Beijing Impressions, Day 2 continued

Today's event was weightlifting, and wouldn't you know: I got girls again. That's not what it was when I bought them, but they can and obviously did rearrange the schedule a bit in the intervening months. Better luck tomorrow, perhaps? Do women wrestle?

It was pretty interesting, even if it wasn't what I was expecting. The Chinese girl broke a bunch of world records and completely blew away everyone else. The local crowd, as you might imagine, just went bonkers. Jacques Rogge was in the audience. Also, it means that I finally got to see a medal ceremony!

I keep noticing more little details about the training and such. The kids who switched out the weights between competitors always stood in unison, and waited until everyone was back to sit down in unison. Have I mentioned that there are cheerleaders, too? Two squads, in fact: the girls in bikinis, and the normally dressed ones in the audience. At least they weren't playing insipid (and mostly American) pop music in between every single volley like they did yesterday.

Thoughts on the subway:

• Kappa is a very popular brand, and I have no idea why.
• I'm really quite tall, here. Why didn't I notice until today?
• When a beggar went through the train asking for cash, nearly everyone I saw (including me) gave him some. Conclude what you will.
• I may just have a biased sample, but Beijing seems like a very young city. How do you square that with the one child policy? Maybe it has to do with the urban migration patterns.

While wandering around Wangfujing looking for arts and crafts stuff, I stumbled upon the Olympics merchandise flagship store. It had tens of thousands of different things, as opposed to the few hundred at the venue stands. My dad has no idea how lucky he is; I wouldn't have been able to find half the crap he wants me to bring back for him. So far, his tab is up to RMB 1525 ($222) and he still wants more.

I think that's it for tonight. The air conditioner in my room seems to have died, which sucks more than you can imagine. It looks like it might just have frosted up, so hopefully it'll be better by tomorrow.