The Day off part 1

The first official celebrity meeting has occurred. Some will know this name and some will not. I met Dick Ebersol the other day. He is the President of NBC Sports. No big deal. I told him how much I enjoy their golf coverage. He thanked me and wished me well. I recognized him in the middle of a hallway, and he was wearing a polo, cargo shorts and casual leather shoes.

I had a day off today along with Jared the other American. We decided to head to the Beijing Amusement Park. We knew very little about this place, but hey what the heck why not! So we boarded the subway and noticed three young women with green marked Olympic credentials. Athletes. I asked one of the three girls what sport. Swimming she answered with a European accent. What country, Kazicstan. I know that isn’t spelled right, but I’m too tired to check. She lives in Washington D.C. and trains all year...before and after her full time job! She made the FINA qualifying time, and is representing her home country in the 50 freestyle. Her third and final Olympics. Marina is her name and she finished 27th in Athens but was swimming the 200 IM. Her friends with her were also swimmers, and they were competing in the 100 back and breast respectively. They all three were very disheartened by their nations uniform selection. Orange is the dominant color. You can watch for that in the Opening Ceremony. We chatted for about 30 minutes, while our subway train steadily made its way downtown. This is one of the great things about working the Games. Knowing what to look for we can strike up conversations with athletes we spot and find out about a girl, who won’t get any press, but has trained for 20 years in order to compete for her home nation. What discipline to work out on her own before and after work, without any chance of medaling.

We arrived at our destination, which had signage that looked like a used car lot and a hello kitty store had been mixed in a blender and poured out on giant billboards. There was nothing tasteful about the Beijing Amusement Park entrance. I had found it on a map, and looked it up online. Their motto was the following: Disney world is too far, come to Beijing Amusement Park instead. I’m not making that up. Their front gate had a princess theme, except that the princess was on drugs. Not a pretty sight. It was also deserted. About 100 people in the entire park. Did that stop us! Heck no, we bought our tickets and headed into what would be the most depressing amusement park I’ve every seen. We were greeted by a giant green algae invested lagoon. The giant lilies growing on top, were blending in way too much. We walked up to the first ride we saw. It was a small roller coaster called: Super fast cool cool bear. I’m not making this up I swear. The sign below it said “don’t hesitate, come ride”. See in the China somebody who some English came along and translated a lot of stuff. And to this day they’ve never checked to see if the translation actually makes sense. We boarded the ride with other 5 kids in line, and away we went on our 45 second steel adventure. The ride worked without a problem and it was very fun. However, don’t look for Six Flags to be importing this one anytime soon. We continued on to the next attractions. They were permanently fixed fair rides. You know those rides operated by a guy with one leg shorter than the other, or a guy wearing a shirt with a name on it, but it isn’t his name? Well these were the vomit inducing specials. We’re going to lift you in the air, then spin you around on a gravity based arm that flips separately from the spinning of the machine. I was just watching it and it made me queasy. None of the Chinese kids riding it toss their cookies, but I did notice the ride operator was sitting in a glass enclosed control booth. Coincidence? I think not.

We continued through the park noticing it was in quite a bit of disrepair. If a ride was no longer operating, they just left it there, and let the grass and weeds grow up through it. Never seen anything like it. No more water twirl magic car, let it grow old, rust, and continue to take up space. The names of the rides were hilarious. No creativity. We rode the Sky Bike next. Yep, we got on a shared seat with pedals and a sprocket above a track a cycled our way at about 1 mile an hour around a metal track overlooking animal props that were succumbing to very little landscaping maintenance. We could have gone faster but the mother pedaling around her two year old son, was taking forever. Next we went to ride the roller coaster, named the...roller coaster. It had a decent first drop and a loop and several corkscrews. It also took about 50 seconds to ride. Finally, we saw something that looked truly promising. Go-Karts on a huge winding track. We thought it looked like it had great potential but thought it would speed govenors in place to limit us to about 5 miles an hour. However, when we had to put on our helmets, and get into our open gas powered kart, we shot out into the first straight away and quickly saw we could go as fast as that little engine allowed us, and that was pretty fast. Fast enough to feel like we could flip the things going into turns. After five minutes of heated racing I defeated Jared to take the first ever unilateral coordinator grand prix. And with that victory we decided we’d seen enough of the Beijing Amusement Park and it time to head onto to other adventures.

This amusement park was a great illustration of this country. The Olympics have driven some massive upgrades and rebuilds around the city. But if you get off the Olympic path, you run smack dab into terrible conditions. This amusement park was in terrible shape. It was ugly, not well kept, run at minimal effort, yet the people didn’t seem to know any different. That is the real China. When you peel back the Olympic curtain, you seen poverty, and no creativity, only copying of other ideas somebody saw. This thing was a mismash of Disney, pop culture and anything else someone saw a picture of. Quite sad really. I’m going to expand on this topic more with part two of my day off, which I will post shortly.