Although this was the first time we had watched anything on our hotel TV, this was not the first time we had seen the Olympics on TV here in Beijing. The Olympics is on everywhere you can imagine. On many channels. There are TVs on in the subway waiting stations where the Olympics are playing. In the subways themselves, the Olympics are playing. And almost every major tourist spot we’ve seen, they have big screens with the Olympics playing. It’s simply everywhere. Of course, it’s always in Chinese and unless it’s Michael Phelps, it’s always showing a Chinese athlete or Chinese team playing – so you really don’t have a good idea of what’s going in the Olympics from an American perspective, even though the TV is everywhere. Except for Michael Phelps. That is the only person we’ve been able to know what is happening. It seems like replays of him are shown all the time. But other than that, it’s certainly been interesting to see ping pong matches, badminton matches, fencing matches, volleyball matches. Of course, both men and women’s gymnastics have been widely featured.
The other interesting item is that the Chinese measure success by the number of gold medals instead of the total medals. That means that in China, China has been leading the medal count in all tallies since the beginning, even though the United States has been leading the medal count.
We finished the day, having a nice day of rest before our last full day of activity here in Beijing.
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