I just don’t understand. We have the most medals, and we worked so hard to catch up to China on golds, and now we have and we’re still second?

This isn’t over yet, China!

Anyway, I gather you are all having fun with the Olympics as well. Last week, I took a brief nighttime nap and woke up at 4 in the morning to watch the Opening Ceremony, whilst my fellow Americans succumbed to the tyranny of NBC, still unsuspecting of the network channel’s mesmerizing incompetence, gross ignorance and bizarre choices, to watch a recording of it hours later. I’ll admit that up until the Olympics, I was close to apathetic about it, while everyone was asking me if I was excited.

“No, I’m OK,” I had to say. I felt kind of lame, but I couldn’t lie.

But watching the Opening Ceremony is tradition. It’s mostly fun to watch, if just to see how weird other countries are. Then Beijing came and showed everyone how it was done, and I just had to see what sort of zany things the British were going to come up with. Geese? An army of Mary Poppinses doing battle with a 40-foot Voldemort? Idyllic village life and taxi-inspired mascots? God, it sounded so bizarre. And it was.

It is times like these when I wish I had TV. I’ve been resorting to online streams that have been holding up well (so far! Knock on wood!), despite our schizophrenic Internet connection and harsh IOC broadcasting rights. Unfortunately, while we can catch some of the events at night, a lot of things happen while we’re sleeping. This means that unless I really care (which, being the Olympics, I don’t ), I won’t get to see some things at all. One thing I’m glad to miss out on, though, is the hilariously/infuriatingly inept NBC coverage everyone keeps ranting about.

Watching the Olympics also has made me realize how long I’ve been in Beijing now. When I first moved here, the 2008 Olympics had taken place less than a year before. The event was still fresh in everyone’s minds. The Bird’s Nest and Water Cube were still novelties, and the pride of the Olympics still hung in the air. Then, China dominated the medal count, which is really the only thing that matters, with 15 more gold medals than its nearest competitor, the U.S. Hopefully, it’ll be much closer this time around or, ideally, reversed.