The End!

This is my last entry from the Olympic scene and thank you for sharing this with me (and nagging me when I fall behind on the posts.) If I were to blame my blog tardiness on anything other than the fact that I triple-booked my whole Beijing trip, I would blame it on the taxi rides, which are no less than 40 minutes no matter how near you think you're going. But you can learn a lot in a taxi: For example, it is completely appropriate for young children to wear bottomless onezies and pop squats on the sidewalk. The most important lesson may be that "ok" does not necessarily mean "ok I understand." (This will cost you at least another 40 minutes. Luckily that's only about $3.)

From riding elevators that have a maximum capacity of 18 and have the day of the week written on the floormat (someone changes it precisely after midnight) to trying on XXL Chinese clothes that will never fit me or randomly running into friends on the Great Wall, this was a month to remember. It's definitely nothing like the America's Cup-- in some ways good and some ways bad, but having a completely new experience means more in the end. There have been a lot of stories in the past few days involving scalpers, travel nightmares, duck dinner, trying to spend as much money as possible and only getting to $200 because everything's so cheap, running into more random friends, and finally going out socially... but I'll leave you with this: the 2012 preview rocked and I can't wait to get pumped for the next one.



This is how you get up to the Great Wall


This is how you get down from the Great Wall. The toboggan ride has 1 Yuan insurance (around 15 cents) and even this speed demon found it a little too unsafe. (Not unfounded as we saw 2 crashes).



Drying fruit in the market. It's just sitting on the wall by the street. My camera scared the flies away.

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, and Vans, and Taxis

I had tried to go to Hong Kong for one night to visit a friend but with an impending typhoon, 12 hours of travel (nothing direct...) and absurd prices I voted to come to Beijing a day early. By the time I landed Zach (team ticketmaster) had a synchronized swimming ticket waiting for me and off we went to see the Russians win. Then I made the mistake/adventure of going with Carrie to find her family in Tiannamen square and after an hour on the crowded subway it was a mess. Then as we looked for a place to eat it took us, no joke, over an hour to find a taxi. We actually never did find a taxi and we ended up eating at "Food City"-- Hey, it was food.

We made it to the Bird's Nest just in time to catch Brian Clay win the Pentathlon and Aussie Hooker win the pole vault. Riding the village bus with all the athletes is pretty fun-- feels like the Olympics! Carrie said how cool it was to see the Olympians doing everyday things-- it makes them like real people. I had to remind her she's also an Olympian who does everyday things.

I'm keeping this one short because Beijing is kind of a whirlwind. I'm going to the Great Wall now with Carrie's family and need to hop to it, but more details and pictures to come!

USA! USA!

I was walking to lunch yesterday in the media center basement and got a very pleasant and foretelling surprise. It was about an hour before Anna went out to race for gold, and they were rehearsing our National Anthem for the audio system. Wearing my USA shirt, I marched into the lunchroom with my right hand over my heart. We Americans are few and far between in the media center, so it's fun to stick a little USA pride out there.

An hour later Anna won the gold. The race was insane and I now have absolutely no voice. By the time they played the anthem for real I knew that was a special moment down there in the lunchroom. By the way, the United States National Anthem is truly gorgeous. After years of hearing it it's easy to become desensitized, and of course I'm biased, but that's one motivating tune.

My Georgetown coach Mike Callahan used to joke that I had a crush on Anna, and I kind of did. She played fair and smart and was a pleasure to compete against. Even before the trials I just thought to myself that if anyone deserved a gold, she did.

Local journalism quality update:

After receiving great questions from the BBC and everybody else, the only local journalist in the mixed zone who could get a word in edgewise made this inspired observation: "Anna! You look like Sarah Jessica Parker!" Needless to say the real journalists were shocked/not at all shocked after having seen this for weeks and the interview session was killed.

I'm reminded of this Ben Ainslie press conference question: "Ben, do you consider yourself to be Superman or some kind of ET Extra Terrestrial?"

Wasn't Confucius from here?

Boiling Points

The media center is steadily becoming a madhouse! It's easy to understand the Olympics is a hotbed of pressure and exhaustion, but people deal with their frustration in different ways. Some of my new friends here manage to clock out for beers by 8 or 9PM every night, but for those of us who stay here until 10, 11, 2, or 1:45 (That's been my schedule the past four days) it's not that easy.

Not less than ten minutes ago two Chinese journalists got in a heated yelling match with three of our young, female volunteers. It got to the point where the middle-aged man pushed a girl and she and her peers ran away crying. He ran after, pushed past the girl who was trying to block the door, and all we heard was a lot of yelling and sneaker-squeaking.

Rewind to two days ago, when a photographer lambasted a volunteer in front of the whole media center and made her cry.

Now add the constant drone of the PA system, through which they use possibly the most words available in the English language to convey every message. Yesterday a famous journalist screamed at the sky "SHUT UP!" to vent some frustration against the intangible voice.

Now remember that many of these people are exhausted to the point at which they can't control their emotions, and that they are all working on deadlines with hundreds of requests.

In the midst of all this I'll admit I am catching a bit of the insanity, but I have luckily been sitting across from my cheery Croatian equivalent. We work the same hours and she's always smiling so I use her as an inspiration. It' becoming a bit of an animal farm here and we have to look out for each other.

Media Center at noon:

Media Center at midnight:

Around the Village

We have three medal races going on today in the pouring rain and the rumor is the Star and Tornado RC boat was sinking and had to go in. But enough about sailing I write about that all day!

Ticking/Beeping Security Wands update: Security officers have now put their ticking/beeping wands into backpacks-- I guess to be less conspicuous? So now we have ticking/beeping backpacks walking up and down these apparently threatening aisles of the media center.

I did an impromptu photo shoot this morning around the hotel:

First we have our "Warm Remindings" of elevator safety basics. Gotta love the huge heads and stylish tufts of hair.

Everyone makes fun of the "Mind Your Head" placard over the elevator, but I can appreciate that it's well-intentioned. This one I think is a bit of a stretch:

This morning Zach made fun of me for taking the elevator two floors and I said I couldn't find the stairs. He showed me the stairs and up I went, but I ended up on floor 17 instead of 15. I knew I was no good at the stairstepper machine but wondered how I got up that far! Turns out if you look at the elevator numbering, there are quite a few unlucky numbers here in China. Superstition over practicality of course.

Back in Action

Sorry for the delay! Our new interesting development here in the media center is that security guys have started walking by with some sort of sensor that makes noise kind of like the ticking wands they wave over you at the airport. Sitting on the aisle in our prime real estate by the tv monitors (11 of them- none of which play video, just stats), my new Croatian work buddy and I are trying to figure out what sort of rays they're emitting and what kind of threat they are hunting. I also had trouble logging into the blog this morning and got scared, but it's a go!

I managed to steal away for a dinner out with some TV friends I worked with in Valencia at the America's Cup who also happen to be working here. As nice as the village is, only going to a social dinner twice since the 30th is reason enough get out of dodge. We ordered a Teppanyaki assortment type thing and it was great to just eat something outside the village cafeteria, but then the chef dumped a bowl of a diced meat explained to us as, "It's like a snake." I didn't think it was eel either, so resolved to pass on that-- especially when the bowl was filled with part meat and part gelatinous blood-glop. Luckily for us, he was cooking it for another table and it disappeared before we got a chance to get too grossed out.

As I talked to my friend about the changes in professional sailing, I brought up the infamous fact that some of our friends were in the cast of the movie, "Wind." Little did I know my friend sitting right beside me played one of the most talented and memorable (minor) parts in the whole thing! He played Spidey, who climbs the mast to save the day and is tragically knocked unconscious. At that point, you think he might be dead. My heart went out to Spidey every time as I watched him clunk his way down the mast. It looked like it hurt, but he said they paid him a hefty sum to do that stunt, just once with three helecopters. So, every time he banged the mast he just thought, "Cha-Ching, Cha-Ching!" My friend said he was "hamming it up" and everybody made fun of him, but I wondered how you can ham it up if you're playing dead. How can you play extra dead?

Today's picture is an example of the ratio of volunteers to "the rest of us." The best part of this shot is that it is one tiny girl holding the Finn dolley, and all the boys just stared at her without helping. When the angry sailor asked her to pull up, she was too weak and couldn't do it. She was leaning into it, and even tried to sit down and dig in for some hidden strength, but still no help from the boys. (You'll see one boy crouching down with her, but he was just kind of making fun of her and pinching her bicep.) After all that the sailor ended up doing it himself.

Parlez-Vous Chinese?

I am sitting here at the media center and here and have carved out my convenient spot in front of the scoring monitors. What's also great about my spot is I feel like I'm riding "It's a Small World" at Disneyland all day long: I hear Croatian being spoken just in front of me, German behind, Chinese beside, and some bloody British accents one row over. My parents will tell you this is a good thing because I dragged them on that ride about 12 times in a row when I was five.

Another reason I feel I'm in some weird world is because this village is like a gigantic assembly line. Whenever I do anything I pass by 3-8 volunteers to be either checked, prepared, greeted, or served. This is a 400-sailor regatta, but there are 2,200 volunteers, so when I say I see seven on my way down the elevator to breakfast (about 30 steps total) I am not exaggerating. There are two ladies in the bathroom whose job it is to empty the ridiculously tiny wastepaper baskets, and there is a lady at the hotel whose only purpose is to point out the step (which is right in front of you).

Possibly the most assembly-line-esque part of my day is the buffet. The most interesting one is the takeaway line for lunch. We have silver NASA-style lunchboxes we can fill with our choice of vaccuum-sealed cooked goods. After first reading "Roast Beef Ham" as an option, I decided to forgo the vaccuum-sealed meats... Although I did eat a sandwich called "Chicken Ham." I'm hoping it's all in the translation.

Me at work on the dock.