Men's Handball -- Hanguo Jiayou! (go Korea)

From 08.16.2008

Phase 4 of ticket distribution in China was at the end of last month. Individuals could go to the ticket venues directly in Beijing and buy a certain number of released tickets. Most everything sold out on the first day (a Friday), which was the day I first arrived in Beijing. However, because information is so difficult to get in China I went the following Saturday morning to buy tickets...all that was left was handball. I'd never heard of handball at this point, but since we were there and tickets were available, I went ahead and bought them.

Here's the gymnasium for handball -- it is near the Olympic Park, but in a different area. Again, blue skies. And not humid. Probably some of the best weather I've experienced in China.

Here's the inside of the gym. Handball is a lot like other sports...except you can hold the ball as you run around. You have to occasionally dribble (though I'm not sure what the rules are for this specifically), and you try to throw the ball into the goal.

Our first game was China v. Brazil. China lost by a pretty solid margin. Handball is actually a lot of fun to watch, and some of the players are very skillful. There is an area around the goal where you are not allowed to stand, so players will jump in and then throw the ball mid-air into the goal.


Our second game was Korea vs Egypt, which turned out to be a lot of fun. The Korean fans are very loud and excitable so we decided to join them in their cheers -- goo Korea, Hanguo Jiayou!

Egypt was winning for quite some time, but towards the end the Koreans were able to turn this around quite quickly.


You can see that we were able to get much closer...most of the time you can move up front because t

Opening Night for Athletics (Track & Field)

From 08.15.2008

Athletics began Friday morning (with the 50km walk...lol...how is this an actual race!?) in the bird's nest stadium. I attended the games in the evening. It was so exciting to finally go inside -- also the entire park is so beautiful at night!

View from underneath...
Water cube from the upper level of the bird's nest.

This should give you a good idea of just how large the stadium is! I believe it holds 93,000 people, which is a number I can't even begin to comprehend. The entire place was packed, and the crowd was very loud/excited. You can actually hear the crowd from quite far away (even for the morning events)!





These are little cars that are driven back and forth to return the discus.

The start of the 100m race. Even though he wasn't trying at this point (since it was only a prelim), I did get to see Usain Bolt (the gold medal winner and WR holder) run.

This is steeple chasing...quite possibly the most ridiculous race I have ever seen. They run around...jumping over giant hurdles...and then climb atop one slightly larger hurdle and into a puddle of water. what!?! why!?

We saw the finals for men's shotput. The US came a bit short, and managed to get the silver medal.

We also saw the finals for the women's 10,000m run. This was a very long race...at first it seemed slightly boring...but it was very exciting toward the end. The woman who won was only the second ever to run the race in under half an hour. They are able to run the final 400m so quickly even after 24 laps!


The Olympic Torch!



Here are some more night views of the park...


You can actually see the tall building on the left hand side of this photo from our dorm building. Yes. That is how close we are to all of the excitement! Some of the basketball teams actually practice at the BLCU (our school) gym. BeiDa (Peking/Beijing University) actually hosts the ping pong matches in their gym (this is where I will be in the Fall).

Women's All Around Gymnastics Finals

From 08.15.2008

Friday was very exciting...two Olympic events in one day! My first was the women's all around gymnastics final. I was incredibly lucky to get a ticket to this event as it is highly in demand. My seat was also A-level, giving me an amazing view.

I thought this UPS truck was cute...it has the fuwa characters, which are the Olympic mascots.

Here's the venue. It's also in the Olympic Park, right next to the Water Cube and Bird's Nest.


Finally inside! It's definitely a little overwhelming to watch gymnastics because at any given point in time there are four different events...the parallel bars, floor exercises, balance beam, vault.

Here are the athletes...waiting to start their routines...





It was an incredibly exciting to watch the events play out. It ended up being a competition for the gold between two Americans and one Chinese girl. The Chinese have performed incredibly well during this Olympics...this one was right down to the very end...but in the end we won both the gold and silver!

For once it was also nice to go to an event where basically all of the seats were taken. It's been so frustrating seeing so many empty seats, knowing that tickets are being sold at such inflated prices right outside.

The awards ceremony...it was so great to be there, hearing the American anthem being played in the gym.



And look! Nice weather. It's very strange to see blue skies in Beijing. It's too bad that it will likely all go away as soon as the Olympics end. The factories will open up again, and cars will be free to roam the streets...I'll have to enjoy it while I can.

Swimming Prelims (8/13)

From Wednesday (8/14/2008)

Today is my one day off from Olympic craziness...jin tian wo ying gai xue xi hanyu! Events scheduled for tomorrow (8/15), Saturday (8/16), Monday (8/18), Saturday (8/23)...and I plan on going out every other day to see what else I can get my hands on.

Yesterday I spent another three hours outside of the Olympic Park again...incredibly frustrating, as usual.

Somehow my first roommate (this boy has some ridiculous luck when it comes to Olympics tickets) managed to get into the women's gymnastics team FINALS for only 150rmb (~$20). SO LUCKY. He also was able to buy two tickets to swimming prelims in the evening for 600rmb (~$90).

I had really wanted to see swimming or gymnastics so I was upset to find myself spending a second day with no luck. Thankfully...I actually did end up getting pretty lucky. One of the many hundreds of people I asked were buying tickets themselves from a friend. Their friend had two gymnastics tickets for Friday, so I bought them both from 650rmb (face value). I didn't realize it at the time...but I had just purchased gymnastics women's individual finals.

Anyway I wasn't really sure what they were, and I wanted to try to go to some events for free so I sold my ticket at the semi-inflated price of 1500rmb (~$220). This allowed my first roommate and me to see swimming at night for free, and for me to watch gymnastics on Friday for free (and make a tiny bit of profit making next week's water polo and this Saturday's handball also free).

It's actually ridiculous for me to think that I could've probably sold that ticket for WAY more than 1500rmb. But since I was able to buy it at face, and I hate all the scalpers who are selling it for way more I didn't want to completely screw someone else over.

So we went home...and then went back to the Park again in the evening to watch swimming...for once, we left to go to the stadium with only half an hour before starting time...what a nice change! It's SO nice to go to the stadium without having to worry about buying tickets beforehand!

I had an amazing view...despite the fact that it was a level C ticket. I ended up being on the side with all the camera men and official Olympic staff and since many of them were not there...I was able to move up to the center and very front row!

This is the view from underneath the diving board (the same as synchro diving).



My very clear view of all the action. Here's one of the starting heats. Since it was evening, it was basically all heats/preliminary races. Somewhere amongst all these swimmers are the winners of the gold, silver and bronze medals!

You can see that this time the stadium is mostly full, which is good.

This is my current roommate's (in the BLCU dorms) friend breaking the Olympic Record in her trials for the 200m women's breast stroke. Hopefully she will get gold on Friday. (Note: she did and she broke the world record!!)

And then...Michael Phelps!


You can see him in the middle with the white cap...he didn't try very hard because it wasn't even a semi-final, but it was still very cool to see. This was for the 200m individual medley.

And yet another record being broken! This time the French broke the Olympic Record for the women's 4x200m free style. It's too bad though that in the finals they didn't even place. How frustrating must it be to leave the Olympics with a record (the medalists didn't break the French record this morning)...but to have no medal!

Taking photos of the people taking photos...





Here's a side shot of the water cube at night. It is absolutely phenomenal. SO BEAUTIFUL. The lights on the cube keep changing, and the entire Olympic Park has lights everywhere.

The bird's nest. I cannot wait until we get to see track at night on the inside!! It has got to be absolutely amazing.

Not every day is a successful day...

From Tuesday (8/12/2008)

So up until this point we'd been incredibly spoiled...

On Sunday one of my roommates managed to get three free entries into different events for women's team gymnastics. On Monday my other roommate and I were able to watch men's synchro diving finals and field hockey for free, and then also buy water polo and track at a little over face (original) value.

Tuesday was not so great...although my first roommate (again with the good luck!) managed to get into swimming in the morning morning at face value (300rmb), and see Michael Phelps get gold...I spent nearly three hours outside and got nothing! =(

The way things work...
Ticket sales are absolutely ridiculous and unfair. The Olympics are supposedly "sold out," but every single event has plenty of empty seats! Parents of Olympians are even having a hard time getting in, and it's frustrating to see so many spots go to waste. Most of the tickets have gone to scalpers, who are usually Westerners who have managed to buy the tickets out of some personal connection. Either directly through the International Olympic Committee, or through sponsors, or other political means...

Basically what this means is that these scalpers will have thousands (I met one guy who told me the people he works for had 30,000!) of tickets. They are then sold at insanely inflated prices. A 50rmb ticket will go for thousands of rmb. The price mark up is ridiculously, and completely unafforable for many people.

Now, I would be okay with all of this markup if they had waited in line like the rest of us. Even if they had paid for cheap labor to wait in lines for them, that would still be okay. But these are people getting tickets in ways/manners that are not available to the rest of us. This is not at all fair in my opinion.

I personally hate the scalpers. They hold on to tickets for SO long...even after an event has started. They make so much profit on each ticket that they are actually willing to let tickets go to waste. Tickets are thrown away on a daily basis because they have more than they can sell. This seems completely selfish, and not at all in the Olympic spirit.

Anyway...what we have basically been doing is going out front of the venues every single day a couple hours before events and asking every foreigner if they have spare tickets. The goal is to get to some nice people before the scalpers do, and either buy the ticket at (or close to) face value or receive it for free. This is not easy...we have literally spent hours asking hundreds of people, but in the moment of success it is finally all worth it.

Getting tickets is basically a full time job! We go to class, go to the venue, and hope we get tickets to see something...it's been a group effort though and between us we have all managed to be fairly successful.

A couple other photos...

I have seen no smiling police.

Men's Field Hockey Prelims (x2)

To end our very exciting first day of Olympic games...we headed up to the field hockey stadiums. Each ticket comes with two games, so we saw Korea v. New Zealand and Spain v. Belgium. I'd never seen field hockey, but it was still very exciting to watch. We were in the front row with some amazing seats, making it all the more fun!


Our luck on this day had truly been ridiculous. We were also able to buy one water polo and one track ticket for a very cheap price after the games finished. Yay Olympics!


Being so close to all the action makes it far more exciting. These guys are incredibly adept at using their sticks. At one point...one of the Koreans through the ball across the field with his stick, and another managed to catch it!

This is a view of a side penalty hit...very exciting. The guys watching the goal put on gloves and face masks so they don't get hit in the face.


This is the Belgium team practicing/warming up before their game. They did a lot of tricks so it was fun to watch.

And here are the Fuwa Characters running around the stadium for audience enjoyment. One of the workers (I think HuanHuan) took off the head so that someone could pose with it! Mascots aren't allowed to do that!?

Each country has the national anthem played before the game. This was only a preliminary match, so there wasn't the added excitement of having a medal at stake.

Judge Grime...

Some fun action shots:

Inside the Olympic Park

To continue our adventures from Monday afternoon, after watching men's synchro diving we decided to take advantage of the fact that we were inside the Olympic Park and walk around a bit before our field hockey games further north.

Here's the bird's nest! We get to watch track finals here. =) (and hopefully more stuff...but we'll see how the ticket purchasing luck continues) The entire park is much more beautiful at night, but I'll have to post those photos on a later date.

Another short of the water cube...

I'm not really sure what this building is...but it has two massive screens on the side, which I think is pretty cool.


These two buildings are outside the Olympic Park. One is the natatorium, where I will be watching water polo next week.

You can see the weather here is really great. The smog just doesn't seem to let up. There was one day that was a bit better, but the pollution came back again.

I'm pretty sure this is gymnastics. I get to watch the women's individual finals here on Friday!

I found these two statues in the park to be highly amusing. Massive PDA.


Fencing...and maybe something else is here.

And of course...the Olympic Torch.



They did a really good job with the entire park. There are even water fountains with drinkable water, which in China...is a rare rare rare sight. I don't believe I've seen drinkable tap water the entire time I've been here. It's too bad that the organization behind ticket sales has been so incredibly inefficient, and that so few people actually get to enjoy it at a reasonable rate.

Check out this article: Fan Frustration Grows Over Ticket Issues

Inside the Water Cube: Men's 10m Synchronized Diving Finals

Ticket distribution in China is currently an absolute mess...many of the events have empty seats, but people cannot find a way to buy tickets through the proper vendors at face value.  The only real alternative is to go to the venues themselves and try to buy tickets from people on the street.  These are people usually with spares, or people who are in the business of selling tickets at greatly inflated prices.

On Sunday, one of my roommates had some amazing luck and managed to see three artistic gymnastics events for free by asking people for spares!  Of course my other roommate and I wanted to experience the games too...so we went after Chiniese class on Monday.

The security is very strict, so unless you have a ticket to the games you cannot get into the Olympic Park.  This is my sad view from across the parking lot.  You can see the Water Cube and Bird's Nest, but only just barely.

And so...we split up and began asking people if they had any spares they were willing to sell for a reasonable price.  Many of these tickets are on sale for hundreds (sometimes even more) of US dollars.  When the face value is usually always less than US$100, someone is making an enormous profit.

After a while, I hit my first bit of a success.  I couldn't get tickets to anything inside the Olympic Park, but some nice people gave me their spare field hockey ticket for later that night for free.

And then...I struck gold.  A man had synchronized diving tickets and was willing to sell them to me for face value!  I bought three B-seat tickets at 300RMB each (a little under US$45) for a total of 900RMB.  I then immediately sold that third spare for 900RMB, making our two remaining tickets free!!  We ran inside...and made it on time into the Water Cube.

So exciting!  So beautiful!

Here you can see the athletes lined up before they are about to begin their dives.

Some Fuwa Character dancing to get everyone prepared...haha, these characters looks so creepy to me.

I think these are the Russians...they were in second until the very last (6 total) dive, when they were overtaken by the Germans.

Watching synchro diving was really incredible!  Some of them (especially the Chinese) are so spot-on, like a mirror.  We had no idea what was considered a good dive, but it was still fun to guess the scores and then see what the judges actually gave.


Huge crowd...but somehow there were still odd empty seats!  I have no idea how this happens, sounds like a terrible distribution system.  Especially since these tickets were so hugely in demand.

Zhong guo jia you!

So sad...UK came in last, and the US didn't do much better either.

You can see the Chinese celebrating their win.  They were amazing.  They clearly deserved their medal -- it wasn't even a competition!  The awards ceremony is right after the event, which is also pretty fun to watch.

We walked around after the event to get a different view from the inside.



And here's the outside.  You can see the water running on the outside.  It also looks amazing at night, but we decided to leave so we could catch our field hockey game about 15 minutes north of the park.  Will definitely have to get a closer look this or next week when we watch another game...

Aoyunhui Kaishi!

08.08.2008 08:00 pm

Welcome to the start of the greatly anticipated 2008 Beijing Olympics!

After seven years of anticipation...finally the opening ceremony.

As students who only recently decided to study in Beijing, we obviously did not have tickets to the opening ceremony.  Nonetheless we still wanted to experience Beijing's excitement.  Although we originally wanted to head to the Bird's Nest and watch from the big screens, we found out -- to our disappointment! -- that you ALSO need tickets to see from the outside!

Instead we went to Wangfujing Street, Beijing's famous walking street.

People came gathered early to get a good view of the opening.  By the start of the ceremony, there were thousands of people crowding the streets to get a good glimpse of the big screen.  Strangely enough, in such a central area...there was no sound on the TV!  Eventually the sound was turned on a little bit, but unless you were listening carefully it was barely audible.

Meiguo Jiayou!

After a good deal of waiting around and walking about...we were in the crowd and the countdown began...

WU...SI...SAN...ER...YI...!!

Also despite what everyone is saying (even in news articles I've read), it started at 8PM, not 8:08PM.  Of course everyone was cheering and celebrating when the moment finally came!  It felt a little like New Year's Eve, especially with the countdown.

The opening ceremony was really amazing.  China did a fantastic job.  I've heard that 100,000 people performed!  Clearly a resource China can provide...

The fireworks looked absolutely amazing.  We were only able to see the fireworks duing one portion when they went thorugh the streets of China and passed us by on Wangfujing Street.

To my greatest surprise...shortly into the show...I heard massive chanting of a different sort.  Not "Zhongguo Jiayou!" (go China!), but "Zuo xia! Zuo xia!" over and over again...  "Sit down, sit down..."  Who sits down at a public celebration/sporting event like this!?!?!

The crowd was ridiculously aggressive/loud about this issue.  We ended up having to sit down.  Imagine thousands of people squished together standing.  Now try to have them all sit down...there was physically not enough space...not at all comfortable...


That didn't last too long thankfully -- people were standing up soon enough and gradually more and more people did as well.

The ceremony lasted over four hours!  A great deal of standing around.

Some things I found noteworthy:
1) I was the only person that I could hear cheering for Japan (I stopped that after about two seconds when everyone stared and glared).  This was immediately followed by booing.  When the crowd saw the Japanese athletes holding Japanese AND Chinese flags they started yelling "Zhongguo Jiayou, Zhongguo Jiayou."  The chanting/yelling was not this loud again until China came out...
2) The booing with South Korea was FAR worse than with Japan (to my great surprise).  Apparently this was because one TV station posted a video of the Opening Ceremony practicing.  They were clearly very angry.
3) Lots of loud cheering for the world's most random countries.  Usually maybe one person from that country would cheer and the Chinese would join in.  Or they would cheer if someone was wearing really cool looking clothes.
4) Not much excitement for Meiguo (USA).  We were cheering and screaming but the Chinese instead cheered for China again instead.

Great cheering for the Chinese leaders, of course.

And when Yao Ming / China came out at last the cheering was insane.

Imagine thousands of Chinese clapping and screaming and shouting "Zhong guo jia you! Zhong guo jia you!" at the top of their lungs over and over.  Very energetic!

Watching the opening ceremony here in China was lots of fun.  It was an incredible opening ceremony...especially the lighting of the torch...and will be insanely difficult to beat.

I am definitely very excited for the rest of the Olympics season.  Especially for the events where I have tickets: handball semi-final and track finals.

Ni men hao!

Ni men hao!

I just graduated from Cal (UC Berkeley) after spending my last semester abroad at Fudan University in Shanghai.  I found myself loving China so much that I spent the summer traveling, and am now starting at Beijing and Language Culture University (BLCU) for a four-week intensive Mandarin program.  I'll be spending the next semester at Beijing/Peking University doing more Mandarin.

For now...I will be enjoying the Olympics in Beijing!  And posting on them, of course. =)

You can read more about my travels in China at:
www.chasingphantasos.blogspot.com

Enjoy!

Zuong guo jia you!