I Saw the Sign

When you think of going to China, one may look at the Great Wall, Forbidden City or Xi’an Clay Soldiers as the coolest thing one can do. Well they are right, the Great Wall is outstanding (more later on that) and really awe inspiring in many places. However, the best night of our trip belongings to July 24th, the night before the last Olympic tickets went on sale at the main ticket office. Olympic tickets were sold in four flights and it was announced five days prior that the fourth and final flight would go on sale starting at 9am on July 25th. Although tickets would be available at all venues, the main ticket office near the Olympic Green was selling tickets to some of the most sought after events: athletics, basketball, baseball and handball (well maybe handball isn’t an overall hot seller, but I wanted the tickets). A group of us was made privy to this clearly public information on the 24th and decided to camp out in line in order to secure tickets on the 25th. Several people went ahead of me and bought the essentials (yoga mats, pizza slices and beer) at Wal-Mart. Clearly we were experienced line waiters, forgetting that in the 12 hours or so we planned to sit there that maybe water might be a good option in the humid Beijing night. I joined the group at the subway and we made it down to the ticket area at about 7:00pm, strutting out of the subway station fairly confident that only a short 12 hour wait stood between us and some great, cheap tickets. Naturally we weren’t shocked to see an already long line forming, one we guesstimated to hold a couple hundred people. After all there are almost 20 million people in this city, some of them must have free time to get tickets. As we followed the giant snake of a line our fears continued to increase that maybe we might not get tickets, perhaps our best efforts were for not. And it only took one look around the corner of the next street to at the same time completely dash our hopes and make our jaws drop in astonishment. There lay before us tens of thousands of Chinese stretching out into the distance. The rest is history…


http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/gallery/2008/jul/24/olympics2008.china.beijing?picture=335958099

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/24/olympicgames2008.china1

http://www.mingpaonews.com/20080725/spb1.htm
The captions says: A group of American volunteer came to buy ticket, but after seeing the scene they opt out (or maybe something like chickened out?) They also made a "the line starts here" sign to entertain themselves.

It says in the article: A few American volunteers hoped to get baseball tickets, they brought yoga mats, beer and food hoping to be first in line, but when they arrive at 6pm, they realized they were too late.

Eric was quoted: This is too scary! We came too late! Even if we start lining up now, we still won't get ticket, so we're just having a picnic here and have a look at the scene of lines."

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Our legend is too big to describe is a few measly words so I will say only that for a solid 3 hours we were the party, we were “it”, we were the news, we were what the French call a certain – I don’t know what, we were the stars (and oh how thankful the Chinese were to see stars because you sure can’t see them in the sky), we were Westerners, we were ‘those guys’, we were causing so much of a distraction the police broke it up…and it was AWESOME!