I'm sure you've heard about the sale of the last group of Olympic tickets in Beijing and the chaos that has ensued to get those last remaining tickets. Today wemade our own attempt to get event tickets, basically any type we could find. We headed out to the main ticket office south of the Olympic Green to find a rather short line that I must admit made me a little nervous - I was expecting long lines since this was the last day of the last phase of ticket sales. I learned too late later today that instead of staring to sell certain tickets for different events each day from the 25th to the 27th in waves, they decided to start selling them all yesterday.
We were then told around 9am, the time the ticket office was opened, that there were no more tickets left, and soon a small crowd gathered, we thought in protest, but no - they made a run for it. We decided to follow them in a more leisurely fashion to Olympic Sports Center venue cluster ticket office to see if we possibly had a chance there. Soon there were security guards blocking both the ticket window and soon after the entrance, not allowing anyone else to come in. A few hopefuls still were line waiting it out when we decided to leave, but now it seems the only option is to scan and hopefully find some good deals on the Beijing Craigslist. If we had read the official Chinese news agency's take on the situation, we would have known that the sign we saw by the ticket office informed us tickets were sold out even before we even got in line!
Just to say that training this week has been mixed - some work, long stretches of free time. We finally got to meet the rest of the photo services volunteers, all of whom are Chinese. I do know now that I have been assigned to work the moat at Court 1 during the Games which is to the left of the lotus-flower center court in this photo. I will be there for matches on a rotating schedule with the rest of my four member group during the Games, but for which ones I do not know as we don't have our schedules set up yet. There is a Chinese student who is the leader of our group, and I am supposed to report any photographer infractions - blocking other photographers or spectators or moving about the moat during the game, for example - to her after the game is finished. And, also, of course, get to see some first-rate tennis be played.
I've gotten to look at INFO 2008, the intraweb system in the Olympic venues that provides information from the Olympic News Service for info on who is playing, and it looks like there are going to be some good competitions with all the tennis players that are coming and what has been happening in previous tournaments. The most famous are Federer, Nadal, and both of the Williams sisters - here is the complete US team.
Training this week has involved me first acting and then reprising my role as "photographer behaving badly" to provide examples of possible problems volunteers could encounter during the matches. The first time was just for the other Chinese volunteers (which elicited a laugh!), and the second time was for the venue-run through we had yesterday. Got to watch a couple of Chinese tennis players "play" a game, and we had to pretend to be the photographers sitting the moat during it. I moved about because I was trying to avoid a huge bee, and then talked to another volunteer, both of which got me reprimands, but since this was the purpose of practice I guess it was a job well done!
We have three more days of training spread out over the next two weeks with 13 days until the Olympics begin. Will try to see Chairman Mao, the Ancient Observatory, and some more temples during that time, and of course will keep you updated along the way. Please feel free to leave comments too, I'd love to hear from my dedicated readers :).
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