Wrestling Blogs - Martin Floreani

Alright so there are tons of crazy stuff going on here in China. Not to state the obvious but The chinese people and government got so into these games. I feel like they filtered the cab drivers to be the best in China. They are super honest and seem like they are out for our best interest. Not what I was expecting. After hand picking the best cab drivers in the nation they went on to put a radius around all Olympic stadiums and not let anyone get close to any facility without tickets to events. this allows China to try and absolutely control the security but also deflautes the Olympic feeling a bit as no one can just hang out around the facilities and just chill. It also keeps things kinda desolate because everyone doesnt have tickets to all events. (I think the companies that set up boothes around the Olympic stadiums are probably pissed too.) Which brings me to another point because the Chinese eliminated scalpers stadiums can be half empty but the tickets are completely sold out. This kinda sucks for people who may want to go to an event last minute as well. I dont think the Chinese government could phathom people having tickets to the events but not being able to go.

Yesterday my brother and I took bikes all across the city. We felt pretty foolish for the opening ceromies event because we didnt have an American Flag to flaunt. Im not one of those dudes who would carry around a canadian flag to try and make people think Im not American. For reasons Im not going to get into, those people annoy me. We wanted a huge American flag and we finally found some chinese dudes selling some (made in china). Well they were trying to sell it for 50 Yuan, an outrageous price of about $7. So we bartered them down to 35 Yuan to a still very expensive price of $5.

We were on bikes with our new chinese friends so they got a chinese flag and wrapped the flags around our necks so they were like capes and drove through the hard core parts of Beijing. We got stopped by a news crew and everybody stopped and waved and smiled. People get shocked so easily here. My brother and I got interviewed by a news agency and had a photo session of about 15 minutes nonstop with the chinese people. Im not making this stuff up. People would give us their babies to have my brother and I take multiple pictures with us. Multiple times it got to a point where Mark and I were like "lets get out of here" and two more people would come up and hold out their camera asking for our picture.

For NCAAs and other events I go to we are working all hours trying to get stuff going, it is always a blast and wouldnt trade my job for anything but it is also hard work. Here we are just taking it in. Riding around the city with an American flag riding with a chinese guy with a chinese flag was crazy. No one saw anything like it in their whole lives. Everyone was driving by taking pictures and stuff. Our tour guides were very ambitious and I think they loved being around us so we rode for about 30 miles on these crapy bikes. Needless to say I was pretty tired and was kinda annoyed that we couldnt just return the bikes ourselves because we had no idea where we were. I was very cautious when we were at Tinenium square where they had those protests in 89. My brother didnt really know anything about them and I tried to explain. There is a big picture of this dude Mao on the wall and I didnt want to take a picture in front of it because he is like stalin or something, so my brother got a picture in another part. I wanted to see the place where that dude stared down that tank but our friends didnt know where it was. The security cameras, the history and the fact that we got so much attention anywhere we went gave my brother and I a really creepy feeling so we got out of there pretty fast and avoided a dangerous situation.

When we were on the cab ride home we heard about the killing of a couple of Americans and found out it was right where we riding that day. It happened at a tower but there was already police there when we passed so when I asked our friends if we could go see the really big tower they decided by the looks of things that we couldnt. I had no idea anything was out of the ordinary. Well the killings and the Russian invasion have made things a little more tense here. I hope that nothing else happens, but we are only on the second day of events.