Beijing 2008 Olympics 到北京看奧運 (Aug 2008)

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In the first picture is He Chong of China preparing for the jump. The second picture is his very hight score after the jump. I believe he went on to win the gold medal for men's 3-meter springboard driving.

The last picture is the Water Cube before the competition. On the left you can see the plastic bubble wall.

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It was quite late when the diving qualifying rounds were finished. By then, all the lights were on, and the Olympic Greens became a giant light show.

I am very glad that we took some time to wander around and enjoyed the light shows. From what I read, these light shows will not be turned on again once the Para-Olympics are finished. In fact the Water Cube will be transformed into a water amusement park and a mall, without the color changing lights due to high maintenance cost.

The Water Cube and the Bird's Nest sounded almost like a one-use buildings to me.

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More light shows.

Behind this T transmission tower, next to the Bird's Nest, was a series of giant power generating trucks. They were the standby emergency power supplies.

I read that there was a special para-military force of 6000 who spent their days and nights in the rural area around Beijing to protect the power transmission towers.

In Beijing, not only the Olympics venues were all lit up, many major roads and parks and the greens in front of commercial buildings were all decorated with special light effects. There was no expenses spared!

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At the entrance of the Olympic Greens was a large court yard displaying or decorated with Chinese musical instruments with traditional style buildings.

Inside this "drums" is the elevator to the subway stations.

We generally enjoy the Olympics events very much. The biggest complaint was the lack of choice for and low quality food inside all the venues.

Many times our dinner or lunch inside the Olympic venues consisted of plain buns, cold sausage, and occasionally Yili yogurt (probably laced with Melamine!!!)

The McDonald's is the fanciest food outlet inside the Olympic Greens, but the line was just too long!

Why couldn't they serve some traditional Beijing food? Like noodles and soupy dumplings?!

One of the more interesting Olympic food was the self-heating rice box. We actually bought one to see how the self-heating mechanism works. We did not eat the food after the experiment though.

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19-Aug-2008.

Tonight we would be seeing the 1/4 final of women's basketball in the new basketball stadium.

In the morning, we wandered around in the busy Wang Fu Jiang trying to find a local Beijng style noodle and dumpling shop. But we ended up in a tourist trap selling some pretty bad food.

The only highlight of our lunch was that we got to try fried scorpion. It actually did not really have any taste. The texture was similar to fried shrimp shells.

My young daughter was thrilled at the notion of eating scorpions. This was her bragging right, in addition to eating fried grubs and fried grass hoppers in Thailand earlier this summer.

These two pictures were taken with my camera phone. The colors seem off...

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Beijing Olympic Basketball Gymnasium, or the Wu Ke Song (Five Pine Tree) Gymnasium.

After coming out of the subway station, we had to walk a few hundred meters of urban streets to the venue.

And along the way we got to see the "finest" of the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics - ticket scalpers offering all kinds of Olympics tickets, sellers of stickers & flags, and even guys offering us a umbrella for a used ticket.

In the later sections, I will have a bit more of my observations and speculations about the ticketing arrangement.

Once we passed the security check and got inside the Wu Ke Song compound, the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed.

Time to get more tasteless food for dinner.

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The 1st picture is the court before the match.

As in any Olympics event, a large portion of the venue is reserved for media with monitor and other hi-tech gears. Since this was only the 1/4 final, not much media attention here.

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The matches were US vs S. Korea, then Russia vs Spain. With my not-so-professional gear, I was not able to take too many good action pictures.

There were a few groups of very loud Russian fans yelling and waving flags.

In the background of the last picture is the ring of corporate boxes. I wonder what it takes to have a box here...

The audience, predominately mainland Chinese, mainly cheered for S. Korea and Russia. Should not be a surprise to anyone.

But if it were men's basketball match, I suspect many would cheer for the NBA stars from US. See the next set of picture.

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First I noticed an entire section was blocked-off, with staff sitting at the entrance to the row of seats.

Then they all standing up during the intervals, while young guys eagerly taking picture between the shoulders.

The focus of their attention was the guys sitting there. Must be the NBA stars.

The NBA must have been a very successful American cultural export.

I remember perhaps 10 years ago, clothing and sports stores in Hong Kong were suddenly awashed with NBA merchandise. I was wondering why the youth in HK, who are generally not very sporty, would be fascinated about NBA.

In the mainland China, the popularity of NBA is a lot more understandable - I was told that basketball is a popular activity for young people, and Yao Ming's has been an iconic figure.

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Whoever they were, must be popular figures. I saw people waved to them and and take picture of them.