Does this come with instructions?

Well, the day started out as normal. Me waking up before dawn, having a few moments to myself and Lori waking up just before it is time to go to breakfast.

Once again, we decided to take the Olympic bus to the Olympic Green so that we could be dropped off close to the Birds Nest and the Water Cube, not to mention that it is a good 15 minutes quicker.

On the way, I decided to take some shots of Beijing waking up. My first few pictures were the kind where the bus is driving by and you just snap you shot and hope you get a good picture.

After a taking a few of these shots, I was looking for some more interesting pictures to take, perhaps some architecture. I was looking out the bus window and saw some pretty cool stuff ahead so I put my arm out the open window with my camera in my hand and snapped a pic. A few meters on, I thought I would try it again as we approached a really cool looking building. I put my arm out the window and as I snapped the pic, all I heard was the bus driver yelling at me in Mandarin, I quickly pulled my arm in and checked my camera to see if I was successful. All I got for getting yelled at was a picture of the bus' side view mirror. I guess that is how the driver saw me taking the pic. DOH!!!!!!



On to Olympic Green......



Today was the day of the Men's 10m Platform Diving Semi-Final, although our seats were better than for the 3m Springboard Gold Medal event, we still could not get closeups of the divers :-(

I don't think I have ever seen an event that moved quite so quickly. When we saw the 3m event, there were 12 divers who each had 6 dives. This time there were 18 divers who each had 6 dives. The 3m event lasted for just over 1.5 hours with a medal ceremony after. The 10m event lasted for 1 hour and 38 minutes. Canada had two divers in the competition who managed to finish 16 and 18 out of 18. The diver who finished 16 was Rueben Ross, I remember his name because this lady was walking around the stands with a t-shirt that had a Canadian flag on the front and 'I'm Reuben's Aunt' on the back.

All in all, it was a great event. I sat beside this lady and her 3 year old son. She was amazing with her son and he was so cute, clapping at the same time his mother did, waving his cloth with fringes like his mother showed him, and he did exactly as his mother told him. One thing I have discovered about this trip is that the Chinese adore their children and the children adore their parents and grand parents. I have not seen the kind of behaviour we see in North America where the kid will throw tantrum in the mall or on the street, talk back to their parents and even, at times, use profanity towards their parents.

What I have seen in China is that there is great amount of love and respect given towards children and amazingly enough, the children return it. I guess it is because they are taught love and respect so they see that as the normal pattern of behaviour.

Lori and I were going to meet David after the diving event so that he could use one of our ticket stubs to try to get into the water cube under the ruse of leaving something at his seat. After the event I called David and he was on his way to the Birds Nest for his soccer game and was running late so would not be able to go to the water cube. David did however want Lori and I to meet him before he went in so that he could introduce us to his friend from the North West interior of China.

The plans that Lori and I had were to go explore the Chinese Cultural exhibits at the north end of the Olympic Green by the South Gate of Olympic Forest subway stop. While we were walking towards the subway station, we decided that it was too hot and we should just head down to the Wangfujing shopping district and walk around. This is really nice area, but now that I look at the map, we only made it to the Oriental Malls Plaza and up Dongdan, Wangfujing is one street to the west. DOH!!!!! I guess we have to go back.

The Oriental Malls Plaza was full of amazing stores from every designer you could imagine. I checked a few stores out and these prices are the same as they are at home, oh well, I guess I won't shop here but we did have a great walk around the area and the mall and saw some pretty cool stuff.



After making a purchase, we decided to head back to the guest house, grab out bank cards, grab some cash and go in search of a cell phone.

Off we went, back on the subway and out to Xidan shopping district.



After getting all turned around with exiting out a different exit than the time before, we managed to locate the China Mobile store where we had seen some pretty cool phones. After shopping around the store and looking at a bunch of new technology phones, the gal comes out with this brand new phone they just got in that day and presents it to us. This phone is amazing, really nice screen, keys are great, it has a digital cam, video cam, MP3 and MP4 plus loads of extras. I ask the gal how much and she tells me 1850 Yuan, I say too much and we finally agree on 1600, after she laughed at my first offer of 1200. Lori bought the same phone for the same amount too.

I bought the phone for 1600 and ventured off to see if anyone else had the same phone on offer. We found a shop that was just down the street from China Mobile, pushing the phone as the latest technology and selling is for 3850, we got a great deal and are extremely happy with it.

After our telephone purchase we wandered around Xidan at night for a while, an amazing place, and then we decided it was time to go back to the guest house and charge our phones. Unfortunately everything is in Chinese but we did have the shop set the phones to english.

After not being able to figure out how to charge the phones, we went to sleep. I must have had an epiphany during my sleep because when I woke up I thought I should look at the instruction booklet for pictures and, lo and behold, there was instructions on how to obtain and English User Guide on the last page. My new cell phone is charging as I write this entry.