Olympic Venues

The Chinese certainly spared no expense when it came to creating the various venues for the Olympic events. Here were some of the most interesting of the sites...the bird's nest and the water cube. After the gynamstics events, we watched the Today show crew watch a live interview that NBC had just done with Michael Phelps. Look closely and you can see the teleprompter wording and the camera shot with the water cube in the background.

Olympics - Day 3

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

Our last day at the Olympics took us to Men’s Quarter-final Indoor Volleyball, the two matches that our tickets were good for was Russia/Bulgaria and Italy/Poland.

The lines for all the venues were very smooth & orderly except for this one. We ended up getting in a line that routed us to the side of the venue only to be put in another line that split in two with one security checkpoint which was very long and very slow. We eventually made it through but with only a couple minutes to spare before the match started.

Indoor volleyball is impressive to watch in person as the players are huge and crush the ball mercilessly. Again, we had good seats and lots of Europeans around us that were cheering quite enthusiastically for their teams. We even had a group of Polish fans trying to figure out how to distract the ushers so they could sneak to some better, yet unoccupied seats close to the floor.

We ended up leaving for the airport part way through the two matches to catch an early afternoon flight. Ron needed to fly to Michigan for a two week trip so he wanted to get home to spend a few hours with the kids before he took off the next morning out of Shanghai. The biggest bummer about that was we had to miss the athletic events at the Bird’s Nest that we had tickets for that night.

Overall, we had a fantastic time at the Olympics. The whole experience was made possible (see if you can follow this...) by: my mom’s childhood friend’s, daughter’s, friend’s husband who works for Visa. Thanks so much Wayne for the opportunity!! This will go down in our books as one of our most exciting times in China!

Our flight home was fine & the kids did great while we were away! Mr. He picked us up at the airport with kids. The evening ended with some good ol’ pizza from California Pizza Kitchen!

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.