Day 7…again…

Sorry about the break in posts, but marching band camp started yesterday so things have gotten busy again. I’ll try and keep up, but some of it might have to wait until next week.

The rehearsal this morning (Aug. 6th) was actually a lot of fun. We finally got to see the other hubs perform from outside the formation. The Chinese had set up a mini field show that they planned to use for their next performance. After everyone finished performing, we loaded the buses and drove to the soccer stadium in Tianjin which is a few hours from Beijing.

This performance was also covered by the media, but I think we were televised only in China. We played the same program as in Tiananmen Square. We went back to the buses for dinner where we got our first sample of Chinese McDonald’s. We had a few minutes to change out of our uniforms, and then we were off to the Games.

Security was SUPER tight! Everyone went through a metal-detector, had one of those wands waved over them and all bags were put through scanners. Most bags were even searched by hand. This was at women’s preliminary soccer game. I wonder how bad it is getting into the stadiums now. The match was China vs. Sweden. China won the game 2-1. The game itself was fun to watch, though I don’t know enough about soccer to give a good description. A couple of our people bought Chinese flags and circled the stadium with a parade of other people carrying flags. We started our own little Swedish cheering section in the midst of the Chinese. The people in front of us told us how to cheer for Sweden in Chinese, which was cool. It was more out of fun than seriousness. I certainly didn’t mind the Chinese winning. The stadium went insane!

It was an amazing day. As I said in the first post…we did the wave at the Olympics =D