Greetings from Beijing!

By now the Opening Ceremony has been a wonderful memory and like you I watched it on television. China’s television broadcast was spectacular. Our hotel is not far from the stadium but we have not seen it up close and personal. Hopefully that will happen. As with all the Olympic Games, security is very tight and you can’t get into a venue without a ticket.

As you might suspect, we arrived safely. The travel time is long but well worth it. Because there were many heads of state arriving in Beijing on the same day as we were, the airport was closed to public transportation, like taxis. We learned that we needed to select one of the buses that would take us into the city, somewhere near our hotel. Beijing is home to more than 17 million people and it felt like all were in line ahead of us at the airport! The weather was not disappointing either, hot and very humid. Confusion was the state of mind! Just as may be portrayed on television, there appears to be a constant fog around the city. Not certain what is in the fog?

The bus took us to an unknown destination, which lead to trying to get a taxi cab. Several attempts failed but we were able to get a female driver to at least consider taking us somewhere. I had copied the hotel’s website in Chinese which enabled her to call and find out where we were going. We arrived at the hotel several hours after landing at Beijing’s beautiful new international airport. It is magnificent.

The Opening Ceremonies were stunning, sorry we missed seeing it in person. Tickets for a seat were outrageously expensive if purchased ahead of time. We also saw lots of people with fans trying to cool down. I can only imagine how hot it was with all of the people and no air conditioning…

I captured some of the beauty of the fireworks from our hotel window, they don’t do them justice.

Saturday was a day to catch up and continue to figure out which events we were going to be able to see and acquire tickets. Connections proved difficult but we were fortunate to be in contact with Gan Kawakita [former LHU Assistant Women’s Volleyball Coach] who is working with the USA Women’s Team. He met us and it was great to see a familiar face! USA Volleyball had a tragic loss of a father-in-law of one of its men’s coaches. Both men’s and women’s teams had to have been upset by that. The individual responsible was captured but that didn’t change the unfortunate circumstance.

We went to the match with USA and Japan. The audience was very interested in the introduction of USA’s Women’s Volleyball Head Coach Lang Ping, former China national coach and player. She has a tremendous following in China, in fact her wedding was televised nationally here. The match was good to watch with long points and lots of great shots and defensive saves. It didn’t start until 10 pm which made for a very long evening. Imagine almost 20,000 people going to see a volleyball match.

The organizing committee has put together some interesting entertainment between matches. Each sport venue has its own set of cheerleaders. Some are pictured in the photo gallery. Peter don’t get any ideas…mascots are everywhere as well!