way smiling, examining the pin from another world you have just bestowed upon him. Now, resume your smug look, it worked before.Pin trading is as important to the Olympics as politics. The atmosphere is mostly jovial. The Chinese are arrogant when it comes to bargaining and I’m Jewish, we might as well be cousins in that regard. I rarely had to pelt out a punch over a pin, but I did tell a few insulting lurkers to “go away.” It wasn’t necessarily over the traditions of swapping, more on cultural variations of rudeness. In one instance a woman looked mockingly at our Mizzou pins as my comrade attempted to swap her. “This is not a real pin. It has nothing to do with China. It is not a pretty pin.” My annoyance over China’s vanity had already reached a critical point. I broke many of my own rules, looking away from my pins (they really will get stolen if you don’t watch them), managing my burning voice as best I could; I said, “The Olympics is about all countries, not just China.” She was taken aback by my abrasiveness. She responded merely by backtracking her comment and I turned back to my pins. I wasn’t sorry for it. Most of my opinions have, and will continue to be, kept absent from this blog. I felt justified, my reasons for why I broke cultural rules and boundaries were evident to me and to those around me, who have been here for some time. Ask me about it on Sept. 18th.
The Closing Ceremonies were that same night and after we wrapped up our last official pin trading session, four other delinquents and me gallivanted around on the Olympic Green semi-illegally. We had a couple of hours until show time, so our adventures and hunger brought us to Mickey D’s. Chinese lines are a great way to break social boundaries and bring you to question what you’re touching and what is touching you. But Chinese food lines are a fabulous place to make friends—or enemies. On this particular night I aimed to keep the woman behind me from using my back as a ramp in which to launch herself at the counter, while I attempted to lure the perverted gaze of the Chinese man to my right elsewhere. The frightened bewilderment of the man to my left distracted me from my line’s work. He shook his head at the chaos and I smiled at him. We chatted for a bit, he was an older man who was born in Spain and slightly upset by the U.S.A’s win over Espania in basketball earlier that day. But he had a ticket to the ceremonies and glowed with excitement. Despite the lack of personal space and unnecessary jostling, he truly seemed to enjoy every aspect of the Chinese culture. I got my food and with it a ticket out of the jumble, I bid him good luck and walked on. As the five of us sat at a table for two, we teetered our dinners on the table’s edge and laughed at how comfortable we had become with these situations. I looked up to see the monster crowd throwing up my new friend now jovially carrying his food. Beside us were two open seats and he and his partner joined us. The seven of us joked mostly about our run-ins with Chinese food. Their experience with the mysterious Chinese cuisine was eons better than ours, which always causes me to raise an eyebrow in confusion (but I suppose they never had to eat the free “food” at an Olympic venue). Nevertheless, we left the two to finish their fries and continued on our way to see how close we could get to the ceremonies.
It turns out tickets are necessary if you came to see the show, that is; we had no interest in viewing the ceremony inside the Bird’s Nest. The jangling bells, matching stretch suits and excited looks of the performers as they waved at us on their way inside was a far better view. Our interest waned, however, as all the excitement did compact itself into the Bird’s Nest. That is until we received a call from one of our little cohorts. She had ventured off in search of a bathroom and found herself barricaded watching athletes gaily parade into the stadium. Would we like to come? “Seriously?” was my only response. We coursed through the stragglers pacing themselves up to the stadium, which was patiently waiting for it’s last night in the spotlight. We found our little friend chatting up the guard (who was not supposed to be talking, by the way). We had front, um, barricade seats to greet the athletes. Chinese culture is relatively quiet, so let’s just say that our excitement screamed “American,” but it was worth it to see it bleed into the athletes. They were genuinely happy to see us wave at them by name. They threw pins and gifts into the crowd, and we watched each country as they made their way onto the world stage. I looked for Viktor Ruben, the Archery Gold medalist and
my crush, but he wasn’t there.I’m genuinely not sure if it is a surprise to know that the biggest, most exciting part of the Olympics, for me at least, is not the athletes. I rarely go to movies because of who is starring in them; I go for the high of being lost in something imaginary and surreal. The Olympics, to me, were like a movie; each player delicately placed and engineered to depict a persona or portray a feeling. Knowing about the Olympics, watching the games became a common thread for everybody in the city. It was the one thing we knew about each other and the one thing we could share. Like an omniscient narrator, all the readers knew what everybody was thinking, but the ending was still a surprise.
That night, after the ceremony had started and everybody was inside we walked back to the other side of the stadium. We settled on a rock just behind the Olympic flame. I kept my eyes above the stadium, watching the flame dance and swell with the performance. Every minute that ticked by the flame became more passionate. It grew, knowing it was soon to be over, and I became anxious. I wanted to record it, to watch it disappear. The five of us began to ignore the big screen cluing us in on the inside events. Nothing else seemed as important as the burning flame. We knew the end was getting closer, as the flame hedged further up in the sky, as it grew more passionate, as if fighting the end as much as we wanted to too. The five of us edged closer to the stadium, now barefoot from horsing around only moments before. We grew more silent. With the extinguished flame came a bigger finality to one adventure. For the others it meant an end to their time in China, to the trip of a lifetime that
turned so unexpectedly taxing. For me, it was more than the end of this journey—I’m still here, you see—perhaps it’s childish and maybe even dramatic, but with the end of the Olympics came a signed journalism degree. The end of college, for me, the start of life and adulthood, I merely wanted to stay inside the movie, lost in the rare surreality of life.Love to you all!
~Molly
