was in town and took him and his friend to a cheap food court with tons of typical Beijing foods. It was a place that a local took me to once and I wanted to go back to try more of the local food.
On Sunday I spent five hours at the new Capital Museum, including one hour waiting in line. It was a Sunday and the museum had some new exhibits, so it was expectedly crowded, but this was extremely crowded, even by Beijing standards. When I finally got into the first exhibit, I couldn’t help but laugh because all I could see were clusters of people swarming displays and madly snapping pictures. I didn’t see much of anything in the first exhibit because they were obscured by too many heads and cameras. It wasn’t nearly as bad in other parts of the museum and I was able to see nearly all of it in four hours, including ancient Chinese painting, pottery, jewelry, calligraphy, a computer animated video of the history of the city, an exhibit on the ancient Greek Olympics, and a break eating a delicious buffet lunch.
I biked back to the Olympic Green Sunday night, which was even more crowded than it was on Friday, before finally getting down to studying later that night.
[UPDATE] more pictures are online.
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