Olympics News and Info

There is This Little Wall in China

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

I’ve been in Beijing for almost 5 full days now and I’ve yet to see an actual Olympic event just yet but I’ve hit plenty of the amazing places this city has to offer. Without a doubt the most amazing part of my trip so far has been our visit to the Great Wall of China.

Setting foot on the wall is something all who love to travel aspire to do and the thrill of actually walking on the wall did not disappoint in the least.

The Forbidden City was amazing at parts but the sheer size and scale of the Great Wall, at such an amazing height, is simply breathtaking. A quick video I shot from the wall after the jump.The section of the wall we visited was much more mountainous than I had always pictured it to be in my head. We had to take a cable car up a few hundred meters just to get near the wall itself.

The visibility where we were at was not very good due to the obvious smog issues the area near Beijing has. I’m curious to know what the amazing vistas look like on a clear day if they exist.

The Great Wall of China, in a word, is simply breathtaking.

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Taking A Cab in Beijing Is Not Exactly Easy

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

Taking a cab in Beijing has proved to be challenging without any of our taxi drivers knowing a word of English. We’ve quickly learned that the best way to get to where you want to go is to have somebody at your hotel write down the address in Chinese and simply show it to the driver. This has about an 80% success rate.

But there are of course circumstances when you don’t have the time or brains to do this which often leads to a lot of pointing at a map. This probably has about a 20% success rate. There’s also some sort of strange law where certain cabs can’t drive to other portions of the city that are a bit far. There’s seemingly a line on a map that they gesture to you that they’re not allowed to cross. That didn’t help us on our endeavor to watch the Opening Ceremonies.

Anyway, the following video is our attempt at communicating with a Taxi driver to get “close” to the opening ceremonies. He tries to asks us if we have credentials or tickets which we clearly did not. Perhaps the highlight of the video is around the 1:05 mark when he shows his love of Yao Ming.

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Nike’s Beijing Presence Outshines Adidas

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

Adidas is an official sponsor of the 2008 Olympics here in Beijing but Nike has a much more remarkable presence throughout the City.

On a trek through many of Beijing’s different shopping areas I came across four Nike stores and only two Adidas stores. The display setup at Nike had dozens of mannequins — including LeBron, Kobe, and Yi replicas — sporting the Olympics jerseys of their respective countries. While the Nike store had a distinctly Olympic vibe to it, the Adidas stores didn’t really scream Olympics or China nationalism.

Pictures of the Nike displays as well as a small sampling of Adidas after the jump.In addition to the store display differences, Nike had a huge presence inside one of the local malls. There was a model half track setup in the middle of one section and boxers, BMX racers, and tennis players setup in another section.

These are simply my own observations but you can read all about the big dollar sneaker war taking place in China all over the Internet.

One of Nike’s displays in the middle of a Beijing mall:

More Nike displays in mall:

Gnarly biking dude in the mall:

And finally the best Adidas display I saw featured the fabulous Gilbert Arenas:

And the Agent Zero stand in full:

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People In Beijing Watch the Opening Ceremonies Just Like You: On TV

I spent about three hours on Friday trying to get as close to the Bird’s Nest in Beijing to get an up close look of the opening ceremonies. We had hoped to find an outdoor area nearby — maybe a park? — with a TV screen of sorts so we could catch a glimpse of the pageantry on TV as well as the fireworks above the stadium.

That mission was a failure but it didn’t stop us from enjoying the festivities. A recap of our attempt after the jump.Getting a taxi driver to go anywhere near the general viscinity of the Bird’s Nest proved to be a challeng in itself. We switched cabs once and finally found someone who dropped us off close as physically allowable by the Chinese police — which is to say about 20 blocks away.

Also, walking on the sidewalk was not allowed. One of these nice police officers kindly asked my friend Chris (pictured) to get off the sidewalk and walk in the street. Makes sense.

Finally we went into the subway and popped out somewhere with a big crowd being ushered into security lines. We had no luck with those security lines as you needed to have a ticket which we of course did not.

There shuttle buses taking people somewhere so we figured we’d give that a shot.

So the shuttle bus actually brought us about as close to the Bird’s Nest as we got the entire day. But we were on a bus.

That dropped us off at another security area where workers with loud megaphones were loudly shouting instructions to the crowd… in Chinese. It seemed at this point as if we were the only people in this area without tickets.

So there was no park, no big TV, etc., and we couldnt find a good location to watch from anywhere. Imagine the South Philly Sports complex but you couldn’t actually get anywhere near the venue and tailgaiting wasn’t an option. Parking lots aren’t exactly fun. We did get to see some surface to air missiles though. (More on that in a later post)

This was the best view got.

Finally we try to find a bar or restaurant nearby which proved a challenge. Nothing within a 10-20 block radius was even OPEN. (Except Starbucks of course.)

So after about 2.5 hours and a caramel frapacino we deem the complex near the Nest impenetrable and a televesion screen in a park nonexistent. After texting some interns from NBC that my buddy knew who had been in China for over a week, we decide to take a taxi to a bar they said would be a good spot to get some food and a view of the ceremonies on TV. It was our best shot.

The bar ended up being rather festive with seating in high demand.

It was a nice mix of travelers from around the world and the locals. This guy (below) was the most excitied and helped lead the whole room in some Chinese chant when Yao Ming and co. brought their flag out.

There was also a British contingent that was quite vocal and friendly as well. One Brit tried to get our group of 8 Americans to sing “American Pie.”

After taxis, metros, shuttle buses, security, and Starbucks, we ended up watching the Opening Ceremonies just like you will: on a TV while eating some chicken wings and nachos. Only problem was, our telecast was in Chinese.

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A Random Chinese Guy Who May or May Not Work at Harvard Paints for Us in Beijing

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

On Thursday night, having been in Beijing for less than ten hours, the most random, spontaneous thing that will likely go down on my trip has already happened.

We arrived to our digs for the next few weeks on Thursday around 1:00 pm Beijing time. After a quick breather at the hotel me and my buddy Chris headed out to explore this year’s Olympic host city.

They weren’t kidding about the smog because it is hot and hazy. We must have walked around half the city yesterday. We hit up parts of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, an indoor mall, an outdoor shopping area, and just some random hutongs around town.

After a few hours of trekking around aimlessly our legs were pretty beat, so we sat down in the main outdoor shopping area to enjoy a few cold ones and take in some people watching.

So to finally get to the good part of this post: We get lost, can’t find our way and are standing on the corner with a Frommer’s map out like a bunch of tourists. Then the guy you see pictured to the right asked us if we needed some help — in English!
I only mention the fact that it was English because in the ten hours we’ve been in Beijing only one or two people we’ve bumped into spoke English. And this guy knew his stuff.

So the guy on the corner giving us directions speaks great English and my buddy compliments him on it and we get to chatting. Turns out he’s an art teacher at a local university and is planning to work at a museum at Harvard in the fall. True story. So anyway, some how the conversation turns to his art studio in the hotel nearby and we agree to check out his gallery. We walk through this shady looking entrance to the “hotel” where they are selling strange types of cigarettes and tobacco products, go up an escalator, through a “lobby” and through a “bar” where twenty-something locals are drinking and smoking. Finally we go through two more rooms and get to an art gallery where he paints my name “Enrico.”

Here’s a video of it. It’s about three minutes long with not a ton of action but it gives you a pretty good idea of what he did for us.

Also, the strange chanting you hear is the crowd outside on the street watching China play New Zealand in their first game of the Olympics. It was a fairly pro-China crowd.

He later painted my buddy’s name as well and wouldn’t accept anything for his gifts to us but did try to sell us a few of his more impressive works. A few of them, featuring images of the Forbidden City, were actually really awesome.

So yeah, that’s my story for day one from Beijing. Frommer’s says your trip always turns out for the best when you go from being a tourist to being a traveler. So there’s that.

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China’s Roads Are Ready for Olympic Traffic

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

The trip from the airport to our hotel in Beijing was traffic free for the most part but in the off chance that we did hit some gridlock the Chinese government had made us our own lane just for those traveling to the Olympics. I took the above photo while in the back of a taxi cruising down the highway.

The main roads were very nice and were lined with light posts bearing the Olympics logo flags every 20 yards or so for the entire length of the highway. The painting of the Olympic rings to designate an Olympics-only lane weren’t as frequent as the flags but there were still quite a few of the markings in the middle of the highway.

Our very first impression of Beijing was obviously of the smog. Apparently the clean up effort wasn’t working too well on Thursday as skies all across the city were tremendously misty with a strange stench of uncleanliness.
The Beijing airport was simply remarkable. It almost seemed to perfect with its unique design which featured a roof that tapered quite seamlessly, letting light through in many parts.

The whole airport experience from walking through the clean terminal to taking a very nice shuttle type train to the baggage area was seamless. The only odd part was the “volunteers” and security every 20 feet. There were smiling faces wearing Olympics gear just kind of standing around doing who knows what. It was a bit eerie.

As for the buildings on the main strip coming into Beijing they had a strange, fake-like quality to them, almost as if you were driving down the stip in Las Vegas. There’s a mixture of archaic looking nondescript towers mixed in with overly emphasized cartoonish Chinese looking buildings and finally some very sexy state of the art type skyscrapers. It was a bizarre mixture.

Finally, when pulling off of the main sections we arrived into some of the hutongs. This reminded me of driving through the clean parts of Atlantic City near the casinos but then getting lost when you’re trying to find Whitehouse for a cheesesteak and and up in some shady neighborhoods.

The distance between clean, impressively designed buildings and dirty shacks is quite small.

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Free Internet Makes the 32-Hour Journey to China Bearable

Filed under: Beijing, China

FanHouse blogger Enrico Campitelli Jr. is on the scene in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

After four airports, three ergonomically packaged airplane meals, two glasses of really harsh cheap wine, and one celebrity sighting, I’ve finally arrived in Beijing.

You’d think a door to door travel time of 32 hours would be a miserable experience but really it wasn’t all that bad. A solid eight hours of sleep on the LAX to Seoul leg certainly helped – as did some free wifi and my iPhone.

Much more on Beijing, which is smoggy and HOT, later but first I’d like to tell you about two fun anecdotes from my travels.

My lengthy itinerary had me flying from Dulles to LAX to Icheon, Korea to Beijing.

On our walk from the domestic terminal at LAX to the international wing we spotted L.L. Cool J exiting an SUV with a small crew of people heading into the airport. It took approximately six hours into my journey to spot my first celeb but Cool James certainly made for a good cherry popper. He’s hard as hell, you know.

The 12 hour flight from LAX to Korea wasn’t all that bad. Two glasses of horrid red wine coupled with the fact that it was 5 am according to my sleep cycle helped me get some great sleep and I woke up just in time for breakfast.

A four plus hour layover in Korea was eased by the amazing Internet Lounge you see above. Not only did they provide free wireless but they also had some great couches and some extra laptops for those travelers sans computer.

Besides checking my email and IMing all of my friends back home “Yeah, I’m in Korea right now,” I also managed to sneak two innings of the Phillies vs. Marlins game in over my Slingbox. Nothing like watching Chase Utley drive in a run from the other side of the world.

For all of my updates from my Olympics adventures in Beijing be sure to check out the Enrico at the Beijing Olympics tag.

This post was written at approximately 24,000 feet above the Gulf of Chihli at a ground speed of 395 mph and a typing speed of 17 words per minute.

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