Posts in “Olympic Events” Category

I, personally, have never been in a bird's nest! Well, that was until five days ago. We got tickets to the second day of athletics. Even though it's not our favorite event, we just wanted to see what the Chinese National Stadium or the "Bird's Nest" was like.

 
First, we took the subway to the Olympic Green stop.  See how crowded it was at the exit of the subway!

There is always something for the crowd to watch at Olympic events. My mom took this video of some half-time hoop work.

 

On Wednesday, August 13th, one of my dad's friends surprised us with four tickets for the tennis match that day. Since my dad had to work, one of my aunts, who was visiting, went with me, my brother and my mom. My mom got instructions on how to go to the tennis venue from her friend who had gone before. So this time, we took a taxi to the Olympic subway line. Once we got to the transfer point for the Olympic Green, we got out of the station and took a No. 2 Olympic bus that took us directly to the Olympic Green Tennis Venue (it was really crowded & squishy though). We then went through security and had our tickets checked. In all, it took us around one and a half hours to get there, compared to the three and a half hours last time. It was overcast and humid, but no rain!

Rafael Nadal was playing against Igor Andreev on Court 1 for the first match. He's my mom's & brother's favorite, so we went there first, even though it was not in Center Court. The tickets we had came with a grounds pass, which allowed us to watch any match on any of the courts. The match between Nadal and Andreev was amazing because it was free seating and our seats were only about 50 feet away from the court! I have never seen a big tennis match in person and it felt like we could almost reach out and touch the players. We had watched the entire Nadal vs. Federer match at Wimbledon on TV, but this was so totally more awesome than Wimbledon (pardon my grammar). Nadal's serve looked so much harder once you got close up (up to 197 km/hour). Plus, you could see the ball rotating really fast when he hit it. We could also see that the players were really sweaty with the heat and humidity. That must make it a lot harder to play well.

I have been out in a canoe and a kayak before and I thought that this would be like kayaking on a lake. Well I was really wrong about that. You see, this wasn't any ordinary course; this was a Level 5 course with rapids, drops/falls and all that stuff.

Now I can truthfully say that your Olympic blogger has finally attended an Olympic event!  One of my dad's friends gave us two tickets for the first round of tennis. The event started on Sunday, Aug 10, 2008--two days after the Opening Ceremony (wasn't it cool how Li Ning lit the cauldron!?!)  As the event was on another even day and we have an odd license plate on our car--it meant more public transport.

That would be fine, except for the fact that half way through the trip it started to rain. We were not sure if they would cancel the games for that day, but we decided to go and give it a try. My dad had printed out some instructions of how to get to the tennis courts; we took a shuttle bus downtown, and then rode on the new Olympic subway line to the stop by the Bird's Nest.

We walked up the steps to get out of the subway and then we saw it. It was a huge mass of people, and beyond the teeming mass of people were two security tents! It turned out that you had to go through a security checkpoint before you are allowed to ride on the Olympic Green Subway line. So we lined up and waited a looong time.