#111 Beijing Olympics

The Beijing Olympics are underway and thanks to some advance planning and good luck, I have secured eight tickets to track and field on the evening of Monday, August 18th. I bought these tickets through the U.S. ticket lottery last summer before I moved to China and bought enough for the whole Cazzato family. As it turns out, the rest of the Cazzato family is spending most of the month in Peoria, so I had to find seven willing people to take my extra seven tickets. These included my boss, Dan, his family, and three of his neighbors in Beijing. Dan invited me to stay at his apartment in Beijing so I had no worries about paying inflated prices for a hotel room the night of the event.

I flew to Beijing on Monday morning, had lunch with Dan and Marguerite at their very cool downtown Beijing apartment. We then took the subway in the mid-afternoon to the Olympic Green. We had a beautiful, blue sky, 75 degree day in Beijing - those emergency air quality measures seem to be working - and we spent the afternoon checking out the scene around the National Stadium. The Olympic Green contains five or six different sports venues including the now famous Birds Nest and the National Swimming Center where Michael Phelps won his eight gold medals this week.

The area is populated with display buildings for the major olympic sponsors - Coke, Kodak, Samsung, Volkswagen, GE, and others. These are essentially Disneyworld-style, walk-in commercials with long lines, and in the case of the Coca Cola building, a free cold soda at the end. We rather enjoyed the Coke "Shuang Center" with the pounding music, olympic torch display, and history of Coke exhibit.

Next we spent some significant time at the largest souvenier shop in the world - the "Olympic Super Center". Again, there was a magnificently long line, just to get inside and shop. I bought some T-shirts, pins, a U.S. flag, and a coffee mug. Surprisingly the prices were not overly inflated - $10 for a T-shirt and $5 for a coffee mug is probably a fraction of what you get soaked for at a U.S. event of this magnitude.

Those two simple activities filled the afternoon and we had one hour until the start of the evening track and field session so we had dinner at the largest McDonalds I have ever seen. There were probably 50 separate lines for purchasing food and over 200 people working behind the counter and in the kitchen. What a mass production operation ! And they were very fast and accurate in filling our orders. Very impressive.

After dinner, we walked the length of the Olympic Green back to the birds nest, taking lots of pictures on the way, and found our way to our seats in the upper deck. The stadium is such an impressive building with the randomly criss-crossed steel girders. It was a long climb up the stairs to our seats, but the view that greeted us inside was stunning.

Pictured above are Marguerite guiding us through the Beijing subway, the Coke "Shuang Center", Jackie, Kristen, and I with one of the Fuwa characters, and two shots of the birdnest at twilight.