The Trouble With Tennis

Just back from Beijing, having decided to fly back so we could take care of laundry today. Such minor conveniences drive our lives. In any case, i've two stories for you today about the last week. Far more stories remain, but time is limited. Despite the two stories, we did manage to visit a different section of the Great Wall, since the Badaling section (the popular one) is closed all week for Olympic bike racing. We also managed to visit the Forbidden City yesterday before taking in women's basketball last night. By the way, we sat between one girl who attends Delta college in Stockton and a set of girls from UC Davis. It's a small, small world.

The Trouble with Wang Qiu (Tennis)
We flew into Beijing Friday afternoon, a journey I'll now call Plan F and one which i'll write about below. We got settled quickly and arranged to travel to the Great Wall on Saturday. Great trip, although exhausting. Sunday was our first day of Olympic events. now, Beijing is fairly locked down, meaning that we can get close to the Bird's Nest. Only those with tickets to a Bird's Nest event can board busses to the area. All others are turned away.

We're lucky that our hotel is next to subway line 5, which runs north/south. it's about 30 minutes (maybe 8 -10 stops) to line 1, which is the main east/west line. Line one will take us to both the Forbidden City and to the Basketball stadium (another 30 minute ride). Sunday morning, we boarded the subway to pick up tickets and then we made a dry run to the tennis stadium. All went well. Strangely, we tried to take a taxi back to the hotel and promptly got lost. This is the first time we've had a taxi drive who had no idea where we were or how to get us to our hotel. Within 20 minutes he'd gotten half way to our hotel, made a U-turn, and ended up onthe other side of town. We finally just got out and found another taxi.

Our evening Tennis match was scheduled for5pm to 11pm and our seats couldn't have been better (row ten in the closest section). We arrived just around 3:30pm, waded through the security line, and stood in packed lines waiting to be admitted. apprently, a few matches were still in progress so they were waiting for those to end before admiting us. Well, shortly it began sprinkling following by a deluge that would not end. While the staff did hand out plastic rain parkas and we did have our umbrellas, it rained hard for 90 minutes, never letting up. Finally, we were told that the "session" was cancelled and that we could apply for a refund following the games.

huh? I ordered my tickets in January, 2007, got GREAT seats, and miss watching Federrer by moments. While i hate to disparage women's basketball (which was great, by the way), we were/are tremendously disappointed. more to follow.

Don't Plan on Plan D
We thought we had it all figured out regarding picking up Chris at the PuDong airport. He would arrive at 6pm ((40 minutes late) but we would still have time to make the fast train to Nanjing, followed by the plane to Beijing the next day. Well, the plane did arrive as expected (6pm). We'd arrived around 5pm and began standing in the gauntlet around 6:10 to wait for Chris to clear customs. The exit area for International travel in any airport consists of a single exit that, inthis case, consists of a long, "U" shaped journey which allows spectators plenty of time to spot their loved ones and meet them at the exit.

Or so i thought. What actually happened went like this (well, this is my side of the story). Around 6:20pm, i turned to Mia and asked her to walk down to Burger king (yes, they're in China now) to get him something for dinner. I'd continue to wait for Chris at the gauntlet. Well, somehow i missed Chris' travel through the "U" and he continued walking past the crowd and into the rest of the airport. Yes, Mia and I continued to wait until 8:30 pm when we finally figured out something was wrong. around the 90 minute mark, she'd gone up to United Airlines to ask if he was on the passenger list. They wouldn't tell her (privacy issues). At the two-hour mark we also had the airport make an announcement asking Chris to come to the international area. Around the 2:30 mark, we went to the airport police who told us that we couldn't complete a missing person's report for another 24 hours. A call to his mom told us that he'd left SF, so we suspected he was somewhere in the airport. We just didn't know where.

Finally, Chris had the good mind to stop at an airport business center to ask to use their phone. He called us and we found him.

Unfortunately, we'd missed our train, so we made our way to the train station to ask about later departures. Yes, trains depart constantly through the night, but only standing room was available. Our only possibility was the 6am fast train. NOw, it was 11:30pm and we were dragging. After checking out several local hotels around the airport, and discovering that most were full, we found one at midnight, (mia and i without luggage). We slept until 5am and then made our way to the station for our train.

oh, well, we thought. At least we'll be watching tennis in 48 hours.

Or so we thought.