July 24th in China, Camping for the final round of Olympic ticket sales!

Today I got up and got around for a short day of training. I was sooo tired but we got to our training site and had a lecture and 2 power points and then we were done. So it only took an hour or so and I was fighting sleep the whole time! haha After that we had the choice to leave or to stay for the free lunch for volunteers half of us stayed. The food was ok, I have had better, but it was free so I can't really complain. After that me and another MU volunteer Furquaan took the bus to head back to Renmin. It took us about an hour to get to the University but that isn't that bad. We talked a lot about what our majors were and what we hoped to do with our degrees after. When we got to the gate of the University we ran into a couple other girls from our group who were heading to an Olympic store nearby. After I got back to the hotel I rested a little before I received a phone call from Allie telling me that her and Whitney heard a rumor that people were already lining up for tickets at the tennis venue, even though they weren't going on sale until the next day at 9 am. Well we thought that we should probably get to the main ticket venue then, because we were wanting baseball and swimming tickets and for sure more people would want those than tennis. So I packed a bag ready to camp out over night and met Whitney, Allie, Mark and Matt in the lobby. We got on the subway and headed first to Wal-mart. We bought some food, some drinks, and some mats to sit on at wal-mart and then we headed out to the main ticket venue. While on the way our friend Eric caught up to us. It was CRAZY! There were people everywhere when we got off the subway and then we turned the corner and our minds were blown! I would say there were between 50,000-70,000 people there. The first person in line had already been camping out for 2 days. It was surely something unlike anything I have ever seen before. We all decided that there was no way, even if we stayed all night, that we would be able to get tickets. So we decided just to sit down on the sidewalk and take in all the energy and the atmosphere. Pretty soon we were a spectacle all on our own! Camera guys were recording us, photographers were taking pictures of us and journalists were interviewing us. Here we were the only non-chinese kids sitting in a group on the sidewalk. Everyone could spot us in that crowd! HAHA Way to go America! So after a little bit one of the guys in our group, Eric, made a sign that said "Line Starts Here", we got a few laughs but not as many as we did once our sign was in Chinese! LOL We asked the help of one of the journalists to write "Line Starts Here" in mandarin on our sign and people were cracking up! I think we even fooled a couple! It was awesome, we definitely felt like celebrities. We were surrounded by a group of like 30 people and we were definitely being targeted by the press paparazzi! I have to say our biggest accomplishment however was getting interviewed by a reporter from the Guardian! Which is like the biggest newspaper in the UK. Our picture made it online as well as 2 quotes from the guys in our group! It was just so amazing, after a few hours me, Allie, Matt, Mark and I all headed back to the hotel. It was surely a night to remember!!!