It had been a long night and we had decided before going to sleep that the plan was to depart the hotel room around 8am to make it to the first game. Let me just say that while I fully support the concept of a “plan”, it’s the implementation of said “plan” that often causes me consternation. Luckily, this plan caused me no consternation, because I slept right through it. I awoke an hour late, missed breakfast, and Wesley had long since left for the venue. He was nice enough to leave my ticket, however, so I gathered up my backpack and camera and high-tailed it to the subway. Beijing, it turns out, is a reasonably large city, and its subway system is quite large and somewhat confusing to a first-time Beijing subway user. So it took me a good 50 minutes to get from the stop nearest the hotel to the stop nearest the venue, and of course I took the wrong exit which necessitated some circular walking. Nevertheless, I made it towards the end of the Iran vs. Australia game.

As you might imagine (and no offense to any Iranian or Australian basketball fans here), the Iran vs. Australia game had a few empty seats. And by a few, I mean the majority of seats were empty. This was fine with me, as the seats, despite being in a brand new stadium, were far too close together for my comfort. Of course, the game ended and people started entering for the next game – Angola vs. China, and most of the empty seats quickly vanished. It seems there is a fan base in China for Chinese basketball. And this guy named Yao Ming. Who’s tall and affable and apparently plays in the US. So now we were a little more crammed together, but it was exciting to see a real-life famous person . The Chinese, no surprise, won the game, much to the delight of the assembled masses. Much to our own delight, we now had about three hours to find some food before the real fun started.

So Wesley and I set out in search of food. I was okay with pretty much anything, and was even looking forward to some Szechuan-style food having had my fill of American chain food by now. To this day I’m not sure how we ended up there, but we took the subway to somewhere, got out and walked for a bit, and ended up at a mall. We explored the mall for a few minutes, and, surprise! – there was a Pizza Hut. So apparently we were now obligated to eat there, which, I’m ashamed to say, was our fourth (yes, fourth!) visit to Pizza Hut since our trip began. What can I say? As an American, frequent visits to Pizza Hut are pretty much built into my genetic code (and now into my arterial walls too). I guess the funniest thing about Pizza Hut in China was that we were always the only obvious Westerners in the store – and we were never really sure with all the stares whether the local population was positively or negatively surprised to see us. Oh well, the food was just as good as before.

Since we’d now violated every major rule of cultural food immersion, we decided (read: I decided, and forced Wesley to follow along) that a search for a McDonalds Sweet Taro Pie was in order. A ten minute walk away from the subway revealed a McDonalds, and, yes! they had sweet taro pie. In fact, they had some kind of combo that included a sweet taro pie and a pineapple pie, so both were purchased and immediately shoved into my backpack. Wesley, wanting nothing to do with McDonalds, stayed outside. On our way back, we walked past several stores including a bakery, which Wesley dutifully ordered stuff from lest I be the only one to have tasty treats to smuggle into the basketball arena.

It was now getting uncomfortably close to game time, so we made our way to the subway stop and headed back over to the basketball arena. When we emerged at ground level at the arena area, we were shocked at how many people were there all of a sudden. Every entrance was full of people milling about. We walked to a far-side entrance hopping the line would be less – it probably wasn’t, but we managed to convince ourselves that it was a good idea. It didn’t help that people were constantly cutting in line and that the lines themselves weren’t clearly delineated, but nevertheless after a twenty minute wait, we were ushered into the initial ticket check.

We knew this game would be popular – not as popular as a USA vs. China matchup, but popular nonetheless. So we were a little surprised when we got back into the stadium that there weren’t very many people sitting around us despite it being very close to tip-off. It turns out lots of people got ensnared in the long security lines, as the house was packed shortly after the game started. During one of the breaks, the announcer mentioned something about a famous American, and the camera crew panned over to him. I couldn’t hear the name they announced, but the person looked a lot like Michael Jordan to me. Wesley thought the person was a TV/movie star. Perhaps someone can identify the mystery celebrity based on this photo?

In case it wasn’t obvious by now, I’m not a huge sports fan (oh the horror!), so I wasn’t so much interested in the score and the moves as I was in being “in the moment” at that particular place and at that particular time. That said, watching the US team go for slam dunk after slam dunk was fun, and by the second half of the game I was really getting into it. As they say, it was an “electric” feeling, and I guess I finally understand what that means. I immersed myself in the moment, and clapped and cheered and enjoyed the antics of a small but vocal contingent of Greek fans sitting in the nosebleed section – if their team had performed as well as they had, Greece would have won the game. All too soon, the game was over, USA having beaten Greece 92-69.

With the completion of the game, the realization also set in that our amazing trip was nearly at an end. We joined the massive crowd waiting for the subway and about an hour after we left the basketball stadium we were back at our hotel and promptly went to sleep.