Beijing Day 5 – 9/30

If you are getting bored of Beijing at this point, you will be happy to know that we have passed the half way point. Today we went to the Olympic Park. It was a very interesting adventure, but not like the one we thought we would get. With the conclusion of the Olympics and Para Olympics, Beijing starting charging tickets to see the Olympic Park on 9/26 (that’s right 4 days earlier). Prior to that you could walk around the buildings all you wanted, free of charge. Now there are at least 4 different tickets. One for the Bird’s Nest, one for the Water Cube, one to walk around the Olympic park (the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube included this one), and one to walk around a track and field stadium.

Sounds simple enough right? Well, as it turns out the actual ticketing booths are hard to find. They solved this by having lots of volunteer information tents at least 4 to each ticketing booth. Long story short they were not much help. Eventually we found out that all of the tickets for the day (not sure how many, but I know there were at least 80,000 for the Bird’s Nest alone) were sold out by 10:00am. Well, they still had tickets to a track and field stadium so that is where we went. You might ask who bought all of the tickets. This one requires you to think a little so once again I will include a multiply choice question.

A. All of the Tourists coming to see the sites after the recently completed Olympics (remember we are here during a National Holiday and China has 1.3 Billion people)

B. Large Tour Guides – There is a tour guide for almost everything in Beijing (Seriously – there is)

C. Chinese entrepreneurs – we call them scalpers in the US.

If you have read any of my previous blog entries you will know the correct answers to my multiple choice questions are always C. Now, one might say (like I did before my worldly wife educated me) okay, the scalpers got me, I will pay more but at least I will get to see it. Well, truth to be told many of the scalpers are not actually selling real tickets, just tickets that look very similar to the real tickets, and since you don’t know what the real tickets look like… well you get the picture. Now to something a little bit nicer... Met the Fúwá Dolls, aren’t they cute (the Olympics Mascots). The blue one is Beibei, the black one is Jingjing, the red one is Huanhuan, the yellow/orange one is Yingying and the green one is Nini. Together (in that order) they are Beijing huanying ni (Beijing welcomes you).