Tuesday - Go USA or Kung Fu Fighting!

Ok, I'm still suffering from some jet lag and I have been up since 430am. I have been to Wal-Mart to do the weekly grocery shopping, fed and walked the puppy, and now I am sitting on the couch watching some Olympics, so I decided to catch up on some of my posts while I wait for everyone else in the house to wake up.
Tuesday August 12th started out with softball. One great thing about the Olympic tickets is that most of the tickets include more than one game. With the softball tickets we got two games. The first game was Canada vs. Chinese Taipei. Canada won this match 6-1. The second game was the one we were really excited for, USA vs. Venezuala. Considering when you buy the tickets you are just buying for a time slot and you don't know the teams you will get, we felt very fortunate to get to watch a USA game.
Jenny Finch was pitching and the USA team won by run rule at the end of the 5th, 11-0.. Larry bought us flags and scarfs at the embassy, so we were all decked out to support our women!

Lauren, here is one of the freaks that I was able to capture for you while I was gone. Who knew we would travel all the way to China to see the token Redneck.

It was exciting watching the game. These women are truly in a league of their own and will hopefully continue down the road to gold. As of this morning, they are still undefeated in preliminary games. Pretty amazing considering the round robin tournament requires them to play 7 games in 7 days. Go USA!

After an exciting day of softball we were off to an evening Kung Fu show that Larry booked for us. It was cool to watch, although it wasn't necessarily what we were expecting. It was less Kung Fu fighting and more artistic dancing / story telling. It was still pretty amazing to watch some of the fighting and dance moves the performers were able to do.

We finished the evening with a stop at Tian'amen Square to look at the lights. I still can't get over how amazing this area is considering not very long ago it was nothing more than a slab of concrete.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention that became even more obviously while we were looking at the lights. We are all celebrities in China! Apparently people who looked like Wendy, Zach and I are fairly uncommon in China (who knew!) and we got asked to take pictures with perfect strangers all the time. Zach thought this was very weird but started to get used to it by the end of the trip. Here are some examples of this phenomenon.

I'll try to catch up with a post each day until I have summarized the entire trip. Hope you enjoy the pictures.