In China

We have arrived in the new airport terminal in Beijing! Will post pics later.

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At airport

And away we go! We are moments away from leaving LGA and beginning our journey to the Olympics. We didn't sleep at all last night in the hopes of shifting our time zones more efficiently. We have a 4 hour layover, which is somewhat annoying, but then it's straight to PEK. 

The Opening Ceremony was pretty amazing -- the rollout of the scroll was ingenious and the sheer manpower overwhelming. I think the electricity of the Opening Ceremony is carrying over to the events. Michael Phelps already captured his first gold in an impressive, world-record shattering 400 medley, setting the pace for the rest of Swimming. The Gymnastics qualifiers are competitive and with the new scoring system in place, who knows what will happen. We happened to catch some Women's Weightlifting (48kg) on nbcolympics.com, and gained newfound respect for these athletes. It's all happening so fast, all across Beijing, and we hope to cover as many events/sights/sounds as possible. Stay tuned! 

No Live Opening Ceremony on NBC

NBC is not showing the opening ceremony live. It is truly hard to believe that 1 billion people all over the world are watching the opening ceremony live, and the US is not part of this, no thanks to NBC. Okay, I know they just want to make the most money by keeping people in suspense until prime-time, but come on! Fortunately there are a few sites that are streaming video from European channels, like this one.

Team USA 0, Norway 2

Well folks, the Olympics did not open too smoothly for Team USA as the women's football (soccer) team lost to Norway 0-2. A gold medal will certainly be tough now, but we will see. We have tickets for women's football, so we hope to see Team USA in action (and doing better)!

In the meantime, we're packing and preparing for the trip, and trying to make sense of conflicting reports on photography at the Games (ranging from "you'll get your camera taken away at the airport" to "you'll be totally fine with any camera").

Beijing Transportation

I came across this page on the official Olympics website. The first piece of information is that Olympic ticket holders will be able to ride city subways and buses for free on the day of the event listed on the ticket; however, we already knew this by reading the backs of our tickets (which are very cool-looking by the way, you can see some pictures here) and the People's Daily. However, what we didn't realize is that ten new "K" lines are being opened to get spectators to and from the events. Finally, this web page gives us some peace of mind regarding transportation to/from the Shunyi rowing course. Bus number K20 will run from the Olympic Green South Bus Depot directly to Shunyi. Rowing finals, here we come!