Paul Horstmeier 2008 Olympics Blog

Olympic miscellaneous -- the elderly are in shape

2008-08-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

We saw lots of "in shape" elderly people. Whether jogging (this first lady was actually jogging) or squatting (this man seemed to be resting by squatting for a long time on the ground) -- they seemed to have a lot of energy. I hope I could do such things when I am older

Olympic miscellaneous -- Funny statues

2008-08-20T23:11:00.003-07:00

There were a few funny statues in the Olympic village

Olympic miscellaneous -- Food

2008-08-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

We didn't eat a lot of Chinese food, but took a few memorable food pictures...

Olympic miscellaneous -- Funny signs (4)

2008-08-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

When we first saw this sign, both Emily and I scratched our heads. What did it mean? It looked like it said "No exploding cars" or "No turning left or your card will explode). ..

We asked our guide, who laughed and said it meant "cars with flammable materials not allowed"

Olympic miscellaneous -- Funny signs (3)

2008-08-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

This advice was posted on one of the tomb sites

Olympics miscellaneous -- Funny signs (2)

2008-08-20T22:57:00.000-07:00

We got a chuckle as we saw this sign going down an escalator

Olympics miscellaneous -- Funny signs (1)

2008-08-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

This sign was funny because it was a beach volleyball sign placed right in the middle of a 6 lane highway in the middle of Beijing -- which couldn't be further from a beach...

Olympics miscellaneous -- Beijing architecture

2008-08-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

Beijing had an incredibly variety of very different architectures, both in the city or constructed specifically for the Olympics. Here are several examples, including nightime views of the swimming natatorium and the spectactular Bird's Nest stadium.

Olympic miscellaneous -- pollution

2008-08-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

I read a lot about the pollution in Beijing -- but it was hard to imagine until we saw it up front. Some of the days cleared up after rain, but on the humid days, it sometimes liked look the fallout after a cataclymic event in the movies...

Mon Aug 18 – the final track and field event

2008-08-19T17:13:00.001-07:00

We got to our seats which were almost the same exact seats that we had on Saturday evening – but on the other side of the stadium. (I forgot this until I started wondering how they had changed the locations of the three flags so quickly that they used for the medal ceremony…) It was a great night for the Americans. The American threw the winning discuss throw on her very first attempt. The American pole vaulter gave the Russian world record a real contest, getting a silver. The American men and women qualified with good times in several hurdle events, and the best was the very end when the American men went 1-2-3 in the 400M hurdles. The crowd again seemed to be very international, as we sat by people dressed in flag colors of so many nations. The group of Jamaicans sat right below us. When the gold medal ceremony was had for the 3 Jamaican women winners, one of the s below us turned and mentioned to the many next to me that she had been on the same high school track team as the gold medal winner, and was obviously so excited. The two highlights for me were 1) seeing a lot of winner from smaller and barely known countries win gold, silver, and bronze medals – reinforcing the international nature of the Olympics and 2) hearing the US national anthem in that huge stadium when we watched the US women’s discuss gold medal winner accept her medal. It was definitely a lump in the throat moment. Hard to describe.

As we walked away from our final event, Emily and I agreed this had been a once in a lifetime experience. We are sad to leave such an exciting event, glad to have had such an interesting and thought provoking experience, and excited to come back home to a place that we love with freedoms that we can easily take for granted.

Mon Aug 18 – buying an Olympic t-shirt

2008-08-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Mon Aug 18 – Shopping in Beijing (part 3)

2008-08-19T17:11:00.002-07:00

On Monday, I looked at my Olympic tickets for my 3:30 event which was for flatwater canoeing. Turns out that this venue was not reachable via subway. It was actually 30 kilometers east of Beijing proper – and could even been seen any on any of the maps I had in the room. I decided that was a recipe for disaster and so since I had gotten the tickets for very little, we decided to scrap that event which would give us more time to get ready and for SHOPPING. Now that we knew the process, we were prepared. We got there and started shopping. They probably didn’t like us much – because the recommended rule of thumb was to counter their initial offer at 25% and then negotiate from there. Our rule of thumb was to 1) never decide that we “had” to have anything, 2) assume there was always someone else probably selling the same thing, 3) consider a low price that we would consider was a very good bargain, 4) offer a lower than 25% price every time, and then 5) be willing to not budget on our price – and be willing to walk away to either get a better price, or search for the same merchandise else where. I think the strategy worked very well. I think we set the price on almost everything we got. But it took a lot out of you – I think we started getting a little tired in the afternoon because sometimes we would give in and raise our counteroffer by $1 or $2 dollars. But basically, it seemed like we were naming our price – and then we would get it. They had 6 floors of stuff – jewelry, silk, ties, shirts, pants, dresses, bags, luggage, watches, sunglasses. The prices were so ridiculously low and it seemed a crime to not buy something that you might need to buy in the next year, knowing that you could buy it now, or pay 5 to 10 times more in the states. But you had to work for it. And frankly, it was fun doing it that way. Much more interesting and engaging than just browsing pre-priced items…before we knew it, it was 4:00 in the afternoon and we had to call it quits. That’s the fastest time has even flown shopping.

Mon Aug 18 – Shopping in Beijing (part 2)

2008-08-19T17:11:00.001-07:00

We walked by some more clothing booths and then came upon another booth with women’s clothing – only this time, there was a longer, tailed overcoat that looked even cuter than the first. This time, we were staying in the middle of the corridor so that we could really be “looking”. Again, Emily made a slight mention of it to me and our eyes and body stopped for a brief moment to eye the overcoat. Again, we were immediately “accosted” by another even more aggressive female sales person. Very quickly, Emily was pulled into the booth, the coat came off the hanger, and in no time, Emily was looking at it. It was even cuter than the first. Since we had just experienced the sales pitch a couple of minutes earlier, we braced ourselves for what was to happen, but thought we would get a better idea of what price she would truly be willing to sell it to us – and as we did the other, we would continue looking and come back tomorrow. But the girl defines the embodiment of “tenacious”. Quickly, the sales pitch started. How wonderful the coat, how exquisite the tailoring, but yet she had a special price just for us. So we listened for the opening price – which she quoted at something around $200. Of course, we really both said “No” – way above what we were looking for anyway and tried to walk away. Of course, we knew she’d pull us back and offer us some lower prices. She tried to get us to commit to some type of price – and we initially declined and told her the story of just looking. She wouldn’t have any of that, so thinking a good way to get rid of her, Emily told her we were looking for something more in the $20 range, but maybe $30 max. She got immediately offended and spouted off how insulting a price that was, how it couldn’t cover any of her costs, how we needed to be serious about doing any business with her. We reminded her that we weren’t intending to do any business today, but we were looking for coats in that range and would come back tomorrow. As we walked away, she literally grabbed my hand by the wrist and spun me around and pulled me back into the booth. Startled, I started to laugh and look at Emily, who was also surprised. From then on, she wouldn’t let go of my hand. She “counteroffered” my non-offer, coming down to $130. I told her thank you and that we weren’t interested. She grabbed the coat and put it into my one free hand and asked me how could I not want to spend such money on a beautiful outfit for my beautiful wife. I told her this was not my wife but my daughter. Then she told me all the reasons why my beautiful daughter needed this coat and that she would give me a final price of $100. I told her very clearly now that I wasn’t interested today and tried to giver her coat back. She then grabbed both of my wrists (she was strong) so that I could not move nor give her the coat back. I then tried to lay the coat down but she said “no” and wouldn’t let go of my wrists and grabbed the coat and put it over my arm, Since she had a vice lock on my wrists I couldn’t put the coat down. Her price came down to $60 dollars and I still said “no – we are just looking. By now, I was kind of laughing in incredulity – with Emily standing looking wide eyed at me. It felt like she was literally wrestling me as I tried to put the coat down, or pull back my hands. She handed me a calculator asking me to enter in my price – I tried to put the calculator down on the floor but she just grabbed my other wrist again and bent down with me stopping me from doing that. We were now literally in an arm wrestle in her booth – she was not going to let me go. I started feeling the only way I could get out would be to either twist her arm or punch her (of course I wouldn’t do that). I started laughing at how funny this must look. Finally, I had to almost pry her fingers away from me, letting her know that her price – would had now come down to $35 dollars – was getting to be a good price, but that I meant it when I said we were just looking today and that I would remember her tomorrow when I came back to buy. I felt exhausted – like I had just been in a wrestling match – and finally felt like I could walk away -- when she finally said, “Alright – you can have your price -- $30”, and started putting the coat in a package. I said, ‘wait a minute – I told you 10 times that I am not going to buy today – that I’m just looking”. Upon which she then got defensive and said, “what do you mean – you gave me the price – I matched it – you need to buy it from me”. For the umpteenth time, I told her what we were doing and we were finally able to walk away. Sheesh – that’s a tenacious sales person. I know where to recruit great sales reps if I ever need to do business in China. My biggest regret is not asking Emily to take a picture when we she was wrestling me for a price… J
Anyway, we walked around having learned our lesson. We didn’t answer back to any of the sales people, walked in the middle of the aisle, didn’t make the mistake of stepping into any of the booths with the female sales representatives (interestingly enough, none of the men were that aggressive), and scouted out some opportunities for the next day

Mon Aug 18 – Shopping in Beijing, a “gripping” experience (part 1)

2008-08-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

For our last day in Beijing, I scheduled an afternoon and evening event, with the thought that we could do any needed shopping in the morning. We hadn’t really figured out where we should do our shopping until we ran into the man who was an agent for one of the swimmers who told us of Silk City and the ability to get great deals. Then, I remembered an entire section on “shopping” in my book on China – and remembered it had mentioned Silk City as well. The idea was that it was a negotiating experience – the vendor offered an initial price, then you countered with something much lower – like 25% of the initial price, and then you negotiated. The book recommended even walking away in order to get an even better price. This sounded like a good idea, so we decided Monday morning we would head over to Silk City for our shopping experience. I was originally only thinking of a few souvenirs, but the agent made it seem like something where you could get some really good deals on lots of stuff, so my original thought of “shopping” started becoming more a thought of “SHOPPING”.

Given that we had no idea of how to get there, the time it would take, the size of the marketplace, or the things to consider, we decided to take a test run on Sunday afternoon. We decided we would at least find out where it was, walk along the market, see what they had to offer so that we could be as efficient as possible on Monday. So we took a taxi and headed off. The taxi dropped us off in front of a large store with a few fast food restaurants in front of it. We walked up and down the street, looking for the “market”. I imagined something like an open market like I might see in Mexico or Argentina, but it wasn’t there. So we went inside the store. It was then that we saw “the market”. It was an absolutely sensory overloading scene. It was row after row after row of cubicle like “booths”, filled with similar merchandise – each booth with a salesperson inside, trying to hawk their wares. Each floor had different themes, but the booths in each floor were mostly the same or very similar merchandise. My guess is that there were easily 300 or more booths per floor. You simply walked up and down the aisles and each sales person barked at you to somehow catch your attention and pull you into their booth to get you to buy. Man, oh man, -- talk about selling. The female Chinese salespeople were unbelievable. Within our first 10 minutes, we got our unexpected introduction to Chinese selling.

Emily and I started walking down the aisles. We were “just looking” which was of course, our plan. We truly had no intention of buying, which made it a bit more interesting, because we could genuinely walk away from anything, but perhaps we would get a better idea of the right price range when we came back on Monday for the actual selling. In retrospect, now I realize that we were absolutely the most valuable target that any Silk City salesperson could want when we walked in, because we had no packages and hadn’t bought anything yet. I assume that means they believed they could make the most amount of profit from a “newbie” and that they were anxious to get us first. We passed some booths of jeans (it looked like a 100 different types) – and we thought, “how would you buy jeans without being able to try them on, since there were certainly no dressing rooms). We passed booths of winter jackets and ski wear – we certainly didn’t need any of those. Then we passed a both of women’s stylish overcoats. Immediately Emily spotted a cute tailored overcoat – one that looked like it would be really cute on Emily. The very “moment” our eyes stopped to gaze even momentarily at the jacket, the lady salesperson leaped out at us, asking Emily if she wanted to try the jacket – at it seemed at the same time, not even waiting for the answer, but ing the coat off the hanger and before we knew what was happening, she already had one jacket arm around Emily’s arm and was turning her around to put on the other. We chuckled and let her finish putting on the coat. One thing we learned quickly – with the smaller size of the Asian people, it seemed like all of the primary clothes displayed were exactly Emily’s size. Anyway, it fit perfectly and was very cute. Definitely something we would have to consider tomorrow when we came to shop. So we smiled and told her we were just looking today and were not planning to buy. Immediately, she launched into about 10 reasons why that didn’t make any sense, why the coat was so beautiful, why she would offer her a good deal and “best price”, why since she was so pretty she would make us a good deal…and that was in one breath. Again, we smiled and politely declined and tried to go on. The next thing we knew, she was offering us an outrageously high price – something like $150 (she was quoting us yuan, but I’ll translate the prices to dollars). Of course, we said “absolutely not” and that it was way too high of a price – not realizing that this was her way of drawing us into starting to bargain…when we didn’t even want to bargain. So we again started to walk away, and she then started to offer us lower prices. We kept trying to walk away and her prices kept on coming down. She kept on asking us to name a price – so finally we told her that we were only looking to buy tomorrow something in the range of $30 and that since this coat was obviously too high for that, we would keep looking – there were certainly other coats we could look at. As we walked away, she kept pulling us back and the price came down, down, down. Finally, she said – “fine, I’ll give you your price” -- $30. Emily and I looked at each other because we really weren’t going to buy anything, and told her that was a good price but we weren’t going to buy anything today and that we were just looking, and emphatically kept walking. As we walked away, she kept calling out “okay $25”,… “okay $20”. Wow. We had just been there 5 minutes and already had an intense experience with almost feeling forced to buy something – and yet having seen the price come down 5-7X if we were just willing to walk away. Pretty interesting. So we kept going to see what else was available. Little did we know that our first experience would be only a precursor to our second experience.

Sun Aug 17 – The Oympics on TV in Beijing.

2008-08-19T17:07:00.002-07:00

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.

Sun Aug 17 – Peking duck

2008-08-19T17:07:00.001-07:00

Later – we decided to take a taxi Ride to what is known as the “Silk Street” which is a market where all the best deals and shopping is. We weren’t going to buy anything as we had designated Monday morning as our shopping time, but given that we only had one morning for shopping, we wanted to make sure we knew where it was and how to get there, since we had been told that the deals and prices were amazing and we wanted to plan and plot our strategy. We had a pretty funny experience which I will relate in the description of shopping on Monday. But after looking around 6-7 floors of open market shopping, we did see a restaurant labeled “Western food” which also offered “Peking duck”. Since we’ve been here, all of the tourist guides have said that we have to try “Peking duck” in Beijing, because no one does it like Bejing which is the original source of the recipe. So we stopped to try it….And now we can say that we’ve tried it. Maybe we didn’t have the fancy version, but it was alright and at least we can say we’ve tried it. It was kind of like a spring roll dish where they bring different plates of roast duck slices, sliced sticks of cucumber, a type of onion, and a thick sauce tasting like a combination of plum and soy sauce. You take the duck, cucumber, onion, dip it in the sauce, put it in a thin tortilla and eat it. It was fine. Then we headed back to the hotel, and for the first time watched the Olympics on the TV

Sun Aug 17 – The Forbidden City

2008-08-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

We finished meeting at the branch and went downstairs. Today was a “rest day” for us, so we were just playing it by ear. We hadn’t had any breakfast, so we decided since we were in a nicer part of the city that maybe we could get some type of meal that was healthy but not just yogurt and orange juice. We had also set today as the day we were going to visit the Forbidden City, which is right across from Tianeman Square, and remembered that there was a really nice downtown Oriental Plaza Mall close by, where maybe we could get some “healthy” food. So we flagged a taxi and asked him to take us to Tianeman Square, knowing that he would know where that was and that we could navigate from there. He dropped us off and we went inside. My hunch was correct. They had a “food court” where they had a Starbucks (which had sandwiches), a French café (where they had sandwiches) and even a Fruit Smoothie place. So we had a lunch in China – and had ham and cheese sandwich, a tuna fish sandwich and two fruit smoothies. Such a cultural experience.

Then we headed off to the Forbidden City. This is one of the must see tourist sites that everyone sees when coming to Beijing, so we had to do it too. It is a massive “mini-city” that was constructed in the 1400s housing the emperors and their people/concubines – and was forbidden for the common people to ever enter. Of course, since we hadn’t really planned our day, Emily was walking around in her Sunday church dress, I was walking around in a long white shirt and pants – but most conspicuously, I was carrying around my Book of Mormon from church, since we hadn’t stopped back at our hotel to change. I smiled “inside” at the thought of how many people had ever brought a Book of Mormon to the Forbidden City but made sure I was careful the rest of the time.

We walked into the first large inner courtyard area and stopped to sit down for a moment. Emily and I were talking together when a giggly school girl sat down next to Emily. She didn’t say anything to us and Emily and I continued talking. But then I noticed that some people were taking pictures and videotaping in our direction. I laughed and told Emily that I wondered whether they were really trying to videotape their girl next to Emily with blonde hair. We had already had this happen once on our trip. When we went to the Summer palace, a girl came up to Emily and asked if she could take her picture with Emily – and so they did, and then I took a picture of the girl taking a picture with Emily. Emily looked especially pretty on Sunday as she put her hair up and had a really pretty dress on. One of the locals said she looked like a Hollywood movie star. I thought she looked especially pretty that day – kind of like Reece Witherspoon. Evidently, she made someone’s day.

We walked into a another huge inner court area and then another where lots of vendors were selling stuff. We saw what appeared to be a type of “ticket booth” which had prices of 5 yuan and 10 yuan, but all the instructions were in Chinese. I told Emily that I wasn’t sure now what to do. We could go up to the counter and buy something – but I don’t think we would even know what we were buying or if we were buying tickets for the entry or not. It was kind of funny. But we didn’t see many people stopping there and they all seemed to keep going, so we did too. Next we got stopped by a Chinese local student who had obviously practiced their “pitch” to people like us. She asked us where we were from in a way that I knew she was going to try to sell us something since she almost didn’t wait for us to answer. Then she told us she was an international art student and that today her art was being shown in a booth “over there” and that she just wanted us to go and see the art exhibit for her. I thanked her and told her “maybe later” and then she quickly gave us a slew of reasons why we should do it now. I thanked her and told her “maybe later” and she gave us some more reasons. I was starting to want to tell her that mostly I didn’t like Chinese art, but I held back. She finally let us go. We kept going toward where the rest of the crowd was going. Maybe a minute later a young man came up to us and asked us where we were from. Again, as soon as we answered, he introduced himself as an international art student…with the same exact pitch. We “thanked him” in the exact same way – you have to give them credit for trying. We walked past another American man who had been confronted by another enterprising sales man who was offering him “a great deal.” He too was smiling, in a kind of “how do I get out of this type of way” and said something like “I’m sure it’s a great deal but I’m not interested”. We soon exited that courtyard.

Then we came to another courtyard where we finally saw the ticket booth with instructions in both English and Chinese. There was an option to buy a self-guided walking tour, which we really liked because today we wanted to be in charge of our schedule, so we bought those tickets as well. But when asked where we got the audiophones, they just pointed in my in a direction and waved me off. I could see the entrance, but realized we had no idea how to find the audio phones. We approached the entrance right at the same time as what appeared to be a 50 person school group, They had a security x-ray screening line so Emily had to get in line for that. In this line, you put your bag or purse on the conveyor belt and then went to a small booth to pull it back out. With the school children, it was pandemonium. There was no official on the other side to pass out the bags, so everyone was crowding around this window and grabbing bags helter skelter. I immediately went over and watched everything coming out of everyone’s hands. I thought this was the most insecure security line ever – a bag could be easily stolen as it seemed that there were 15 people reaching and grabbing all the bags. Luckily Emily was able to grab her purse and we escaped the security line.

Then, of course, we entered into another courtyard – and still no sign of how to get our audiophones. We went to a little kiosk and they just pointed up stream again. So we went to the next big building and finally found the self-tour stand. They outfitted us with a pretty neat device. It was a GPS like device that automatically launched a specific portion of the tour description based on where we were walking. There was also a map device with a light that showed us exactly where we were in the Forbidden City. We coul go anywhere we wanted and in essence have our own private tour. Clever. We learned more about the emperors, empresses, concubines, and Chinese traditions and history. Finally we finished at our own pace and went back to our hotel.

Sun Aug 17 – Finding church…depends on your tone …

2008-08-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

Sunday came and was planned to be our rest day. Our biggest goal was to find and go to church at an international LDS branch in Beijing. I had found the address from the lds.org web site, but after having multiple experiences where taxi drivers didn’t know addresses, I anticipated that unless I had more information than that address, that we would never make it. I could tell I was going to have to work hard to be able to get there. I was right.

Saturday evening, when we got home from our events, I started working on it. I went to the hotel counter and showed them the printout from the church web site with the building name and address and asked them if they knew where this address was. This stumped the hotel front desk. The best they could do was write down the address in Chinese as my first starting point. The next morning, church was at 10:30 a.m., so I got ready by around 8:00 and gave myself an hour and half to search the internet for any clues to get me closer to the address. I had already typed in the address before leaving the States to try to get direction with no luck. I googled all sorts of word combinations like “LDS Church Beijing directions “ or many variations thinking that certainly someone would have had the same problem as I did and put some type of clue or advice on the web – but no luck. Then, I typed in the street address and tried to find some businesses that might have some directions to get to at least the street – no luck. I then tried to find telephone numbers of any businesses or hotels that would be on the street so that the hotel front desk could call them and ask for directions. I found a few numbers there and wrote them down. Then, I found out the district (city area) that the street was on, and searched for hotels within that district, thinking that maybe if I could find a nice 5 start hotel – preferably an American chain – that we could take a taxi to that hotel, talk to a concierge, and then find it that way. Faster than I could imagine, 90 minutes went by, and now it was 9:30 with church starting in one hour. Emily was ready, so I told her we would just have to go with the information that we had and hope we would get there somehow. I took the newly gleaned information back down to the front desk where I approached the best English speaker of the morning staff. She too puzzled and puzzled over the address and the building name. However, when looking at the building name (Jin Tai) she did call what seemed to be some type of Beijing directory assistance (my best guess) and had what seemed to be a 10 minute conversation. Finally she hung up and told me that there was a street name of my address, but the building name was wrong – there was no building named “Jin Tai” at that street. We both looked puzzled at that, because I was able to show her the printout from the church web site, but she seemed convinced that there was no building on that street. Finally she said she was going to check the Internet. Of course, I was convinced that would do no good, because I had already spent probably multiple hours on the Internet trying many options, but I thought maybe the locals knew other ways to figure this out. By now, it was almost 10:00, and our chances of finding church were dwindling. The taxi drive alone could easily be 30 minutes or more and that assumed the taxi driver knew where he was going. And then, all of our sudden, our luck turned. She came out of her office smiling and said, “I found it”! Of course, I was surprised since the story seemed to be playing out that we wouldn’t find it. She motioned for me to come back into her office. There on her computer screen she showed me a local Chinese version of a Mapquest and a picture of a building. Then she told me what the problem had been. She looked at me very seriously and said “This building name says “Jin Tai” but that is not correct. The building name is “Jin Tai”. At first blush, the sound and spelling seems exactly the same, but because we had had our Chinese “tone” lesson the day before with our second tour guide, I immediately understood what she was saying. The address based on US characters was viewed as a monotone “Jin Tai” – which meant one thing. But the way she pronounced the real name, it was “Jin Tai” with a upward tone at the end. That meant something completely different. I smiled inside, amazed that she wouldn’t think of that immediately, and yet confirming that the same words pronounced with a different tone have completely different meanings here. Once she knew that, then she was not only able to find the directions but her search engine showed a picture of the building so we could recognize it when the taxi driver took us there. She wrote down the directions and was even nice enough to come out to the street and talk to the taxi driver to make sure he got us there – she even gave him her cell phone number if he got lost, since she now was an expert on how to get there. We got in the taxi and were able to get there in about 10 minutes. It turned out it was not very far.

The taxi driver took us to a tall 20-25 story office building. It was lightly raining and the doorman brought an umbrella over as Emily stepped out of the taxi so she would not get wet (how kind). We walked in the building and it was a type of mall inside. We wandered our way to the elevator and then went to the fourth floor. We stepped out, saw a n open door in a hallway, and looked inside. Two American ladies were talking in familiar words and familiar accents. We said we were looking for the LDS Beijing branch – and they smiled and said that we had found it! Mission accomplished. They pointed us in the direction of the “chapel” and we went inside and sat down. After all of that, we were actually early for church.

There are two LDS branches in Beijing. There were chairs set up for about 100 people and by the time church started there were probably 60 people there that Sunday. We had a very nice meeting. The leaders were very careful to announce the strict guidelines and conditions upon which the members and visitors could continue to operate in Beijing and asked all who attended to respect those guidelines. All who attend are foreign internationals with passports -- no Chinese nationals. One of the speakers introduced himself as an international student who had recently got a job here, originally from Orem Utah. Although we are in the hottest part of summer, the building was actually cool and Emily was cold. She turned to me and said, “No matter where you go in the world, the church is the same….sacrament meetings are always cold…” I laughed, thinking that was a variation of the more common saying.

Sat Aug 16 – Track and Field -- Bolt breaks the World Record (video included)

2008-08-19T17:01:00.001-07:00

Finally it was time to go to our first track and field session. This was the big session because it was going to end with the men’s 100M dash, but there were other interesting events as well. We assumed we would have nosebleed seats, and although they were definitely in the “balcony” section, they were low in the section and pretty good visibility – close to the 30 yard line. We were able to see the final events of the ladies heptathlon (where an American got bronze), the semi-finals of the men 100M dash, the ladies shot put final, the men’s 400M hurdles semi finals, the men’s long jump qualifications, the ladies 800M semi finals, and of course the men’s 100M finals. The stadium was as spectacular as it looked on TV. The crowd was finally international, for the first time, in my opinion. We saw lots of different nationalities on the subway and in the crowd. We brought our US flags and waved for the US athletes. We were right in front of the long jump, so Emily really enjoyed watching the men’s qualification jumps. I was surprised at how many scratches there were from these men when they stepped over the line while attempting a long jump. But of course, the most exciting event of the night was the 100M finals. Already there was US disappointment because Tyson Gay didn’t qualify for the finals – and I assume that was because of his injury, from which he is just recovered. But despite that, the excitement in the crowd and stadium was palpable when it came time for the final. The announcer read each name and showed their faces on the huge in-stadium screens, which made it even more interesting. They played some “tense” music, and the crowd got going. The music stopped and while the racers got ready for the race, the stadium erupted in a sea of flash bulbs. People knew we were seeing something special with the number of men who had held the world record or had been world champions. Then when the race started and Bolt not only won but broke the world record at doing so, the stadium just went nuts. The American just closed fast enough to get bronze, so he was happy too. It was very fun. I actually used my camera as a video camera –and caught the race on tape. I thought this would be an important memory and event to capture. We thought it would take us forever to get home via the subway system – and there was a sea of people. But for some reason, they had the system working really well, and we hit all the trains at the perfect time – so we ended getting home sooner this evening than any other evening…Go figure.

Anyway, click on these two videos.

The first shows an idea of the Birds Nest Stadium.

The second show the 100M finals (sorry - from far away) but shows Bolt break the world record.

Sat Aug 16 – The Great Wall, part 2

2008-08-19T17:00:00.002-07:00

We climbed and climbed and climbed. We took pictures of the other line of people going up the other way. What struck me was how relatively “low” the wall was if attacker actually reached the wall. This would have never worked in Lord of the Rings! They would have just climbed the wall and got in. It seemed like a lot of work for a relatively low wall. But then after thinking about it more, I decided that the invaders would have probably been so exhausted by simply climbing the mountains that by the time they got to the wall, they wouldn’t have had enough energy to climb anyway. So it probably worked. They told us that there is an annual 10 mile marathon along one part of the wall – based on how steep some of the wall sections were – that would more grueling than Robie Creek.

On the way back, we came to one of the “guard towers” where there was a traffic jam. There were guards there that weren’t letting us through. I assumed that they were just conducting traffic flow between those coming up and those coming down. Right then, another American came down, saw us, and said, “Hi – do you know how I can get down from here? I’m trying to get down, but won’t let me.” I guessed that he had just gotten here – and told him that I thought they were just conducting traffic, and he smiled and calmed down. And then we visited the whole way down. He was from LA and had just decided to come to Beijing on a whim as part of a business trip. We laughed and compared notes. Our only funny part coming down was when we got to the really steep part. Emily got stuck behind an old Chinese man and a child. We were all going slow, clutching onto a handrail, but this man was going super slow – in slow motion. We got down, said goodbye and met up with our group. It was only then that I noticed that my back was soaked and covered with sweat. I had been carrying a backpack and didn’t realize how much effort I had expended. I spent the next hour recovering. It was great however, and we got some great pictures.

We had our second Chinese meal on this tour. Up until now, Emily and I have been very careful or too busy to have formal meals. So we have been living on Yogurt, Juice, and snacks. I don’t think we’ll be gaining any weight on this trip. We then visited the Ming tombs and several tourist “trap” places.

We did learn a few more interesting things from our guide this afternoon as well. I told her that we had a Special Olympics Chinese athlete stay at our home and that he always said a word like “Shula”, “Shula” – and asked her what it meant. She laughed and said it meant “loss” meaning that he or they lost. Then I remembered that he had used it a lot when we were playing the Nintendo Wii game in our basement. I thought it mean he was having fun. Evidently it meant he had lost the game.

Sat Aug 16 – The Great Wall, part 1

2008-08-19T17:00:00.001-07:00

Finally, our day came to go the Great Wall – one of the anticipated highlights of the entire trip. We got up and again jogged. I am so proud and excited to run with Emily – I love that she has taken up running and love to finally have a common activity with one of my children. It’s fun to do it with Emily and she can go the entire distance. She’s doing great and I challenged her to consider running Robie Creek next year.

We met our guide at 8:30, and this time were part of a group of about 15 in our own bus. The tour books said the trip to the wall would take about 2 hours, but we got there in about 1 hour 15 minutes. The guide explained that there are many different sections of the wall that are open to tourists in Beijing, but that we were going to the oldest section which had been closed for the Olympic cycling races until yesterday. The mountains in that area are very pretty. They are covered in greenery and very steep and hilly. As we drove in the mountains, the Wall could be seen “snaking around” the tops and sides of many visible places. We got to our destination and found ourselves surrounded by thousands of people with the same idea. I knew this would be a very crowded day – Saturday morning during the Olympics – so I was already prepared for that. I was also happy to see that our guide, once we got into the Wall area, simply gave us a time to meet back at the bottom and let us go “exploring” on our own. There were two sides to go – Emily and I chose the steeper and less crowded side. The day again was very clear and not smoggy – which was great. At the beginning the sun was direct and it started getting pretty hot – but soon the clouds came and the winds blew – so it was a nice climb. It was pretty amazing to climb along the Great Wall that I’ve seen so many times in pictures, books, and TV. It was very steep in places, and even though I am in shape, it was quite an exercise. No one told me a towel was a required element – but I sure could have used one. They warned us about some of the very steep parts – which was true. But both Emily and I soon realized that the most dangerous part of “climbing the wall” was trying to avoid all of the open umbrellas by the Chinese women and children. They were downright dangerous! Since the sun was out, many children and women were walking with their open umbrellas – and they are not careful. Emily got “jabbed” about 5 times. The children had an uncanny ability to hold their umbrellas right about eye level, and whip them around any time.

Fri Aug 15 – Swimming preliminaries

2008-08-19T16:59:00.001-07:00

We got back from our tour and took a nap. Now that we were “experts” on how to get to our Olympic events, I figured we didn’t need as much advance time to get there, so we decided we could nap until 5;00 for a 6:30 swimming prelim event. These were the tickets I had gotten from the US Swim Team and so were really good seats. However, we woke up from our naps at 5:20 and didn’t get going until 5:35. This time, the subway and crowds were much more difficult than anytime before. By the time we got to the Olympic subway entrance to the main square, there were thousands of people trying to crowd in. We had forgotten that this evening was the first night of track and field, which meant that 90,000 people were trying to go to the same general area as us. To give the Chinese credit, by this time, they had their lines and security procedures pretty well figured out – so they moved us along very efficiently. But it still took us longer and we got to the swimming venue about 5 minutes after the start.

Although there were no finals this evening, it turned out still be a very interesting evening. The preliminaries are where all of the minor countries and competitors you will never see on TV have their chance to compete in the Olympic Games. We started out with the preliminary qualification for the women’s 50 meter free style. The top 16 times advance to the semi finals and then top 8 times to the finals. But in the preliminaries, we actually saw 9-10 rounds of ladies – about 80 swimmers compete. It was very efficient and went by pretty quickly. They grouped each group by times, so that there wouldn’t be anyone with the fastest time completely out showing the others. This meant that there were many winners, which was great. For example, when we got there, they were in the third heat – which was won by someone from Nigeria, I believe. The world record is just under 24 seconds and she won her heat in 29 seconds. Of course, she will never make it into the semi-finals, but she had the biggest smile on her face as she clenched her fist and celebrated her “win”. We saw heat after heat of the same thing. Many of the very small countries had a participant entered in here. The whole evening was the same for different events and was simply interesting from the human story perspective. During the event, a guy from Kansas sat next to us (originally from Michigan). Turned out that he represented one of the swimmers from a legal / promotion / agent perspective, so we got chatting about some of the behind the scenes happenings of the swimmers. He confirmed that the US swimmers were great people, easy to work with, very above board – and that he really liked working with them. He also gave us a tip on shopping (which we are going to do on Monday). He handed us a “quick translation” tourist card which had all of the English names of the major sites and their Chinese translation – as well as some key and common phrases. We could have used this earlier – one of the phrases included “please use the meter”, which would have come in handy with my previous day’s taxi driver. But he also told us of the great deals he had gotten at Silk City. Apparently, that is where all the good deals and negotiations are. Way lower prices than any official place in the city. He showed us some fake pearls (that he got fooled / gypped on), and some real pearls –and showed us way to tell the difference. He got a fully tailored top of the line suit for about $200. We had designated Monday morning as our shopping day, but hadn’t figured out where – so now we had a place to go. The swimming session started at 6:30 and ended at 9:00 – and really went by fast. We very much enjoyed it, and then left for home.

Fri Aug 15 – Palace of Heaven

2008-08-19T16:58:00.001-07:00

After lunch, we visited another tourist spot, the Palace of Heaven. This was interesting mostly because we asked our tour guide a lot about religious observance in old and new China. AS best I can remember here is what she explained to us. Historically, the emperor was known as the Son of Heaven. So he was a “son” of deity. Therefore he had the ability and sometimes the responsibility to pray on behalf of his people to his “father” or in other words, the Heavenly Father. Twice a year ( I think during the summer and winter solstice), the emperor would make a ceremonial visit to the special temple where he would pray to the Heavenly Father on behalf of his people. But the more interesting part was how this played into the politics of the time. Since the emperor was the only one who could pray on behalf of the people to the Heavenly Father, it also meant the emperor had a lot of responsibility on their behalf. If there was a natural disaster, the people could also blame the emperor, since it could be assumed that the natural disaster happened because the Heavenly Father was displeased with the emperor. When a natural disaster occurred, a special prayer ceremony would be held, where the emperor would approach the Heavenly Father on behalf of his people. In this situation, if a natural disaster occurred after the emperor’s prayer, it was definitely a sign of displeasure and could be a sign of the people needing to get a new emperor. It looks like this was an ancient implementation of a system of checks and balances between the people and the emperors.

I laughed when she told us about thresholds. Each of the entrances always had a raised threshold to step over. This was because the Chinese believed these would keep out the evil spirits. Evidently the evil spirits were believed to be pretty small, not that bright, and could only jump. If you had a high enough threshold, that would keep the evil spirits out and protect the family.

Then; I asked our guide about religious and cultural belief systems in China. Her opinions were interesting. She said most of the cultural and somewhat superstitious beliefs are taught in the home by the family, and only somewhat reinforced in the school systems. She talked about 3 major belief systems: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. I asked her about how they balance these different beliefs and she said that at one level –they learn about this from the family, and then the school teachers tell them that “it is all a lie”. But at another level, she said the Chinese say that all of the beliefs can intermingle well. In the first half of your life, one follows more the teachings of Confucianism which is more a life philosophy. After middle age (after 40s), then people switch to more Buddhist teachings because as health and other problems start to mount up, they need/want more help from the Buddhist gods to help with different ailments.

I also asked her about the ancient beliefs of heaven given that the emperor was a “son of heaven”. As best as I remember, she explained that the people believed when they died there was a judgment – with three things that could happen. First you would take a drink of something like alcohol, with the intent that it would erase your life memories. Then you would cross a bridge to be judged. If you had been a good person without big mistakes, you would go to heaven. If you were a bad person and had made a lot of mistakes you would go to hell. Each of these places had 9 levels of heaven or hell to which you would be assigned according to your level of goodness or badness. Then there was a middle state. If you took a drink of the offering but could still remember some of your mistakes, then that meant you needed to still pay for your mistakes – and that you would need to be reborn and live again to make up for those mistakes.

Fri Aug 15 – The Summer Palace

2008-08-19T16:57:00.002-07:00

We visited the Summer Palace which was a place for royalty to retreat to from the hot sweltering Beijing summers. It was built on a lake and housed royalty. Evidently most of the history surrounded one of the most powerful women in China’s history who started out as a concubine to the Emperor, but who rose to power because she was able to bear a son, which the other concubines could not. She was smart and cunning and figured out how to consolidate power in China, to the point of being able to “imprison” the emperor in a courtyard in this palace. Each important ruling party had their own “courtyard” with housing in the 4 surrounding courtyard buildings.

We left the Summer Palace and then visited the obligatory tourist shop – a government run silk store. They showed us how the worms are raised and the silk extracted, and then showed us many different items from silk that they had for sale, including blankets, pillow cases, sheets, etc. We looked but did not buy. Then we had lunch at a local typical Chinese restaurant. It was very good and we enjoyed our meal.

Fri Aug 15 – Feng Shui and more

2008-08-19T16:57:00.001-07:00

We learned a lot about “feng shui” (I know this isn’t the correct spelling). The whole tour and many of the explanations behind the Summer Palace seemed to revolve a lot around this concept – with “feng” meaning wind and “shui” meaning “water”. The concept being of course the need to have balance between different elements in Chinese life. She explained that much of the symbolism behind the buildings and statues and beliefs all stemmed from the need in Chinese culture to have balance in life. We learned about how so many of the Chinese animal statues all had meanings – royalty, success, prosperity, wealth, and happiness. We learned about lucky and unlucky numbers. According to her, 9 is a great number because it is the symbol of royalty. 5 is a great number because it is halfway between 1 and 5, and therefore provides great feng shui. 6 and 8 are also good numbers. 4 is a really bad number because it is out of balance between 1 and 9. According to her, no one will buy a car or want a phone number ending in 4 because It will be unlucky. Before buying an apartment or house, Chinese buyers will try to find out the history of the property to find out if it has good feng shui or not. Interestingly, if a property is located near a temple or hospital, this is bad. She explained this is bad because they associated going to a hospital or temple with bad things – you only go to a temple or hospital when something bad happens and you need help. Therefore living close would be akin to bad luck. We were also shown this particular kind of “rock” that evidently you could only get from the lake close to this summer palace. Only the royalty were allowed to have this rock. If commoners had this rock, they could be killed. Emily and I looked closely at this rock – and it basically looked like a rock. I asked the tour guide how anyone could tell this type of rock – and she assured me that any Chinese would know the difference between normal rock and this rock…obviously Emily and I were not meant to be Chinese, because it still looked like a normal type of rock to us.

Fri Aug 15 – More questions answered

2008-08-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

We our guide her how Beijing had such clean streets. That’s one thing we’ve noticed – everywhere is amazingly clean. Until Friday morning when we went jogging early in the morning, I don’t ever remember seeing one piece of trash on the street or side walk at all. There are people with big brooms in the streets all the time –even sweeping up the leaves. This morning, when we went for a job, we found a completely tree lined street, and the street cleaners were busy sweeping away the small leaves that had fallen over night. We asked our tour guide if this was something just for the Olympics, or if it was always this clean. She said it was always that way. She then laughed and told us that when she took a tour to San Francisco, that she was most amazed at how blue the sky was in America (she had never known how blue it should be growing up in Beijing until she came to the states), but on the same hand, she was surprised at how dirty the streets were. She sincerely asked me why we allowed our streets to be so dirty. I told her it costs too much in the big cities to keep it that clean, but that it was better in the smaller cities. She confirmed that people can get their drivers license when the are 18 here after paying a medium size fee and test.

We asked her about the crazy drivers and the crazy bicyclists. We knew that cars and bicycles were everywhere, but we didn’t realize how crazy it was between the two of them. It seems like anything goes. Bicyclists cross the road in front of cars, and somehow cars seem to avoid them. Pedestrians don’t seem to have the right of way here – it feels like there should be crashes and s all the time. She laughed and said that peestrians and bicyclists have the right of way if confronted with a car – but I think it is one big game of chicken. Whoever is the bravest has the right of way. Our guide said there is a saying that in Beijing a traffic light is just a suggestion.

Fri Aug 15 – A personalized tour guide starts to answer our questions

2008-08-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

Friday was our first day of touring. With all the rain on Thursday, we woke to a sky that was blue and pollution free. Such a difference from the previous two days. We got up and ran for an hour and then went down to the lobby to be pleasantly surprised with our own personal tour guide and driver for the day. Finally, someone who could speak good English at our disposal for the entire day. So even though it was a tour to specific Chinese sites, we used the time to ask every question we could think of that we wanted to know about what we had seen so far. She was so gracious and friendly. We asked so many questions that it’s hard to remember them in any particular order.

We asked why all the bicycles on the street looked so used and second hand (we never had seen a new bicycle yet on the street). She laughed, and had to think about it for a minute (it must be so common that she had think of a reason). Her first answer was that Chinese people prefer to buy bicycles at second hand stores. When we mentioned that certainly if people bought new cars that some people would want to buy new bikes, she decided it was because new bikes would be stolen. We told her about my taxi ride where the taxi driver turned off the meter and way overcharged me. She agreed that he was caught doing this, he would be in really serious trouble and have to pay huge fine. Our driver said the charge should have been maybe 20 – 30 yuan. She said since he did not have a receipt that technically I could have just left without paying (which of course I wouldn’t do). We also asked her how the government was controlling traffic during the Olympics. She confirmed it was based on odd and even license plate numbers. Half of the cars could travel on one day and the other half on the other. Taxis and government cars were exempt. We asked her about participation in the Communist party. She said that less than 7% could belong to the Communist party. That it was a very high standard and that only the best and brightest could be accepted. The benefits included being able to be an official in the government with different privileges in housing, cars, insurance benefits, etc. We asked her about health care – she said that employers were required to provide health care benefits which usually translated to an 80/20 benefit – with the employee paying 20%. She said there were still problems with employers who would not provide coverage and often times they didn’t get in trouble because the employees were too afraid to report them on the fear they would get fired. She told us that most Chinese have a pretty positive view of Americans.

Thurs Aug 14 -- The volleyball game

2008-08-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

The China / Japan game was just as exciting or even more than we could have imagined. The place was jam packed – almost all Chinese fans. Many brought flags or bought mylar long-tubes with either yellow or red colors to clap together for anything goodChina won the first two games to make everyone excited and happy. We found out that all Chinese had a favorite cheer: something like “Chai – yo”. One person screams at the top of their lungs (like an informal yell leader) and the rest of the section chants it back. Pretty soon the entire stadium was chanting it back and forth – at any time. A person next to me explained in English that this cheer literally means “more gas” or “add gas” – which is their way of saying ‘to get fired up”. The Chinese also seem to know a common set of chants and songs – because during the intermissions, the loudspeaker would put on some music and the entire stadium would cheer and sing. Then Japan won the second two games to make it much more interesting. Then it came down to the final/deciding 5th game – and the crowd went wild. China turned it around and won in the fifth and deciding game. The crowd went nuts.

That game took so long that it was pretty late when the US game started. At least 60-70% of the stadium left after the China game, but we stayed to cheer. By the time the US lost the first game, Emily and I were so tired we decided we had to leave to get some rest. But of course, we forgot that we didn’t know how to take a bus here, and therefore didn’t know how to take a bus back to the subway. Luckily, I had a card with my hotel address written in Chinese and I pulled over several taxi drivers. Each of them looked it and then told me they had no idea where this was. What kind of city has taxi drivers that don’t know to find an address in the city? Anyway, luckily I had paid attention in the cab drive there so we decided to walk our way back to the subway. Well, we did make it back, caught the subway, and died of happy exhaustion upon getting to the room.

Thurs Aug 14 -- Before the volleyball game

2008-08-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

We headed back to the hotel for a quick nap and then onto volleyball. I hadn’t been able to know ahead of time what games were scheduled and finally found a specific schedule online (I was able to finally get on line for the first time when I got home – the hotel sent someone up who knew enough to get it going again). It turned out that the first game was going to be China / Japan and the second game US/Bulgaria – which meant it was a fantastic night to go. Japan is China’s archrival, which would mean the game would be fun and loud. And of course, we would cheer on the US in the second game as well. The only problem was getting there. The directions got us somewhat close via a subway, but then the directions said to take an Olympic bus from the subway to the venue. From my few days of experience, catching a bus –well, catching the right bus – is very difficult. First, they have a lot of busses. Second – it’s never really clear when you get out of a subway station which direction you are headed. Nor is it easy to find someone who really knows enough English for you to trust their answer. So true to form, we took the subway as far as we could, got off, when to look for a special bus – only to realize we had no idea if were on the right street and/or the right direction to catch that bus (the subway station has 4 different ways to exit, each of which puts you either on another street or opposing directions. You run the risk of either getting on the wrong bus or the right bus in the wrong direction. We tried to stop someone who was helpful, but we again didn’t know if they really understood us or gave us good directions. We went under a bridge as directed, only to find another intersection with buses going 3 different directions. We finally walked to a mall, asked help from a jewelry store clerk, showed her a map, and she was kind enough to write directions in Chinese that we could give to a cab driver. Then we just caught a taxi there instead, skipping the whole bus thing.

We got there early enough for the “pre-game” show…which consisted of many different Chinese drill team and cheerleading routines. We got a kick out of many of them because they definitely tried but didn’t yet have the dancing / rythym thing worked out yet. Which made it all the more entertaining.

Thurs Aug 14 -- Censored??!!@@

2008-08-19T16:49:00.002-07:00

We got back to our room with a little bit of time to take a nap. However, I tried again at the lobby to see if there was a way to get another room with the internet. This time, they sent up a couple of young men who actually seemed to know something about technology. They brought in some network adapters, did some configurations changes to my computer, and magic – I had internet! I was so excited. The first thing I did was see if I could get onto my blog to start updating my blog. No problem – it worked. I didn’t know if it would really work in here – plus the press had said that foreigners would be monitored and some sites blocked – so for all I knew, the blogging sites were blocked. But it worked fine. I decided to put on the first day’s worth of activities because I had been saving everything in a Microsoft Word document. I figured out how to download my photos to my PC and successfully published my first day’s worth of activities. It wasn’t probably more than 15 minutes past my first post, when I was ready to post my second day’s worth of activities. Suddenly, the blog didn’t work. I couldn’t log on. I tried for an hour. The Internet was still working. I was still able to get on all of my other normal sites – but the minute I would try to get onto my blog, it immediately wasn’t available. It wasn’t a timing issue, because I would have been able to tell if there was a timing problem. It was just simply blocked. I can’t know for 100% sure, but I think China just blocked my blogging site. Imagine that – and my first post was pretty positive. I’ll keep trying, but that says something…..

Thurs Aug 14 -- Men's Gymnastics

2008-08-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

Immediately after swimming we went over to the men’s gymnastic individual all around finals – which had started an hour earlier. We had an unavoidable overlap between the swimming and gymnastics finals, but since the gymnastics building was right new to the swimming finals, we felt we could do both. We got there in the middle of the third rotation where the Chinese man was already leading by a large margin. The crowd was much bigger here, and even more pro-Chinese. There were very, very few Americans that we could see or note from any type of flag waving. In fact, apart from our flags, we could only count one other American flag in the entire audience – which I guess sits 18-20,000 people. With the Chinese man winning, the crowd was very happy and yet very appreciative of the good performances from the other men. We had great seats and really enjoyed the competition, which was won by the Chinese gymnast.

Thurs Aug 14 -- Swimming

2008-08-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

Of course, the swimming event was terrific. We were dressed in all USA colors and ready to cheer. We had our white “GO USA” T-shirts with a big American flag on them, we had white American flag caps on, we had two stick flags to wave, and had our big 3x5 flag to hold up as well. There were a mixture of finals and semifinals to watch. The most interesting personal observation I had was how quickly the events seemed to come and go when you were the spectator. Of course, on TV you see the build up, the life history, the commentary. But the real life event is quite simple. They announce your event, you line up, you start and you finish. Hard to imagine how much time and energy had been spent in each of the swimmer’s life before getting to that point. The crowd was predominantly Chinese, as would be expected. So by far, the most exciting race was one in which the Chinese women finished 1-2. The Chinese fans were cheering like crazy, on their feet, flag waving. They both beat an American , but since we were in the “Chinese section”, we were happy for them anyway. And of course, we did get to see Michael Phelps and Lochte in the semifinals of one of the events. Pretty cool.

Thurs Aug 14 -- the taxi ride

2008-08-19T16:47:00.002-07:00

Thursday was our biggest day of events. We started the day pretty early because we needed to pick up some additional swimming tickets from the business development director of the US Swim Team, courtesy of my new boss. The challenge was that the hotel was in a completely different section of town, and we had been warned that many of the taxi drivers didn’t know where it was. So I took extra care to have my hotel call the other hotel and get the directions – and then have them written in Chinese for a taxi driver. We wanted to get there early in the morning so as to catch a bus with the friends and families of the US Swim team members. So we got up early and were ready to catch a taxi at 6: 15 a.m. The taxi ride was very interesting.

The first thing that happened when I flagged down the taxi. The taxi driver got out and said “Mor-mon?” A bit startled I said, “what?” and he repeated, “Mor-mon?” I looked at Emily and said to her,,,”yes, but how would he know? What does a Mormon look like?” We looked at our T-shirts which had American flags on them and thought, “this guy shouldn’t even know what a Mormon is…” and then we realized that he was trying in his best English to say “Moment?”, meaning “just a moment” – wanting us to wait for him while he got the luggage out for his previous passengers. We had a good laugh about that.

Then we got inside and started on our way to the other hotel. The taxi’s in Beijing are all metered fares – I had been told that if they don’t use the meter, it is illegal, and that they were especially concerned about this during the Olympics. I looked, and the meter was on. I then stopped paying attention for a little while. About half way through the ride, I looked at the meter, and the taxi driver had shut it off. I immediately told Emily that this guy was trying to cheat us and then tried to address the problem by pointing at the blank meter. It was pretty useless because when I pointed to the meter, the taxi driver thought I was referring to the radio, and then said “U…S…A?”? I nodded and said yes. Then he tried in his very best and said something like, “Fa-llops”? I didn’t understand so he repeated, “Fa-llops”? I still didn’t understand, so he started making swimming motions with his hands, and I finally understood that he was trying his best to say “Phelps”. So I nodded my head, and he raised his hand and showed me 4 fingers and then 8 fingers – which I interpreted as Phelps had won 4 gold medals so far and was trying for 8. He was very excited about this and smiled about 4 times at me for acknowledging this. I wondered what he would think if he knew that he was dropping us off at the hotel where the US Swim Team, including Michael Phelps, was staying. Anyway, it distracted my attention from the fact that he was cheating me at the same time. Finally, we got to the hotel and he charged me 60 yuan, when I knew it should be something like 30. Of course, that translates into $10 dollars instead of $5 dollars…so I just paid it because I didn’t know how to have the argument with him. We went inside the newly finished hotel and had a regular breakfast buffet. Then we met up with our host who gave us tickets to the Friday preliminary qualifying heats in a good section, and got on the bus with the friends and families of the Swim Team and went to the venue.

Wed Aug 13 -- Tennis

2008-08-19T16:47:00.001-07:00

After getting some water and orange juice, we headed over to the Olympic Greens for tennis. It was about 2:00 and the event started at 4:00. They encouraged everyone to be 2 hours early for the events to go through security and wait in lines. I assumed that 2 hours was overkill, but we decided to make sure we weren’t going to miss that event. So we headed over via subway. When we got to the Olympic Greens subway, they told us to use a City Busline instead which would ferry us over. After we got on the bus, I realized that there was no conveniently labeled subway-like stations on the bus, and hoped that we would know when to get off the bus. I had studied the maps ahead of time and knew that the Tennis Center was the furthest events on the Olympic Green, so I figured we could walk to get there if needed. Again, that would have been a huge mistake. What looked like a nice strolling walk amidst the greenery of the Olympic Greens was a huge distance amidst lots of concrete buildings. It seemed like it took us forever in the bus, and by the time we got out, it was very clear that we could never have walked that distance.

We then went through a pretty short line for security. Before leaving, I had loaded up my shorts pockets with fruit/nut bars and trail mix snack packets. You couldn’t really tell I had them in my pockets and I thought they would be good snacks for us to have during the afternoon and evening. The instructions were not to bring in any food, but I thought they wouldn’t notice something small like this. No metal detector would detect them. Well, I went through security and beeped the beeper. They wanded me and detected all my snacks?? I don’t know they have the ability to detect my packaged food, but they did. Every pocket. I lost all my food. I didn’t even get to eat any before I had to give it up. Darn.

We found our seats and for the first time relaxed for a bit before the matches started. We then noticed the sky – the pollution was very, very bad this day. The sky was a very sickly gray – kind of like the eerie aftermath of some of the movies where things have been destroyed. The whole sky was the same color, with barely the notion of any clouds or the existence of a sky. It continued like that the rest of the day. Wow.

But we had a great night of tennis! Our tickets were for a seat at Center Court, but then we had a grounds pass for the rest of the first week matches that evening. So we got to see some great players and great matches. The first match was Raphael Nadal (the number 1 player) versus a great Russian player. Absolutely amazing match. The Russian was ranked in the top 20 and seemed to be amazing. Nadal was that much better, returning absolutely every impossible shot – with pace and winners. The court was full and we had very, very good seats. The next match was Venus Williams vs a top 20 player from Belarus. We rushed down to the court when the previous match had just ended, so we basically got our pick of seats in the entire court. We picked the first row seats behind where Venus was playing, got out our American flags, and cheered the entire game and match. Sometimes she was as close as 10 feet to us. I’ve never seen a tennis match that close up. Felt like we were part of the game. She won! Yeah. Then we went to our Center Court seats where Roger Federer was playing a tough match. He of course, is the number 2 player in the world. He also pulled out a win. Finally, we watched Serena Williams take on a great player from France. The French player was playing awesome. They would get into power rallies and she would outhit Serena. Serena lost the first set. Emily asked me if I thought Serena would pull it out. I told her that champions usually find a way to win when they are not playing well. Emily doubted whether she could turn it around. But then Serena started to really hit even harder and hit some incredible shots. The French girl kept on playing great the whole time, but Serena was just a bit better. Serena won the second set and then in a close third set, she won as well. By the time we were done, it was past 10:00. There was actually one more round of matches scheduled, but we were very, very tired. We left for home, very happy and ready for sleep.

Wed Aug 13 -- An interesting start

2008-08-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

For breakfast, we decided we didn’t want anything natively “Chinese”, given that most of the breakfast offered here seemed to be something in a hot broth – the last thing we wanted after a morning jog. So I went to a local store and got packaged yogurt, bottled water and bottled fruit juice. The yogurt would turn out to be a trend for the day.

We then got directions to the place that we had to pick up our tennis tickets for later this afternoon – and with new confidence from last night’s subway trip, we decided to take the subway to that place. We had tickets to weightlifting scheduled from 10 – 2, but decided to take our time this morning since we had no need to see all of it – and the tickets had only been $5 a piece. We realized that the ticket pickup location was actually at the same intersection where we had turned around in our jog that morning, so we asked the agency where Tianamen Square was. When they pointed out that it was only a few blocks turning right, we decided that we couldn’t pass the opportunity up and headed down for a peek. When we got to the area, the sign indicated to go down into an underpass in order to go to the square. In the underpass, security was checking all of the bags and purses. However, what I forgot was that I was holding our two American stick-waving flags rolled up in a bigger 3 x 5 foot American flag that we were going to wave at the Olympic events. Having heard about the Chinese concern about any demonstrations at Tiannemen Square, I suddenly realized that having a huge American flag might not have been the best idea. Of course, they came up to me and questioned me about it, in very broken English. I got my excuse ready…and then said “Thank you” and passed me through. We went up into the square and saw the huge area where thousands were milling – and looked across the street to see the foreboding entrance to the Forbidden City with the picture of Mao on it. We took a few pictures and then left to find our Olympic event. We were quickly learning that everything seemed small, accessible, and walkable when looking at a Bejing map. But in reality, everything was further and took longer when you tried to get somewhere. We took a subway to the place of the weightlifting event, that was supposedly right at the building, but then walked maybe ¾ of a mile to finally get there. At the entrance of the event, then we had to walk another ½ mile. When we got to the entrance, it was fenced off and chained up. I caught the attention of a guard and showed him my tickets asking where the event was. He could barely understand and couldn’t communicate. He got the attention of another official who tried to tell us something about the event being cancelled and to come back later this evening. I’m still not sure they knew enough English to tell us what really happened or what the story was. Either the event had finished earlier than scheduled, or they had truly moved the event to a different time than what was printed on the tickets without being able to tell anyone. Of course, we had other plans for the evening and so we left. Our first event…wasn’t.

Wed Aug 13 -- going jogging

2008-08-19T16:25:00.001-07:00

Today, we started out fresh with energy to “do it all”. First, we went out jogging in the morning. Our hotel and our location appear to be in a location where not many foreign tourists stay, which is great. Our jog lasted almost an hour, and I think we saw two Caucasian people the whole time (versus tens of thousands of Chinese). The map looked like we were pretty close to Tiannemen Square, so we asked our hotel attendants how to get there and began our run. The main street was full of small Chinese shops of all types of merchandise, services, and food. It was a great way to see a slice of Beijing while we ran. The attendant told us “just three lights” – those lights were pretty far apart. By the time we approached the third light, we were no longer sure whether we had understood the directions correctly or not. We stopped at a huge intersection with massive buildings lining the street on all four sides – but looked down all directions and couldn’t see a logical place where we thought the buildings would stop and a massive square would begin. So we turned back and ran home, knowing we had time yet to find Tiannemen. The humidity, however, was a different story. We were soaked and dripping. We had to walk for 15 minutes just to cool down enough that we could walk in the hotel lobby. We then showed and got ready for the rest of the day.

Tuesday Aug 12 -- The subway

2008-08-14T01:15:00.001-07:00

We had a couple of hours to explore on our own, so we decided to be adventurous and take the subway system to the Olympic Park – to learn our way. Luckily the travel agency booked us in a hotel where there is a very convenient subway terminal located a block away – so we tried it last evening. It was very easy and very modern and very clean. We made it to the entrance of the Olympic Park – but then found out that you have to have tickets to an event that day in order to go in. So we walked around and got our first look at the Bird’s Nest Stadium at night – along with the Olympic torch. It was quite spectacular at night. There were many local Chinese taking pictures along with us. It was exciting just knowing that a few days ago, the world had watched the opening ceremonies from that exact place. Our airport guide told us that right before the Ceremonies that scalpers were asking $30,000 for a ticket to the opening ceremonies.

Tuesday Aug 12 -- Our hotel

2008-08-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

I elected to go with a “3 star hotel” instead of 4 or 5 star when signing up. That translates to a very “Chinese” hotel. Turns out that we are in a very central spot of Bejing, just a few blocks from Tiannamen Square. (We are going jogging this morning – we checked with our airport guide who spoke very good English before deciding to venture out, making sure that it was okay for us to “jog” there. The staff knows very little English at all here. Since the facilities are, let’s say, somewhat “limited”, that has meant that I probably have already come down to the lobby 6-7 times the first night, asking questions by doing a combination of English and hand gestures. I can tell that they want to please me but really don’t understand me very well. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work real well when you want answers or helpful directions. They are willing to either give you an answer even if wrong, or maybe ignore you and keep going anyway.

We quickly found out how “difficult” it is to get things done here. You can do it – but it takes so much effort. For example, in order to get tickets to the games, my travel agency was not very helpful – I even found out late last week that my tickets for 2 out of the 3 most interesting events were suddenly no longer available, and I had to find them on my own through US scalpers. Therefore, I had tickets from about 4 different places that I had to arrange to collect yesterday evening. I didn’t mind that too much given that I had directions, email addresses, and 2 phone numbers from each source – and collecting them would give us something interesting to do yesterday evening to get to know Beijing…. That was naïve. J The first place was a pickup for the source of the national lottery system that I participated in a year ago. We got the hotel to help get me a cab with the right directions. They dropped us off in a downtown “SOHO” district and an address – but the best we could do was to get an officer to point us “that way” for directions. We couldn’t figure out the street directions at all. The address was a building 18 – and so we wandered around a long time, looking for building numbers, crossing streets – looking in a sea of faces for anyone that looked halfway Caucasian (English speaking), but saw none. We saw plenty of security/guards but realized they didn’t really know where to direct us. But we finally found the building and the line and were able to get our tickets. Three of our sources were supposed to deliver the tickets by courier. One came without any problems. The other two both said they had been having “courier problems” and had to change the plan. ( I assume that meant that they had given the tickets to couriers who disappeared and they never found them). Our airport guide told us that last week, the last set of remaining tickets went on sale locally in Beijing and that some people camped in line for 2 days to get them. I finally was able to get one of the ticket agents to come to my hotel late last evening at 10:30, and now need to go get the other tickets this morning at a new rendezvous.

Internet and phone connection is another real challenge. I knew this would probably happen, so I had many backups. The hotel is supposed to have internet in the first place. Knowing that this could be shaky, I have my PDA/email service and I have a broadband cable modem card that is supposed to work anywhere. Well, first of all, so far, the internet seems to be broken in my room. I plugged in the cable and there were no blinking lights in the back of my computer connection, indicating a live connection. I went down to the lobby to try to explain this. They sent up a nice girl who proceeded to not understand me, but who spent 15 minutes trying to look at my software setup to see if I was configured incorrectly. Of course, she spoke no English, so after trying to explain 5 times that it was the connection that wasn’t working not my configuration, I realized there was no hope of explaining that in Chinese/English sign language and waited for her to come to that same conclusion. Then she called up another girl who brought up a new internet cable, in case that was the problem (which of course it wasn’t). Finally, they got the idea to try another room – with the same problem. My guess is that it may have been broken for a long time, but no one has asked them about this. They told me “so sorry” and told me that they would have someone fix it in the morning. I have my doubts. I then tried my trusty broadband “anywhere in the world card” – nothing. I tried to see if my wireless could find another connection – nothing. I tried my PDA – and got a connection error. This was going to be challenging. I finally got my PDA to download some emails, so I think I have limited email access. I am going to write my blog in Microsoft word each day and hopefully post this whenever I can get the internet.

Tuesday Aug 12 -- Our arrival

2008-08-14T01:00:00.000-07:00

We landed in Beijing on time and in pretty good spirits. Our travel agency actually did something right – they booked us in an exit row, so we had lots of leg room. In addition, we had light all throughout the 11 hour flight from Vancouver Canada to Bejing since we took off at 12:30 PM Pacific Coast time, and landed at 2:30 p.m. Beijing time, so it really helped with the jet lag. Turns out that Beijing is the world largest airport – but it is also first class. We were whisked away pretty quickly on an underground train system probably 3 miles to the main terminal – and when we got there, we may have waited a total of 3 minutes for our luggage to arrive in one piece! (Yea!). We got through customs very easily, and then went out to find our ride from the travel agency, who was supposed to be there to meet us. I have never seen such a crowd and array of signs with people’s names. There must have been easily over 100 signs of people/s names waiting to be picked up. We had to slow down just to read all the signs. Luckily, we were wearing “Tishirts” with the logo of our travel agency and a distinctive “Beijing 2008 Olympics picture on back” – and we were able to spot our guide about 2/3 of the way through the sea of signs. Turns out the T-shirts were very fortuitous because we had to wait for another family who was evidently on our same flight but missed the sign. After a few minutes of looking around, the father noticed our T-shirts and found us and we all were reunited. We then had a private driver take us to our hotel, getting there about 5:00 after all was said and done

Monday Aug 11 - We make it to Portland...barely

2008-08-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

Well, we made our first leg from Boise to Portland, barely. I spent all weekend confirming all of my China plans and tickets, getting all our last minute items...and forgot to confirm the first leg of my flight from Boise to Portland. We actually leave from Portland on Monday, but I didn't want to risk missing any legs of the trip -- so I booked a flight going to Portland a day early. Only, it turns out that when we got to the airport for our 2:00 flight, they didn't have a record of my booking. I had just rebuilt our computer last week and lost all of my email records. So we had to buy the Boise/Portland tickets at the airport. Luckily, when I had originally bought the Boise/Portland tickets, I picked a time where there were 2 later options, just in case anything went wrong. So we bought tickets instead for the 6:35 p.m. flight, and then called Karryl to come pick us back up. We went home, got a nap, and then came back. Then, continuing the theme, there was a problem with the flight -- which was delayed until 7:30. But we finally got on the flight and landed here in Portland. I booked a room in the luxurious Red Lion Airport...with a room on the second floor with no elevator ... but of course, I got a good deal. Emily is on an exercise kick, so she's "encouraged" me to get up with her at 5:00 a..m. tomorrow morning to go running before we take off at 9:00 to go to Beijing.