Let the Games Begin!

Last night I watched the opening ceremonies live on TV at a friend's place of my Beijing host for the first few days, Hamilton. The girlfriend of Hamilton's friend is Korean, and several of her relatives were there, Hamilton is also from the US as were two others, and then there was a girl from China there as well. We ate great Korean food, some of which was cooked right in front of us as we ate, and watched everything on TV. It was very impressive...though I couldn't understand of the Chinese broadcast, everyone did translate some of the story that was being told. The broadcast didn't end until just after midnight, so it made for a long day...but it was great to know that the Olympics had gotten off to a start without a hitch. I saw Taylor and Mike Friedman walk by on the TV broadcast - they both looked really excited, and Taylor looked really young...sometimes it's kind of easy to forget that he just turned 18 a few weeks ago.

Today, on Saturday morning, we got up and walked out to the Olympic cycling road race course that passed through downtown. We wanted to get out to the finishing circuits, but there was no simple public transportation to get there and it was nearly 60km away. We decided to watch the race go by a corner near the Lama Temple. We watched some of the oldest cheerleaders do a routine as we waited, and then finally saw the racers fly by. There were two riders about a minute ahead of the peloton, and we were only about 10K into the race. I didn't see Stevic, but I yelled out for him anyhow. He did finish today in 67th place...well done in a tough race Ivan!

After the road race went by, we went to lunch at a small restaurant located in a siheyon in a local hutong. It was food from an area in Southern of China and was fabulous. Then I got a text from Connie, who said she had some tickets for gymnastics and maybe swimming. We took a taxi to the Olympic area near the Bird's Nest, where the Opening Ceremonies were last night. It was incredibly huge - and we had to walk a bit to find the place to meet with her to get the tickets. We finally met up, and went straight into the National Indoor Stadium to see some gymnastics. It ended up being a rotation of the men's teams (China, Russia, Canada, France, Japan, and a mixed team). They were doing compulsory routines in all of the events used to seed the individual events and also the team competition. It was pretty impressive...and the cheers for the Chinese athletes was definitely the loudest.

Then we went straight to the Water Cube to watch some swimming. There were preliminaries for the men's 400 IM, women's 100 fly, men's 400 free, women's 400 IM, men's 100 breaststroke, and womens 4 X 100M relay. Michael Phelps set an Olympic record in the 400IM, and an athlete from Norway set a new Olympic record in the breakstroke. It was quite cool all in all. The facilities are remarkable...very impressive! Check out the photos below. Enjoy - I am!