And we sang. . .

Today is my last full day in China. We finished up with all the presentations yesterday, including mine. Everyone seemed engaged and asked really good questions, which is always a good feeling! After the meetings were over, we came back to our hotel for a reception. Hilton is a U.S. Olympic Committee sponsor, so we always stay at Hiltons whenever we can. This hotel was just recently renovated and is unbelievably modern. I’ve been starting off each morning with a run in an amazingly well-furnished exercise room for a hotel. The first morning I got on the treadmill, punched in the numbers, and took off on a slow jog. “Why am I going so slow?” I wondered. When I had reached 3 miles, I thought “Wow, living at altitude must really be working for me, I’m not really tired!” Well, if you haven’t guessed what was going on yet, this is China and everything is in kilometers!

Anyway, after the reception back here at the hotel, we went to dinner at a really nice restaurant down by the Worker’s Stadium (I can’t remember the name). No crazy dishes like goose liver this time which was quite a relief. It’s amazing how unfamiliar everything is here – from the food to the alphabet. This week was a good demonstration of how difficult Beijing 2008 will be for Western athletes. After only 2 days of being in this Eastern, unfamiliar culture, most of the seminar participants sought out the Beijing Hard Rock Café just to eat something familiar. This street sign kind of sums up what it’s like to find your way around the city. The colorful Chinese writing in the other picture is, what I think, an advertisement for some type of industry show going on. I have no idea what is says, but it was really colorful and looked fun.

After dinner last night, a few of us went to a karaoke bar (hey, when in Rome. . . !). We thought we were gonna go to a bar and sit around and laugh at people singing up on the stage. Oh, no - not in a country that takes Karaoke very seriously! We were told at the door that we would be charged by the hour, then they showed us up to our “room.” We were all getting a little nervous at this point about what was going on, but we went along anyway. It turns out that we had rented a little room with sofas, a coffee table, and a giant screen Karaoke machine! There was a playlist in several languages, including English, so we ordered some drinks from our waiter and picked out some tunes. It was a little strange to sit around a room and sing into a microphone, but it ended up being pretty fun once we were all singing along together (no, I didn’t use the microphone!). The songs were all old stuff like Tie a Yellow Ribbon! Very strange music choices for the most part! My voice is actually quite hoarse this morning. I would post a picture of us all singing last night, but I didn’t ask the guys if they would mind being posted on my blog, so I don’t want to embarrass anyone in front of their teams back home in case they didn’t know their coaches and team leaders were closet Karaoke singers!!!

That’s all for now, a little more business today and then hopefully some more sightseeing. The Great Wall is a ways away from here, so I’m disappointed that I probably won’t make it out there on this trip. Oh well, there’s always next time!