Another side of Beijing

These games have been wonderful games indeed. It's been a great place to host an event such as the Olympics for multiple reasons.

Visitors can come here to watch/participate in the games and other activities, but then can also take travel within the city to see some pretty incredible historical/tourist destinations, some of which I've visited and detailed.

The other great benefit to the games being hosted here is that despite the high prices for hotel rooms (my friend's place being a wonderful exception to that), everything else is very inexpensive.

The tickets, if you could get them were comparatively inexpensive. My beach volleyball tickets are RMB 120, or about $17.50. Transportation is cheap: you can travel anywhere on the subway for 2 kuai, or about 29 cents. Taxis are plentiful and cheap as well. The food is good... and cheap. No matter where you are, from being in an event to being inside a top tourist destination, the price for a 20 oz bottle of water is 3 kuai ($.44) and a bottle of Coke is 4 kuai ($.58). Compare that with the 3 to 5 bucks (or more) you may pay at a major sporting event or tourist destination.

These plastic bottles bring up a related topic... where do the plastic bottles go? Everybody knows that China's rise has been due to China opening up it's economy to foreign investment to take advantage of the large, cheap labor supply. When you only have to pay a construction worker RMB 1,000 ($150) per month, you can build a lot of big buildings, stadiums, roads, subways.

Some people actually survive in China by collecting recyclable items and selling them. Shanghai is the same, you'll see very poor people digging through trash cans to find bottles to collect. Beijing has been the same. Some bottle collectors were so bold as to come up to us and ask us for our bottles while we were still drinking from them.

It is a striking contrast to see the glitz/glamour of the new in the big cities being built/maintained/cleaned by the extremely poor migrant works from the surrounding areas.

Wherever I/we were, these bottle collectors could be seen "working." Here are a couple of examples:




If you look hard enough, you can see the Olympic flame burning on top of the Bird's Nest in the distance (not the closer stadium, but stadium further back). I just think it's such an interesting contrast to see this in the shadows of the Olympic flame.

Women's Gymnastics Team Final!

There were two events that I definitely wanted to see during the Olympics: USA vs China in men's basketball and the women's gymnastics team final. Odd combination, I know, but ever since I watched Mary Lou Retton win the gold back in the day I've been a women's gymnastics fan.

As you know, I watched the game on TV since the $1,000+ for tickets was way too much. So it was time to try to get a ticket for the gymnastics final.
I put an ad on the Beijing expat website requesting one ticket for the event. I got a phone call last night someone wanting 200 Euros ($300+) for a ticket. I offered half that and he said no way...

I went to the Olympic park entrance this morning where there were plenty of people selling all sorts of tickets. Gymnastics tickets were going for RMB2,000+ (~300+). So I called the guy back from last night and asked if he still had a ticket -- he did, and we agreed on RMB1,500 ($200) .

He took forever to come to the location, and we kept in touch on our cell phones. The longer he took, the lower the price went. So when he finally showed up to make me 30 minutes late for the two-hour event, our price had dropped to RMB 400 ($58)!! ;-)

This was a very exciting day. The Americans came into the event trailing the Chinese by 1.5 points, but well ahead of the Romanians & Russians. After a Chinese gymnast fell off the beam, the US pulled within one point.

But then disaster struck:

This is a picture of Alicia Sacromone after she fell of the balance beam. She was docked points both for falling off the beam and for not being able to do one of the flips she was supposed to do because she had to hop back on the beam rather than use the platform to jump on. This definitely gave China breathing room...

She was able to put the fall behind her and completed a very strong routine other than the fall.

Then disaster struck the second time. Apparently Alicia wasn't able to put the fall off the beam completely behind her as the next (and last) event was the floor exercise. On her first tumbling pass she fell on her bum and then her back, then on the third tumbling pass she stepped out of bounds:

And just like that (and some other mistakes on the first day that put the US in the hole to begin with), the heavily-favored US team, with the two best gymnasts in the world, took silver as a team.

One question, however. The minimum age for competition is 16. Does anybody think the Chinese girls look 16? Just look at the body types: the Americans are fit young women, the Chinese are undeniably girls:

For more on the age controversy you can look at this Time magazine article: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1832312,00.html
The article says that this American team is on average 3.5 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than the Chinese team. If in fact the Chinese girls are 16 (highly doubtful), maybe gymnastics can divide itself into divisions like boxing and weighlifting... you know, weight classes. The Chinese can compete in the super-light weight class and the Americans can compete in the healthy-weight class ;-)

Some other random pictures from the event:

Even the Olympic mascots, the "Fuwas," do gymnastics!

Great day, great event... incredible to see this in person. There is so much going on and it's amazing to see the athletes compete in my favorite Olympic competition.

Scorpions, Silk Worms, and Starfish

What do these three things in common? Yup, they all start with the letter "S." What else? These are three of the critters that my friend Darryl and I ate on Wangfujing Street.

Scorpions, silk worms ans secadas:

An entire block of every creepy/crawly... on a stick!

Starfish, sea urchins, octopus and other seafood

This place is just fascinating. The vendors seem to love the astonished faces we foreigners give them looking at their menus. I took some comfort in talking with several Chinese there who don't like eating these things.

The street takes on a feeling of "Fear Factor" or a game of dare. Nobody really wants to eat anything here, yet everybody does to push their limits. When somebody makes a purchase, several other tourists gather around to watch them actually eat it. When that person doesn't die, then some of those who watched are emboldened enough to try somethng.

Darryl and I ended up "teaming" up with a German couple we met while eating silk worms, and we moved on to eat the scorpions and starfish together. Isn't it great how we can all get along?!

Oh yeah, we didn't touch these:

Lamb parts including testicles, hearts and livers, and "other" parts

Coincidentally, there is a cnn.com report on this area of Wangfujing Street, filmed during the Olympics. I didn't get into this video, but here's the link...
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/10/smith.china.beijing.food.cnn

USA Basketball 101

USA Basketball 101... sounds like an intro class in college for basketball, right? Well, you can say that the US basketball taught the world a lesson in how basketball is played -- American style!



The score: USA 101 China 70



An estimated 1 billion people (1,000,000,000) watched the game last night around the world. This was THE game of the Olympics, and the organizers knew it... that's why they put these two teams together on the first day of competition.



I really wanted to go the game. The problem is there were only 15,000 seats, and President Bush, former President Bush, Laura Bush and Barbara Bush (the younger) took up four of those seats so now there were only 14,996 tickets possibly available to be scalped!



I went by on August 7th to talk to scalpers... the several I talked to said the starting price was RMB10,000 ($1,500). Um, ok, I'd rather buy a new HDTV and watch it at home.



So the plan last night was to divide the four of us up at 6:00 pm, two of us to try to buy tickets and the other two to get a table at a sports bar for the backup plan to watch the game.



My friend Phoenix and I were the team to try to get tickets since we were the Chinese speakers, while Cliff and Zack went to the sports bar. Sounded great until the rain started. It didn't just rain... it poured!



We had no umbrellas... fortunately they were giving out "trash bag" ponchos at the metro exit at the venue:


The rain was crazy. You can see the street has turned ito a river. How safe is it for this bike rider??

So we ventured out from 7:15 - 7:45 pm looking for the obvious scalpers, you know, the guys just standing in the rain with no intent of going anywhere. We chatted with 20 or so different scalpers up and down the street. The cheapest ticket was still going for a minimum of RMB10,000.

So we regrouped, and planned to go out one more time, from 8:15-8:45. The hope was that since the first game had started, the prices would come down as the scalpers perhaps started to feel desperate.

We found cover under a large umbrella and were under there with three Chinese cops and one guy who was selling illegal Olympic stuff... stickers, headbands, etc.

We started talking with this guy, who said he was from Sichuan. I asked him if he or his family had been affected by the earthquake and he said that his family is OK, but that his family's village had to be abandoned. We then just had a great conversation with him until it was time go try to waste our money on Olympic tickets. He gave us two of the headbands he was selling, and the cops immediately moved in to prevent the illegal sale. But since he gave them to us, there was nothing for us to get into trouble about.

But since the cops were interested in us, I asked one of the cops to take a picture of us, you know, a picture of the guy selling illegal Olympic stuff and the Americans looking to buy illegal scalped tickets... and he did! Here we are (note the "cool" victory fingers!):

We went out on the second pass and the numbers of scalpers had dwindled. The price of tickets had dropped, they were now RMB7,000 or still $1,000. Um, no thanks... it was time for us to head to the sports bar on the other side of Beijing to watch the game. We arrived shortly before 10:00 pm, and had time to get ready for the game to start at 10:15. The place was packed, mostly with Americans cheering for the US, and also Europeans and Chinese cheering for China.

Who needs $1,000 tickets when you can have these front row seats!! Here's a picture of Zack, Phoenix and Cliff...

The first quarter was exciting... very close. The Chinese shot very well from outside while the US couldn't make a basket except for dunks. Fortunately there were plenty of opportunites for beautiful dunks. By halftime the US was up by 12. But in the 3rd quarter, the US pressure defense allowed for a lot more dunks and really the game was over then.

The plentiful dunks gave us a lot to cheer about!

There was a scare in the third quarter when Yao Ming rolled on the floor holding his bad foot. You could see the pain and just hope for the best. He has wanted these games more than anything. He came back in the game in the fourth quarter, but I really wonder why. The game was over and why risk hurting him. Perhaps just to show the crowd that he was alright, but still, I think I would have left him out of the game.

It was a fun game, exciting with lots to cheer about. But one thing is that the US needs to learn to shoot from the outside... as in the Austrailia and Russia games in Shanghai, the US has struggled in the half-court game. But as long as they can pressure the opposition into turnovers and easy fast-break dunks, they won't have to face that issue.

So after the game, we hopped on Cliff's and Phoenix's electic bikes (smaller than scooters). It was a beautiful evening, nice and cool, and with little traffic and dedicated bike lanes we zipped right back home. Zoom zoom!

Regardless of the final score, one thing was for sure... people cheering for either team really were cheering for both teams. I wrote a paper for an MBA class on the NBA's international expansion and in particular, its expansion into China. I turned in the paper last week, I only hope that my professor will grade it today, a day after the big game, because there is no doubt, the Chinese love Yao Ming, they love Kobe, LeBron, D-Wade and the NBA as well, and in short... the Chinese LOVE basketball!

Life these days.....

So what is are girls to do when their daddy leaves us for a week: (no pictures to prove this as both cameras are with Tim!)

1. miss him tons....we are so used to having him around quite a bit, his void is definitely noticed. The entire 1st day he was gone, Tally wondered around every 5 minutes, where daddy?? I told her Beijing and she said NO, "anghai". I was totally surprised she had picked up where we live! She still asks and I respond by saying Tally where is he, she says Beijing! (correct tones and all!) She is growing into such a big girl. She is so particular about all the important things in life. Her blanket, her babies, and Ryann. Today Ryann was crying and I was helping Adayla get dressed. I look over at Tally and she is trying to give some of Ryann her very own milk (we hadn't dressed Tally yet and so her milk was more easily accessed!) She is improving rapidly in her vocab and her frustrations levels (as well as ours) have gone down significantly. She is still as stubborn as ever. But lots of fun! She is miss independent and we love her spunky personality and of course her Tally faces!

2. Ryann turned 4 months on Thursday....again way to fast! She is still stinkin cute. She has started to giggle out loud many times a day. She is sleeping quite well, most nights, all the way through. Still stinkin' spoiled, as if she is not sleeping, she will lay by herself if you are sitting there talking to her. She has found her feet! She can't get them to her mouth yet, but she can get ahold of them. She is a sucker....she wants to suck on everything. She still uses the pacifier, but I have noticed because she is swaddled while sleeping she has started to suck on her bottom lip! We must hide those fingers from her.

3. Go swimming....in the bathtub?? Well it wasn't quite the bathtub, but it sure felt like. We headed to the baby pool yesterday afternoon and it was warm! Nevertheless, we had a fabulous time splashing around.

4. Make Cookies....and then eat most of them. Adayla loves to help me cook. We usually do this while Tally is napping or Tally is too busy making messes. This time we did chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips! Mmmm!

5. Practice the Piano - okay, so we do this while daddy is here, but Adayla is doing excellent. We switched teachers to one that will come to our house and she is okay. I almost thought it wasn't going to work out, but Adayla is definitely improving. Her teacher is a stickler on Adayla learning particular things and made her practice the same song 4 weeks in a row. I thought she was crazy, but it has been actually great for Adayla to really learn to play the song and understand the rhythm and see what a difference practice really makes. But before her teacher came yesterday, Adayla was practicing this song again and it sounded great! I look over there and there is no book, she is playing it by total memory. I was surprised completely and impressed. After lessons, her teacher commented what a great memory she has and that she isn't looking at the books anymore. She said I need to make sure that she is still paying attention to the books. I replied that if you give her new songs, that should take care of it!

6. Learn to read - okay, so we do this daddy is here too, but I just had to write this story. We have been using a book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy (or frustrating - :) Lessons. (great tip..thanks Sarah!) We are just where we are reading stories (ie one or two simple sentences of 3 or 4 words) and then you look at the picture. Today's was...The cat is sick. The cat is sad. And the picture of the cat is with a fat belly and remnants of what used to be a ton of food around him. Here was our conversation:

Me - Adayla what is wrong with the cat?
A - I think he is hungry.
M - No, I think that he just ate a ton of food and now he doesn't feel good. See the picture.
A - Yeah, okay.
M - Have you ever eaten so much you felt sick?
A - No, if I did that my tummy would hurt. (Should have had this lesson before the cookies!)
M - Don't you see his tummy, it is big. I think he ate too much.
A- Yes mom, it looks like yours. Your tummy is big.
M - Thanks Adayla.
A - Is that Sprite there in the picture?
M - Yeah, I think it was.
A - Good, because if my tummy hurts I drink Sprite and then it feels better.

Oh, how I love the simplistic and honest minds of small children!

So we are surviving without daddy (probably due to the help of helper lady!) But life is good with 3 small kids in China. We survived the taxi ride there, church, and the taxi ride home all on our own! They are such sweet little girls! Daddy - you have 4 girls here in "AngHai" waiting for you to get home!

Team USA vs China!

We're leaving now to see if we can buy some scalped tickets... Wish us luck! The first game starts at 8 pm, then USA vs China starts at 10 pm. This is anticipated to be the largest TV audience ever for any event!!

So we'll see if the prices have come down from RMB10,000 ($1,500) to a more reasonable level. The hope is that some Chinese who bought at Chinese prices (RMB 50-150) might be willing to part with their tickets for our RMB1,500-2,000. We'll see!!

If not, we'll be watching the game at a restaurant near the game. Two of us are going there to sit at our table, so hopefully we have all our bases covered. Will let you know how it goes...

FYI, the game starts in the States at 10 am EST on Sunday morning. You can figure out the rest of the conversions.

Summer Palace

Summer Palace is a beautiful place, and a beautiful example of the excesses of emperors and empresses. The rulers wanted a place that looked like West Lake in Hangzhou. So the first part of the project was to "build" some "mountains" to build the palace on...

The next step was to build the lake. Amazing what you can do with the country's riches and low-paid labor. Hmm... that actually sounds like today's China, too.

Here's a view from the top. The major expansion of the lake came in the 1800's, when Empress Cixi wanted to be able to watch her Navy peform naval battle shows.

Her extravagence was revealed when the Japanese destroyed the Chinese navy in 1894 in the first Sino-Japanese War. As a result, China recognized Korea as an independent country and gave Taiwan to Japan. The empire of the Qing Dynasty eventually completely collapsed in 1912. If they had only invested money in a real navy instead...

----

These palace grounds are huge and require several hours to cover the grounds and lake. I went here with my friend Darryl from Wichita who is in town and we had a great time here. We took a boat out on the lake to check things out and got some fun pictures:

Coming up to the shore on the other side we saw a large TV screen next to the pagoda. There were a couple of hundred Chinese watching the China vs Spain women's basketball game:

Notice all of the umbrellas? No, it's not raining... the smog was light enough this day that you can actually see shadows on the ground from the people. The Chinese carry umbrellas for two reasons: 1. is to keep them cooler, 2. is to keep their skin as white as possible.

Why do Westerners want to lay out and get dark while the Chinese fear the sun and want to be light?! I guess everybody wants what they don't have...

Last picture, here's a friendly kid saying "Ni hao" to us foreigners.

Temple of Heaven

I started off the morning searching the internet for any "deals" on Olympic tickets. After yesterday's $1,500+ for USA-China basketball tickets, I guess everything looks like a "deal" now.

My friends headed to the Silk Market for some shopping while I headed to the Temple of Heaven by myself. I am really surpised how not overcrowded these top attractions have been.

Unfortunately the smog really obscures the colors from a distance. You can see how brilliant the colors are in this close up:





While I was walking in the park towards the temple, I saw a TV crew wearing KSL shirts. I asked them if that was KSL as in Salt Lake City and that started our conversation.Long story short, I'm going to be part of Amanda Butterfield's piece on how to pronounce "Beijing" properly, so if you happen to see the report, you can see me speaking my broken Chinese, asking Chinese people to say "Beijing" and then explaining in English how Chinese is a tonal language.She said it would be on the 6:30 and 10:00 editions of the news programs, and most likely it will be on their website as well.




I had a blast watching the various groups of older Chinese people singing, playing cards, dancing, and playing some form of chess. I spent quite a bit of time just watching them, until they said something about me, thinking that I didn't understand, and that gave me the invitation to talk with them. It surprises Chinese everytime to see a "foreigner" speaking Chinese.

Singing:

Playing cards:

Dancing:

Playing chess:

I then headed back to Wangfujing Street to see what people were up to... it was a sight! There were large contingents from various countries that had grouped together to watch the Opening Ceremony on the outdoor large screen TVs. I'm not sure where the Americans were hanging out, but it wasn't there. Nonetheless, it was just fun to walk through, get asked to take pictures with Chinese, and chat with different folks for a bit.


I met up at my friend's place and four of us are watching the Opening Ceremony as only CCTV can deliver! The performances were pretty impressive.

Air pollution in Beijing

There are many stories about the Olympics, not directly related to the athletic competitions themselves. One of those stories is the air pollution in Beijing, although air pollution does directly impact the athletes, especially "high performance" athletes that compete outdoors.

Beijing has had seven years since winning the Olympic bid to improve the air quality in the city. I can honestly say that the first two days that I've been here, I've felt my lungs burn a little and have coughed some funk up as well. I can only imagine what it does to a marathon runner.

So how bad can it be? Here are some pictures:

Here are a couple pics from Tiananmen Square with one of my new friends! You can see the buildings behind starting to grey out. I'm sure Mao Zedong would be very upset if "the people" couldn't see his picture clearly! These two pics were taken at 11:00 am.




Here's a picture of Forbidden City. It's a huge compound of beautiful buildings, but from this vantage point, many of the buildings can't be seen because of the smog and pollution. This picture was taken at 2 pm.

What's that in the sky? You can almost make it out... oh there it is, that must be the sun. This picture was taken at 4:30 pm.

This is the clearest I've seen it in Beijing in the three days I've been here now. This picture was taken 5 pm on the 8th:

So every "dark cloud" has a silver lining, right? Well here's the silver lining... It's been in the low 90's here, with 90% humidity. Fortunately the smog is providing some protection from the sun, so it's not as hot as it could be if the sun was able to fully shine on us, right? How's that for the merits of air pollution?!

If this is what the air quality is like after 7 years of taking steps to improve things, I can't even imagine what it would have been like if they hadn't tried to do anything about it!!

USA vs Austrailia

Here's a picture of Spencer and me holding our flag up during halftime. The picture was taken courtesy of our Austrailian friend Simon!

(Can I just say that the US flag is beautiful?! I loved holding it up and cheering on the team)

I went to the "Redeem Team's" second game in Shanghai against Austrailia on Tuesday the 5th. While it was a thrill to see the individual players of Team USA, that is also how they played... as individuals. Austrailia sliced up the US defense with great cuts, great passes, and great shooting. The was a game the US could have lost, and perhaps would have lost had Austrailia's best player, the 2005 #1 NBA draft pick Andrew Bogut had been playing. If the US plays like this in the real games, they can forget about the Gold, and maybe even forget about a medal.

If anybody knows why a healthy Carlos Boozer sat the bench for the entire game, please let me know. With three minutes left in the game, Austrailia went to the free throw line and in between shots, when it was quite quiet, I yelled at the top of my lungs, "Hey Coach K, we want Boozer!" I know the entire team heard it. That must be frustrating for Boozer...

At any rate, after we took the picture above, two young Chinese ladies came down and asked me if they could take a picture with the flag. I agreed and gave them the flag and turned around to talk with Spencer and Simon. Simon then said to me, "You're not getting off that easy. I'm sure they want the picture WITH you." Sure enough, a couple of seconds later they tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to be in the picture as well. So I got a picture as well. All in the name of better international relations, right? That's what I'm here for...



Getting home was a mess. The subways had stopped running for the evening and we were on the other side of Shanghai from our homes (30 miles). The taxis that were available were not willing to use their meters, they wanted to charge us higher rates. Spencer came through for us. He told us to hang back for a couple of minutes, negotiated with a driver to use his meter, then as he got in the car he motioned for us to get in. The driver was furious because he felt that us foreigners should pay higher prices and he refused to drive. Spencer didn't back down, told him we weren't getting out of his cab. Eventually we won and the driver did his job: driving us home using the meter. The total bill? $31. Not bad for 30 miles and 1 hour and 20 minutes of total driving time (including the huge traffic jam getting out of there).

USA 89, Russia 68

What a fun experience, watching Team USA take care of Russia yesterday with 15,000 of my closest Chinese friends. I went with four other Americans and brought along an American flag as well that came out a couple of times in the Spirit of the Olympics! Fun times!


Maybe I can justify these games as a school expense. I just wrote a paper on the NBA's worldwide business expansion, particularly into China. They definitely liked the Team USA stars, particularly Kobe Bryant (the favorite by far), LeBron James (even though he had a lackluster game), and Dwayne Wade.

Here's my picture of Dwayne Wade on a breakaway dunk...



It was also fun to see how the Chinese cheer in basketball. One problem is this, they cheer loudest when their favorite people on shooting free throws. Kobe shot several free throws several times during the game and the place was the loudest it was the entire game when he was shooting free throws. With "friends" like this, who needs enemies??


The game itself was closer than I had expected before we finally pulled away. The Russians have a little American point guard named J.R. Holden who plays for them. He never played in the NBA, but played very well for the Russians. Russian czar Vladimir Putin personally gave him citizenship in 2003 to be able to play for the national team. Interesting...


One other note, Andrei Kirelenko is a pouter! I liked him in a Utah Jazz uniform, but today he was very frustrated (while playing really well), but several times in frustration/anger he spiked the basketball... and no technicals were called. Yup, he was a baby.


So I'm looking forward to the game against Austrailia. Hopefully there isn't as much defense played so we can see even more fast breaks and dunks.