A Peaceful and Beautiful Village

There may not be blue skies, but the ground is looking beautiful inside the village. Gardens, statues, mini ponds with stepping stones across them...our walk to the cafeteria and to the international zone is quite nice, especially when we are walking past and with Olympians. Some are world famous (Nadal sighting in the dining hall, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh talking with my teammates, extremely huge athletes and tiny ones) and some I don't recognize, but we are all here to compete...we've finally made it to The Games.

Some specifics:

Rooms - We have 3-room suites with a middle common area, complete with chairs, table, air purifier, water purifier, and TV for live coverage. My roommate is Heather Petri, who's blog you should also check out (labeled Petie) and so far we have turned our white-walled room into an American masterpiece! We put up pictures and notes above our beds to remind us how we got here, a USA flag in between us and lots of red, white & blue bling to remind us who we represent, and a monstrous XXXXXXL t-shirt compliments of Carlos (Dad) from an earlier trip to China that will hopefully be signed by many athletes to remind us that we aren't the ONLY cool ones in this town.

Food - One huge dining hall, which so far, even when crowded is still manageable. Today, Al and I wanted to be adventurous at lunch and sit next to and meet some sociable looking athletes, but we chickened out a little bit...finding the edge of a table in between some tall Deutschlanders and a group of Americans. We found out the Americans were the women's field hockey team that had just arrived from the US, but we didn't even attempt to make contact with the Germans...maybe at dinner we'll do a better job. The food is actually great we have cereal, sandwiches, pasta and salad at every meal with a few other Mediterranean and Asian dishes. And of course, how could I forget McDonald's also serves us burgers, nuggets and fries while McCafe provides the coffee for free, all day long.

International Zone - Post Office, Salon, Media Center, Environmental Center, General store, Olympic Merchandise Store...and many more places I can't remember. We got free t-shirts made from 4 recycled bottles in the environmental area that will later be used as a pin-trading local. I haven't tried it on yet, but I'll let you know if it feels like a t-shirt or like I'm wearing 4 plastic bottles.....Also, we started talking to one of the girls working there and somehow got on the subject of school. She was soooooo excited that she was meeting 2 girls from Stanford and kept repeating how lucky she was! Her uber-excitement, I think, stemmed from her recent application to Stanford class of 2013, how cool would it be to see her roaming around school??? She was VERY into recycling also...sounds great to me, Good Luck Su Mi!

...there are VERY strict rules to what we can post and I don't want to get in trouble for something like that. I will get some up, but I need to double check with the authorities first....