Mon Aug 18 – buying an Olympic t-shirt

We headed back to the hotel, having gotten lots of stuff – but missing one thing. I was still missing an Olympic t-shirt for Jake. They had a few at Silk City, but they were all large. So I had seen some official t-shirts for sale at a couple of the Olympic event, so we decided to head over early to the track and field event with enough time to find a booth for buying something for Jake. Going early was great because the crowds weren’t as bad, and we ended up getting to the Olympic village 1 hour early, which should have been enough time to find a t-shirt.

We started walking around, looking for any type of Olympic booth selling Olympic ware – but nothing. After wandering around for 20 minutes, I stopped a volunteer and asked where I could buy a t-shirt. She pointed me way down in the distance, and told me that it was “down there – about a 15 minute walk”. Huh? This is the Olympics and you have to go to just one store located at the very outer edge of the Olympic village to buy it? Of course, this was completely the opposite direction of the Bird’s Nest stadium and I only had 40 minutes by now. So I told Emily to site and wait for me in front of one of the projection screens and decided I would “jog” down to the store, buy something quickly, and come back. I jogged, and jogged, and jogged until I finally saw this red store. But as I came nearer – I saw that there was a huge long line – just to get into the store! This is nuts! A line to get into a store? Complete with security. I then spotted a sign which said something about a “short cut” to the outlet store. This had no line – so I ducked inside. One quick look showed lots of pins and doll merchandise, but no T-shirts. I asked the clerk at the counter who confirmed that all the t-shirt merchandise was in the other part of the store, where you had to wait in line. Just then, a lady pushing a man in a wheel chair came in, and they opened a red door that allowed him to get into the main store from this closed door entrance. I went over to the personnel stationed at the guarded door and asked them again about t-shirts and did they have any options for me. They pointed me to the line – but then also showed me this bin of stuffed animal toys. “But we have a special for you sir – if you buy one of these stuffed toys – we will let you in for free right now”. “only $15 dollars”. Emily and I had looked at the Olympic toy mascots which resembled the PBS Teletubbies show with “Po” and others (I can’t remember their names), and couldn’t think of any reason to buy. But with time running out, $15 to get in the door faster was a small price to pay. I whipped out my 100 yuan and they let me in.

Of course there were tons of people milling about but I could see several stations where there were t-shirts….t-shirts that had obviously been well looked over. There were plenty of t-shirts with these “teletubby” Olympic mascot animals on them – but there weren’t many decent Olympic t-shirt designs left. I found a good one and asked them how to get a small. “We’re all sold out of small – all we have left is a large”.

Huh? We are barely 1 week into the Olympics and of the t-shirts you already have, all the small and medium’s are gone? What kind of planning is that? Oh well – I’m thinking Jake can do with a large. Until I lift my head and see the lines. It looked like maybe 15 rows of checkout stands, with lines easily 20 – 25 people deep, all going slow. There was no way I would ever make our track and field event if I had to stand in that line. So I exit the store, now carrying a stuffed Olympic doll but no T-shirt and have to jog all the way back to Emily. Amazing – part of the games are so well run and thought thru and others are so different from how we would do things. Now I get back to Emily with 10 minutes to go, which means we are now a bit in a hurry to get to our seats when we had come so early. But I remembered seeing an official stand inside some of the venues while they were going on – so as we got to our seat, I found an official merchandise stand and actually found a good t-shirt for Jake – in a medium size. So all of that running around was for nothing – since I could have gotten it in the stadium in the first place…of course, I did now have a stuffed Olympic mascot animal now instead. I hope Kaylee or Paul would like a stuffed animal.