Selling Tickets and Other Adventures

When I left you yesterday afternoon, Tom and I were headed to the Olympic Green for track and field.

This is the Media Center at Olympic Green........ those black spaces are huge TV screens.

Well, we made it to the stadium area, after a long bus ride due to heavy traffic, but decided to sell our tickets instead of going to the first night of track (boring, according to Tom.) We didn't want to be there until midnight - which is when the bus takes us all back to the two hotels, so Tom pulled out our two tickets and sort of, lamely, held them up.

One man (American) looked at them and said, "Too much". We were only asking the face value of the ticket - and another man looked at them and said, "Too late" (whatever that meant).

So, we moved on a little, and I said, "Let's get off to the side here, out of the way of everyone." So, we moved over a little, and Tom put the tickets up again. LOOK OUT, ECKER! We were bombarded with Chinese men - about twelve of them. When they found we had two tickets, they literally attacked us. Two men were grabbing at Tom's wrists, one man grabbed for the tickets, and one man pulled at my shoulder. There was lots of yelling going on.

Then some bolder person leaned over everyone, covering the tickets and part of Tom, and said, "I will buy your tickets." We sold them to him, and had to take a taxi back to our hotel (about an hour due to traffic and the driver got lost).

We were both pretty shocked at how desperate the Chinese are to get inside the Birdsnest - they really want to say they have been there. Wendy went in for the evening and she said the couple who bought our tickets was not the least interested in what was going on. The woman was on her cell phone a lot, they were taking pictures of themselves from about 30 angles (so says Wendy), and they were not watching track and field.

Our taxi driver was THE MOST aggressive driver I have ever seen. He drove down the shoulder of major highways at 70 MPH and he cut in and out of traffic going about 75 or higher. He narrowly missed people walking across streets, and we were wondering why he is still alive.

So, it was an exciting evening. We are off now for another adventure - heading to the stadium for another evening of track, but this time, we will go inside.