A Birthday Weekend In Beijing

This past weekend I was able to go to Beijing to celebrate two friends' Birthdays. Michael in Nanchang and a friend in Beijing both have Birthdays within a day of each other so we decided to go to the first ever MLB game in China to celebrate! It was a fun time. The game was at the Olympic Baseball Stadium which holds about 12,000 people. There were a lot of foreigners there to see the game but not only foreigners. There were plenty of Chinese people there as well.

The outside of the Stadium. Thumbs up for baseball!



They didn't quite know what to do with us all at the beginning since everybody showed up at about ten minutes before the game in typical American style. Chinese typically arrive early for events, parties, and banquets. In some cases this is to show respect and other times it is simply a necessity with such a huge population. There was only one gate open to the stadium and they were actually doing a real security check. Thus, most of the fans missed the first half of the first inning. Eventually a second area opened up and they let everybody rush in to the game once it was clear that we weren't going to get in for a long time.

This is a picture of the line at 1:00 PM (=game time) bending around to the left.


Our group in line for the game. Six of us from Nanchang and two Beijing friends.


The game:




In the stands...


My engaged friends. Notice Amanda's ring.


At one point late in the game I was getting antsy as I do when I've sat for a while and started cheering for the player up to bat for San Diego in Chinese when to my surprise the people behind me joined in with me. From that point on we were cheering buddies while my American friends laughed at me. One time we were chanting a player's name together and I was trying to say the player's name in Japanese as they were, and they all stopped on cue and I kept going. They didn't mean to leave me all alone but I was suddenly cheering alone and they were laughing hysterically while I was yelling at them for ditching me. Two of them were from Japan and one from Hong Kong. They were so much fun to be with...I don't know what their sign says.



What a team we could be!