Cup of Cha
This is China

Today I feel good about myself. I know you’re probably thinking, “But Josh, you must wake up every morning with a superiority complex!” True, but today is especially good. No, not because my blog was recently ranked #17 in Beijing among expats aged 22-26.

Yesterday CoSport, the official ticketer for the 29th Summer Olympiad, put the last batch of their tickets up for sale here. This set off a mad rush in my office among the expat staff. I say expat because you need to be a citizen of one of the G6 countries (America, Australia, Austria, Canada, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia) to buy tickets through CoSport . (Am I nuts or does that list of countries look like the used the old dodgeball process of picking? Damn! They got Belarus…Who’s left? Kazakhstan or Bulgaria? Okay Bulgaria, we’ll take you. Just don’t fuck this up for the rest of us!)

So I put a couple of tickets in, but since I’ve already got most of what I want to see, I was just sort of filling in the cracks in my schedule. Problem is that there is a $30 fee and I was only buying about $50 worth of tickets. I kept adding things like Heptathlon to try to justify the purchase (any event that has both archery and steeple jumping can’t be all bad, right?)

Then I had a great idea. My office is about 80% Chinese and only a few were able to get tickets. So first I asked the two women who sit near me if they wanted anything. One was really excited, the other not so much. After one picked out some men’s basketball tickets I asked another coworker who was headed into the other part of the office to let the staff know I was taking orders (at cost).

What happened next was truly insane. She walked into the other room and boomed, “谁要奥运门票?” (”Who wants Olympic tickets?”) Within moments there were nine coworkers jockeying for position at my desk. We were able to get boxing, badminton, ping pong, basketball and athletics. Some wanted anything in the Bird’s Nest, even the marathon, which seems like it would be seven minutes of excitement and two and a half hours of waiting. One person asked for four opening ceremony tickets.

In total I bought 50 tickets for my office and was nearly crushed in the process. After the order went through and I started tallying up who got what, I quickly realized that I had a few tickets that no one wanted. Fortunately, a trickle of coworkers kept coming back to me reserving the last remainders until everything was gone.

As I walked around the office it made me feel good to see everyone so happy with the tickets they got. Everyone who wanted to be involved in the Olympics was able. I quickly drafted up a letter and let the good folks over at the Nobel Insitute know of my good deeds and told them that since Jimmy Carter is no longer worthy of his prize I would be a very suitable replacement.

There is a lesson to be learned from this. The Olympics are a time for togetherness. No matter what country you come from, no matter what language you speak it is s time for all nations to come together and appreciate how great Americans are at sports. And not just the ones that we should be good at like basketball, but even the ones we have no business investing money into like European handball.

Tags: office, tickets
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