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...