Wow! The time’s flown by so quickly, it dosn’t really feel like we’ve been here 9 days! Though I am looking forward to coming home to clean air, food, bedding, clothes, etc. But not so much the temperature (8°C in Wellington today I see.)

We went to the gymnastics last night (apparatus finals for mens + womens floor, womens vault and pommel.) Those guys are amazing! I’m totally inspired to try and get back into gym again when we get back. I managed to get a pretty good seat, and took about 600 photos. I’d like to upload them now but Toni took the camera to more gym tonight. We’ll try and upload some tomorrow, or maybe later tonight.

We saw the last 30 minutes of the Womens Triathalon this morning, which was quite cool, pitty the Aussies won 2 medals though, and we only managed to get 8th.

On Saturday night we had a big night out drinking, shots are incredably cheap here so getting drunk was easy. We where lucky to find a Kiwi bar so we could watch NZ smash South Africa in the tri-nations, it made Super Saturday all that much more super.

I’d love to write more but I’m running out of minutes, hopefully we’ll be able to write one last post before we embark on our 21 hour journey tomorrow evening.

Phil

Food at the events here has been absolutely terrible. You can’t take food into the venue, so there’s no way to avoid it. The queues are long, the staff slow (and don’t speak English – mind you, hardly anyone does but that’s another blog post) and the selection really bad. At most events we will queue for at least 20 minutes and the best thing to eat is a Coke and a Snickers bar. At the Rowing they were selling microwave popcorn and only had one microwave!

Outside of the events we’ve had some great food. After getting soaked at the Rowing we made our way to a restaurant and had hot pot. We each got a pot on our table filled with soup of our choice. That would sit boiling on a burner and we would dunk in veges and meat to cook as we ate. Great food and a heap of fun.

Last night we ate the ‘must try’ Beijing duck. Eeek my internet time is about to run out so I’ll blog about how awesome that was later : )

As you may have heard, the rowing on Thursday was postponed due to rain, thunder and lightening. We travelled for 2 hours, sat in the rain for 2 and then got the news that they had decided to postpone the event. Then it got worse. For one reason or another, when we (and thousands of others) exited the venue, there were no buses waiting. [It is important to note here that there were no other ways back to the city]. The Chinese don’t like to queue so the line-like formation soon turned into a ‘every man for himself’ pushing festival. When a bus arrived and opened it’s doors, the crowd would rush forward – squishing Chinese up against the side of the bus. We managed to push our way though eventually (it helps that we’re the same height as everyone else over here) although we had to spend the 1 1/2 hour bus ride back standing up. Oh, and did I mention that we were absolutely saturated?

I could rant for ages about how poorly prepared the organisers were but I won’t as we revisted the rowing the next day and it went really well. We had a beautiful sunny day (blue sky even!) and NZ won their heat on the final race of the day.

Today we visited the Forbidden City, which is essentially a huge palace area (about 1km square.) That place is amazing! All of the buildings are all so beautifully detailed and the court yards amazingly grand, I’ve seen nothing like it before. I took many photos while I was there (around 100 or so,) which meant I spent half my time trying to figure out where Keren and Toni ran off to, but hopefully it was worth it, and I’ll try and upload some of them tomorrow.

The Forbidden City, as well as the Temple of Heaven and Ritan Park, are such a stark contrast to the rest of the city. While the smog is still evident, the greenery with in these areas is immaculately maintained and makes for a really serene environment. Again, we’ve been taking plenty of photos, so stay tuned and we’ll hopefully upload some more soon.

Phil + Toni

Phew, we’ve managed to fit a lot in over the last 24 hours! Visited the night market last night and ate some pretty interesting things including silkworms and the mandatory tourist-marketed scorpions. They were quite good actually, taste like pork crackling : ) The silk worms weren’t so nice though – a crunchy shell with a mushy inside.

This morning we wandered through Ritan Park which although it had Fuwa (Olympics Mascots) on the ouside, was a peaceful retreat from the Olympic chaos. Local Chinese were participating in everything from fishing to singing to hackey sack with feather shuttlecock type things.

After Phil and Keren played hackey with a local Chinese woman, we headed to the silk market – a 5 storey building full of clothes, handbags and many chinese wanting to be my friend and give me real good price. We insulted a few with our super low offers but also managed to pick up a few bargains.

Lots more to blog about including the Temple of Heaven but I’ll save it for when I’m on a keyboard that doesn’t require me to smash the “T” to make it work. Anyway, off to drink some $1.50 beers. Hope NZ gets a medal soon!

It’s getting towards the end of our second day in Beijing today, but damn it feels like we’ve done a lot!

This morning we woke up bright and early at 6:30am (10:30am NZ time,) ate our free hostel breakfast (which consisted of dry bread, scrambled egg type stuff and something that quite closely resembled bacon,) and headed off to our first event, beach volleyball.

The volleyball was awesome, the Australians beat Angola and the Chinese overcame Belgium (but only just.) We got some good photos, and we’ll try to upload a few.

In the afternoon we went to the Hi-Tech Mall, which was the best thing ever. The most awesome electronic goods you could imagine. Laptops, cameras, RAM, PSPs, flash drives, an iPig and lots of other stuff! It was soo fantastic, any self-respecting geek should visit if ever in China.

I got a Nikon 70-300mm lens from the Hi-Tech mall for about $200 (looking online now, it seems to be a fair price,) but haven’t had a chance to use it yet, though it should help me get some good shots at the next event I go to (which won’t be for a couple of days.)

Tonight we’re heading to the night market, where we’ll be eating some ‘interesting’ food and maybe buy some poorly translated t-shirts (much like the god-fudge shirt I got earlier today.)

Hopefully we’ll post again tomorrow,
Phil + Toni

We’ve arrived safely in Beijing and have spent the day wandering the city admiring the sites and sounds. The temperature is high, it’s humid and there’s a heap of smog – exactly what we expected. It’s a shame that a city with such amazing buildings is near impossible to photograph due to pollution.

We visited Tian’amen square today and were stopped by a heap of Chinese who wanted to have their photos taken with us. I think it’s because we’re just so darn good looking ; )

We also managed to find our way to the New Zealand (xinxinlan) Embassy today and pick up some tickets for tomorrow’s beach volleyball. There are still a large number of tickets available, it’s just a mission to get them as they’ve been allocated to various Embassies and Agencies. We’ve also secured tickets to the Athletics, Rowing, Basketball, Triathlon and of course the gymnastics.

We’ve got so much to see so I’m keeping to keep these posts short but frequent. Look out for us cheering on TV!