Gavelwrench Fishfire | A Blog

And I’m back! I thank you all for your wonderful comments and questions while I was away. A lot of people would ask me if I could speak Chinese here. It’s always a shame when a Chinese person asks you that in a crisp English accent and you can’t even muster up the Chinese word [...]

The mass exodus of 18 people today left me with a lot of time. No roommate means having the Internet all the time. I added two new albums as a result. The first features the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing. You’ll get to see the favorite hobbies of the elderly in vivid color. The [...]

I promised to post a picture of me in my Asian dress so here it is. Don’t laugh because I had to take it in the bathroom mirror. My roommate covers baseball so we’re not on the same schedule when I need her to take pictures of me. (Sad side story: They’ve already started tearing [...]

Miss me?! Thanks to Lee for taking part of the blame for my lack of updates. It’s been hard to write and cover basketball 24/7, but overall, it’s been a helluva run here at the Olympics. I’ve been working everyday at training venues around Beijing as well as two or three or four basketball games [...]

There are more photos up featuring Julia’s new best buddies.  I am in the process of moving to Wisconsin now so I haven’t had the access to update on Julia’s behalf as much.  More posts will follow in the next couple of weeks! Lee

I went to the Night Market in Wangfujing. It’s known for its versatile menu, and you should be prepared to see and smell every type of protein known to man, usually on a stick. The pictures are self-explanatory, and yeah, that scorpion was gross! Click here to see what else I ate.

Do yourself a BIG favor and watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. It will, without a doubt, be unrivaled in the next Olympics, not only in magnitude but the sheer spectacle of it all. Otherwise, it’s hard to describe. You will be amazed the exact minute it starts. Regardless of how you feel about [...]

Today I came up with a game called For or Smog? Here’s how you play. Go up to any Chinese Olympic volunteer, comment on how polluted, disgusting and absolutely smoggy it is outside–and it is–and see if you get this response. “Smog? No, no, no. It’s fog not smog.” If you hear the word fog, [...]

I had a great first day of work. It’s exciting to be around athletes so excited to compete. It reminds you of why there is an Olympics. Unfortunately, I came home and clicked on cnn.com to see a horrifying story about little Chinese girls forced to walk on their hands for three minutes as part of [...]

Tonight at Walter’s goodbye Fish Nation dinner, we started speculating what the world would be like when we were 80, around 2060. Imagine, we said, telling our kids things like we remembered when iPods were invented, when laptops got thin, and being alive for the turn of the century was, yeah, pretty cool. This wasn’t [...]