Olympics- Day 2

More Olympics pictures are now posted at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/krfraser5/2008OlympicsInBeijingChina

Finally back to blogging…sorry for the long time away…here is a long over-due post on Day 2 of the Olympics……

Day 2 was a great day, with lots of sun and warm temperatures, as we started the morning watching Women’s Semi-final Beach Volleyball – US vs. Brazil followed by China vs. China. Ron enjoys watching volleyball, stemming from his day of playing in FL, so watching from, once again, a handful of seats up was amazing!! I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoy watching too!!! Can I say these girls can jump!!! Misty & Kerri won in a great game dominating the Brazilian team. There were many fans from both countries, which was fun to watch. We even joined the flag waving with our own small flag on a stick.

After the volleyball match and lunch, we decided to shop for souvenirs. We figured the venues would have tons of Olympics memorabilia, we found out that that was not the case. We were given two places to shop but went with the recommendation from the hotel staff – the ‘volunteer helpers’ at the Olympics seemed to have no idea what souvenirs were! We took a taxi ride to the strip we were told to go to. After walking quite a bit down the road, we found the shop!! The shop was jammed packed full of people, all wanting a taste of the Olympics. Now why they didn’t have small shops, like this, throughout the venues, I will never know. Shopping was a nightmare (Dave & Ayumi, think Aquarium but worse..) & trying to pay was even better. Paying goes like this in many Chinese stores…you pick out your items, a salesperson in each small area will give you a ticket, when you are done finding all your items you go to a cashier counter (which are always limited in number) & pay (we had about 12 tickets, which have to be paid separately because they represent different vendors – fun doing this when paying with a debit card) & then you have to fight your way back to the vendor (that is if you can remember what you purchased where since all receipts are in Chinese) to pick up your stuff…..whew, just got exhausted remembering the process!! However, we did get some cool souvenirs; however, the variety was not as good as I thought it would be – same stuff we could get here in Shanghai.

The evening took us to Men’s Semi-final Soccer – Brazil vs. Argentina. Our seats were several rows up near the goal line. The match was exciting as the crowd was really into it. Argentina ended up winning! We were seated next to several rows of Brazilian fans that were forced to sit on their hands much of the match. We were routing for Argentina, but it would have been nice to see the Brazilian fans in action.