美国加油！

Went to see America vs Brazil in the womens soccer finals yesterday and it was so amazing. I sang the national anthem loudly before the game, and even louder and more proudly after the gold medal was secured. I have never before cared about soccer or had much interest in watching it, but once you watch your own country playing live for a gold medal all that changes. It seemed like most of the Chinese were pro-Brazil, making the stadium make-up approximately 2/3 in favor of Brazil. It was just indescribable, I will do a picture dump tomorrow after I watch the field hockey finals tonight. China will be in those finals, this should be absolutely insane.

Before the game Ron and I went and haggled to buy large American flags to drape over ourselves and wear to the game. The result of wearing those flags were lots of Chinese people lining up to take pictures with me. Last year when I came to China I never experienced this type of treatment, so I must admit it caught me a bit off guard. I misunderstood the first people that came to have pictures taken with me, I thought they wanted me to take a picture for them not with them. After I understood I wanted a picture with them, too, after all it was just as novelty for me as it was for them being my first time being blindly adored as a foreigner before. A bit later we also had two Chinese guys come and try and buy one of our American flags. They explained in Chinese that they loved America and really wanted to buy a flag to wave during the game, but Ron and I were both willing to sell ours and definitely didn't want to try and profit of our own nation's flag. It was really weird sensation of pride having them want to bear our flag.

I previously made the assertion that everyone in China viewed locker room time as get naked and talk time, but after my time in Hangzhou I must revise my statement to say that this behavior seems to be uniquely Beijing. I never experienced in Hangzhou the strange phenomenon I have seen at both gyms in Beijing where as soon as they have entered the locker room men strip naked and start conversations about everything. You can even hear loud jovial conversations coming from the shower rooms. I still can't get accustomed to just stripping down and carrying on conversations with strangers.