Olympic Weightlifting and USA Men's Soccer

Our last day in Beijing was an eventful one. We had tickets to see weightlifting in the AM and soccer in the evening. Weightlifting was a new sport to us both. There were about 16 participants in the Men’s competition. An Albanian ended up winning the competition, and he would acknowledge this fact by nodding to each side of the arena’s audience with every successful lift held high.

After the weightlifting event, we went back to the Olympic Green to see the village green one last time, hit the merchandise shop for Olympic souvenirs and of course hit McDonald’s! As much as we enjoyed the local cuisine, Kate and I were both craving western food.

Our next stop was Beijing’s Worker’s Stadium to see the first game of a soccer double header. The disappointing USA team was defeated by Nigeria and Argentina played Serbia. Our tickets were awesome. They were in the second row at the 20 yard line. We got to see Nigeria’s famous celebration up close when they scored their first goal.

The Worker’s Stadium, once Beijing’s premier sporting venue until the Bird’s Nest came along this past year, held the Asian Games Opening Ceremonies in the early 1990’s. Its capacity is smaller than the University of Virginia’s football stadium and the facilities for Concessions and Merchandise are not much better than Broughton High School. We got there early, and thank goodness because security was tight and the crowd large.

USA suffered an early set back when one of their players received a red card in the third minute. They had to scramble against a determined Nigerian side one man down for the rest of the game. The USA put up a good fight and made it close at the end; however, Brian McBride and his team ran out of tricks at the final whistle.

This loss was a hard pill to swallow because it meant that the US needed The Netherlands to lose to Japan in order to move on which didn’t happen. They had been winning against Netherlands until the 90^th minute when the US conceded a game tying goal. This effectively meant that the US Olympic journey came to an end with this match. While US Soccer fans should be a little unsatisfied with the team’s performance, the US has come a long way in soccer with fellow rivals Mexico and other soccer powerhouses not even qualifying for this phase.

Our final night in Beijing included a Grand Finale dinner with our Chinese friends Liujing and Du Xiaoli. We went for a Beijing Hot Pot dinner. I read somewhere that this type of cuisine was derived from ancient warriors eating their dinner out of their helmets! Our culinary experience proved to be more civilized . Hot Pot can best be described like Fondue, only no cheese or chocolate! The meat (lamb, beef, chicken, etc) is served thinly sliced and raw and you are meant to cook it in a pot of mushroom-ish broth for a few minutes. When the meat is cooked, you dip it in a sauce made of ingredients of your choosing. You can also dip vegetables noodles into the pot. When you are done with the meat, you can take a ladle full of broth from the pot and add it to your sauce and voila! You have soup!

Our dinner was a wonderful cap to our stay in Beijing and we are thrilled to have experienced so much of it on such a short stay. The Olympics were as magnificent as they are on television and it was thrilling to learn so much about China.