Latest Updates! Including...the Men's USA Basketball Team

My bad for not updating, a lot of things have been happening since we had a week countdown before the Olympics official start, which starts today! at 8:08, can you believe it! I'm in the country and city where the Olympics will be hosted and in China, the number 8 is lucky! 8/8/08 at 8:08 PM. That's pretty sick.

Anyway, building up to this moment I've been very busy. I've actually, like I said before, become a Olympics tickets dealer, on a very small scale. I've bought tickets from people that are crazy and buy the tickets in bulk, making ridiculous amounts of money. This one guy we met, we'll call him Dannyclimber, since that's his account name on thebeijinger.com website (if you remember, its the Beijing craigslist). Dannyclimber, who we think might be gay, has so many tickets. We have gotten at least 6 from him as a group, and these tickets are to really good events, good finals events for prices cheaper than others out there. But he has weird conversations with my friend, who's been talking to him. He would be like, "Want to grab a bite when we meet to exchange tickets?" or call on Skype and talk casually instead of business saying, "What do you think of Skype? I think it's 'Hao Wanr'". Ohh too funny. Anyway, he pissed me off this morning because some tickets we had secured for a really good USA Basketball Men's game he sold to some other people, but I can understand I guess since they offered 700+ for each ticket. Greedy bastard.

Anyway, what happened in the end was that I was selling the tickets I was interested in initially. So to make long things short, I wanted to go to some events early on, only finding out that they were to the Women's only events...not as cool as I thought. So, I bought more because they were cheap tickets and good seats, only realizing these too were only Women's events. Losing hope I decided to put them up for sale. I did and got a million responses from people and was able to jack up the price two fold, making a profit and giving me enough money to bargain for good seats. Now, I have really good seats to a really good Finals Athletics game (this means track and field) and I only bought it for about $50, compared to the $300 it was really going for. $250 profit on the side for someone not serious about buying and selling tickets...not bad I would say.

But another funny side story about the ticket sales is that the people I finally agreed to sell to were people that knew each other. One woman buying my 8/15 tickets was the teacher to students that were buying 8/19 tickets and we met at the same place. Jeez, it was weird because we thought they were in cahoots to scam us. Anyway, the students were fine and paid us but the teacher was a BEEZY because she came to us and told us that she thought it was different, saying "What, I thought you were another guy selling 3 tickets for 400 each?" What a crazy request, these tickets that she was looking for were probably fake because nobody is selling that cheap, well unless they are fake, which I have encountered endless times. A good thing about some of the tickets that are being sold is that some, under a black light, have a China Olympic seal, which is really cool. I'll show you guys when you get back home. Anyway, we brought our price down from 1500 for the pair to 1350 because I'm just such a nice guy. I could have gotten more, but I was already out there and didn't want to deal with it anymore. Anyway, that small discrepancy was about $20 USD, so I thought it was not a big deal to risk not selling the tickets as a whole.

Aside from that entire ticket sale process, something else exciting has happened...

THE MEN'S USA OLYMPICS BASKETBALL TEAM IS HERE. THEY'RE HERE AT MY SCHOOL. Even though our school is ridiculously strict with an unusual amount of security, I was able to get some good shots in of some of the starters and key players. Let's see...I got a a picture of Lebron and DWade waving to me. A picture of Kobe, hiding behind a trainer. CP3, two pretty good pictures, and a bunch of pictures of Dwight Howard, Carmelo, Tayshaun, and others who weren't nice enough to look. I'll show you guys if you want.... :).

But I'm glad I decided to chase their bus and lose a sandal because I got to take nice pictures that no one else will have. It's because the time I got those pictures, the security was lower because they didn't anticipate all the US students coming to see their USA Basketball idols. I saw them entering, but when they were leaving practice (in the gym at our school that was specially made for them), some took a hidden entrance out, but this is even not accounting for the massive people blocks that the guards put up to keep the US students away. It was lame, but I'm glad I got my sweet pictures. I chased them one last time on their way out of our school and screamed DWADE, he looked at me and gave me a peace sign. Sweet. Too bad I couldn't get a good picture, their bus windows were tinted. Dream Team 2 Baby, they got the Kidd, how can they lose?

I think USA has a good chance to win it.

Just a small sample of what I got: Dwight Howard and Chris Bosh.

But now that it's the day of the Opening Ceremony, all the traveling has gone down for me. I'm thinking I might just stay at the apartment and watch the fireworks on TV. I know it sounds lame but I hear there is a terrorism warning from Muslims, telling other Muslims to keep their children and themselves away from any place a lot of Chinese people will be. How is that possible? This is freaking China! Anyway, that's what makes me a little worried and knowing that my mom instilled a paranoia in my head of avoiding trouble at all costs, I would rather be safe than sorry in this circumstance because if it turns out that it doesn't happen and all is fine, I'll still get to experience the roar of Olympic fever when I watch the finals Men's Olympics Track and Field!!!

Let me now show you some pictures from Summer Palace. I went there the other day for the second or third time, don't remember. It was very nice. Even though I'd been there before, and with less smog than there was yesterday, it was nice to reminisce and see how things have changed since I'd been there 2 years ago. It didn't change much, good preservation. No boats this time, but I did see the grass that this little kid in red was running on last time I went. It was so funny that I remembered it when I passed by it. Anyway, the other thing that was really awesome was that, when we were up at the top of the Summer Palace, where I went to 2 years ago, I was waiting for Tammy to come out (the others had already left the area. But as I was waiting for her, this reporter from CNN USA (San Diego and Miami) came up to me and asked me where I was from. I obviously tried to speak English as much as I could because I thought if he heard me, he might talk to me, which he did. As soon as I found Tammy, he came up to me and asked us where we were from. We told him we were from Cali and were study abroad students. Then he put the camera on us and asked us questions like "How does being here make you feel?". I answered with some BS response like "This place is very amazing, it allows us to slightly relive the past experiences here that took place during the Qing Dynasty. It's amazing to think that the Emperor walked these same steps...blah blah." Some corny crap, but if you see it online or on SD news, all you SDers out there, save it for me, I want to see it.

This dragon bush thing was pretty cool.

They almost closed us in the Summer Palace because we stayed past closing hours for the second half.