Olympics Opening Ceremony Adventure

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Yesterday night was the opening ceremony for the olympics. Me and two of my friends decided to give it our best shot to be part of the madness around the stadium during the ceremony. None of us had tickets so we thought it might get a little interesting to see what we would actually be able to do. Right before we left at 4:00 one of our friends told us that if you don't have a ticket then you can't get anywhere near the action...so, i grabbed the three boxing tickets i have for the 23rd and headed out to towards the stadium with my two friends John and Grace. the cab dropped us off pretty far from stadium but it was as close as we could get. When we tried to cross the overpass to the other side of the street we were immediately greeted by police officer who was checking tickets. I casually flashed my incorrect tickets to him and we snuck by. When we got to the other side of the crosswalk we had the same experience and dodged yet another bullet. We proceeded to have to do this a number of times and really got lucky. Eventually we settled at a place that was sort of in between the 'pangu 8 star hotel' (its huge, its supposed to look like a dragon or something) and the olympic pool. We figured that we could see the stadium from here and there was a jumbotron TV on the side of the hotel we could watch the broadcast from. Everywhere around us were people from every country. it was pretty cool and everyone was just hanging out. it reminded me of what a woodstock concert must be like or something like that. If any of you happened to watch some broadcast on CNN awhile back about some students from the University of Iowa who are working at the olympics, well, we met them. They sat about thirty feet down the sidewalk from us. I honestly thought they were kind of stuck up. oh well. We met a couple of volunteers (they were the majority of the people in this 'mid point' area) named Ming Ming and Chenchuang who joined our crew. One of them was from Xi'an and the other from Harbin, and both were university students in Beijing. I guess they got assigned to the handball gymnasium. We stuck together and camped around a tree while we waited about three hours for the festivities to start up. While we were waiting a 66 year old man from Germany introduced himself and we brought him into our 'olympic family' or 奥运会家庭 as we called ourselves. This guy was pretty amazing. His name was Robert and he had just arrived in beijing the day before after biking, yes biking, from Greece to Beijing...no joke...he had been on the road in greece, turkey, tjakastan, kazahkstan, asldfja;lsd-stan, and all through china for the last SIX MONTHS with about 15 other people. He has a wife, three kids, and even some grand kids. His wife is back in Germany. He was a really cool dude. We helped him take the subway back to his hotel when we thought it would be a good time to head out and then proceeded on home towards CET around 11. The fireworks were amazing. Check out the pictures...

oh yeah, John and I got on fox news radio. it was sweet, and grace got interviewed by a national korean TV channel so she'll be on TV in korea. (she's korean). it was awesome

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Photos

this dude was ridiculous...
I dont know how this guy got in, but he did and it was awesome. He's from nigeria, lived in philadelphia, and now lives in beijing...there were a lot of interesting people around

our olympic family!
look, you can see robert, the german dude, in the back on the left. he was so cool

It looks like...
an alien mothership has just landed in beijing.

where we would have been
if we had gotten caught! it was madness outside our area

madness
they were pushing back these barricades on the bridge and shouting jiayou zhongguo (lets go china!) they were nuts

Photo 23
very glad we gave it a shot to 'just be part of the action'

Comments

[Aunt Kay]

That is so COOL!
JOhn What an adventure!!