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!