Olympic Fever!!!

Ok, here it is, all you want to know about Scott, Sylvia, and the Olympics! I'll do my best. Sometime last Fall we applied to volunteer. We had interviews in March, heard in May that we were accepted, and then got trickles of emails here and there. Scott is assigned to the Olympic Common Domain, doing Spectator Services. Basically, he stands inside the Olympic park (south end, between the Bird's Nest and Water Cube) and helps foreign spectators with any problems they have. The biggest problem he encounters is that people get dropped off by taxi, or enter the wrong gate. Then they have to walk 500m the other direction. Because of security you can only go into the park at certain spots. There's just a lot of walking involved. Even for us, the bus drops us off one place, we have to walk up to the security gate, then walk back down to check-in, then back up again to your location. Chinese people are used to it, but foreigners generally get pretty fed-up with all the walking :) So that's Scott. His managers are really great, they contacted him right away when we were back from camp, he was working before the olympics even started. He basically is required to work everyday, but it's kinda flexible. He usually works 4 then takes 1 off. The chinese are pretty thrilled about the Olympics. They don't take days off!

As for me, I had never been contacted by my manager. I called an Inspector for my site, and he said that they had problems with the manager, he wasn't answering his phone. Finally, 3 days after the Olympics had begun, I was called to go pick up my ID badge. I went to the south end of the city to get that, then had to go to my venue at the opposite end of town. I am also on the Olympic Green (park where most of the venues are), but in the northern end, about a 15min. bus ride from Scott's location. I am at the Tennis, Archery, and Field Hockey venues. As I found out on Monday, I'm in the office for the Volunteer Assistant staff. This office is in charge of checking in and out of all the volunteers for the tennis venue, getting uniforms for them, some statistics about the volunteers, numbers for catering, and writing a newspaper for the volunteers. So the question was at first, what would I do?? They didn't really have anything set for me to do, so I suggested maybe something in English in the newspaper, because there are other foreign volunteers. So I'll be interviewing foreign volunteers, and writing some short articles for the newspaper that gets put out every other day. It's been pretty laid-back though. We have a TV in our office, where we can watch all the Olympics we want. And today I helped make some paper flowers! My job is much easier than Scott's, but a bit more boring.

Our office is located underneath one of the tennis courts. Our security clearance doesn't allow us to go INTO the actual venue, but we can get pretty close, and peak inside. Yesterday I peeked at the match between a famous chinese girl and a spanish girl. Also, we went into Center Court when there was no game going on. But I'm pretty sure it was a William's sister that was practicing there. Tall, black, USA uniform. Pretty cool. And yesterday I saw some of the field hockey action between the UK and Argentina. We receive free breakfast, lunch, and all the drinks we want. The food isn't that great. Actually, lunch is pretty bad. But at least the drinks are good! The Olympics are totally sponsored by Coke.

One of the best things about doing this is meeting other chinese people. Most of our colleagues are university students. They are all excited to have foreigners working with them. I was paraded around to other offices to meet them, but it kinda felt like they were showing me off. It was kinda awkward.

We went to 2 women's soccer games last night. Brazil vs. Nigeria and Canada vs. Sweden! Good times. And on Friday we're going to see Handball. Looks like fun. We're also hosting 2 delegates from Niger right now, so our French is coming in handy! We're all going out to dinner now so I've gotta go! Thanks for all your comments!!!!