Cool days

The last couple of days have allowed me to take some much needed down time. The weather has been mild in terms of Colorado in late November. Although bundled up quite a bit, I've managed to get on my Harley and tool around town a little. I didn't go far- it's much too cold to go very much over 45 mph!!! The Garden of the Gods has been breathtaking for the last few weeks, so I thought I'd give yall a little peek at what I'm seeing on my rides.

Julia and Gavin were really excited when they could finally see the "Kissing Camels" formation on these rocks. Can you find them?!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is a half day at work, so I thought I'd start off the Thanksgiving holidays with this poem I have hanging by my computer at work. I don't know where I originally got it from, so I can't give the author proper credit (which will probably get me sued!). As we all go through the rat race of life, I thought this might make the holidays with family and friends a little bit sweeter. Now if only I could learn to heed my own advice!

Money will buy. . .

A bed, but not sleep

Books, but not brains

Food, but not appetite

Finery, but not beauty

A house, but not a home

Medicine, but not health

Luxuries, but not culture

Fun, but not happiness

Religion, but not faith

Acquaintances, but not friends

Never get so busy making a living that you forget to HAVE A LIFE!

Update!

Wow, since there's been a flurry of activity now that some more Navy buddies have gotten this blogsite address, I feel the need to do a quick update!!

I'm staying here in the Springs for Thanksgiving, then leave on Tuesday for one of our other Olympic Training Centers in Chula Vista, CA (near San Diego). A good friend of mine from Spain just got out of the Navy and actually lives in Chula Vista now (her husband is stationed in San Diego). Between the training center and visiting with Stephanie and her family, I'll make sure I post next week. So stay tuned. . .

Birthdays and Veterans

November 10 is not only the observed day for Veteran's Day, it is also my Dad's birthday!! It's getting close to the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years holidays and I'm itching to go home, so I thought I'd be a little nostalgic in my blog post today!

That good looking guy in the old Navy photos is my Dad back in the day! When people find out I was in the Navy, they usually ask me why I chose the Navy over other services. I could tell you things like the Navy was the only one who would guarentee me a school in writing or that I love the water, but the overriding factor was. . . because my Daddy was in the Navy!!!

I was a Daddy's girl growing up. As you can see from the picture, my habit of twirling my hair goes way back!! I was a huge tomboy and my poor brother and male cousins had to put up with me tagging along with them all the time! I suppose since I never did anything traditional-like anyway, it made perfect sense for me to go into the Navy!!

As it turns out, my Dad and I did similar jobs in the Navy. He worked on electronics on ships, and I worked on electronics on airplanes. If you look real hard in the crew standing in front of the plane, I'm standing second from the right (the lone chick!). Two of my best friends are also in the picture (Jim is standing next to me, third from the right, and Dave is 6th from the left). That picture was taken on Christmas Eve 1995 right before we flew a mission.

So on this day, I'm wishing my Daddy a Happy Birthday as well as a Happy Veteran's Day. To all those I served with, whether a civilian or still on active duty now, I thank you for your service and wish you a Happy Veteran's Day too. It matters not whether you served in peace or war time, you volunteered to lead a life that wasn't always easy or conducive to a happy home life. Be proud of the time you served and for not taking the easy road!

Chinese food

Even with all the horror stories about the food in China (e.g. scorpions on a stick!), there really are some tasty dishes offered. We were treated to a traditional Chinese meal during our trip to Qingdao. Our host explained that the dishes we were having were a mix of both Cantonese and Sichuan.

On the middle of the table is a large glass lazy susan on which various dishes are served in what we would call family style. You spin the dish you want in front of you (or your host spins it over to you) and you dish out onto your plate the amount you want. If you are squimish about sharing your food, you'd probably cringe that everyone takes what they want with the chopsticks with which they are eating. About halfway through the meal, our hosts asked for spoons to be put on each dish so we wouldn't have to "double dip" with our own chopsticks.

During the cultural immersion class we had the first full day we were in Beijing, we had a chopstick contest. Each table had a plate in the middle with some dried beans on it. There were about 5 or 6 of us at a table and we had to see how many beans we could pick up off the plate in 2 minutes. It was really fun and beans were flying everywhere!

Back to the food. . .
Although the fish may look a little intimidating with the head still on, it was actually quite tasty! The ribs were pretty spicy, but went down quite well with my Tsingtao beer (a beer locally produced in Qingdao). We also were served Peking Duck, which I've explained in a previous post (April, Peking Duck). I don't care for the skin, but the duck meat itself dipped into the sauce is really good.

Also offered at this meal was a soup that I can't remember the name of. It was basically a congee with Peking Duck meat in it. Congee is a type of rice porridge. Rice is cooked down in lots of water until the rice breaks apart and becomes a viscous mixture. The texture is comparable to runny oatmeal or overcooked cream of wheat. There are many variations of congee and is quite popular as a breakfast dish. It is usually eaten with savory items such as wheat gluten, various pastes, and some type of fermented egg.

I don't know if these pumpkin dumplings were served because it was Halloween or for the fall season, but I loved them and ate them everytime they were offered. Dumplings are balls of dough stuffed with different ingredients, in this case it was pumpkin. I've seen dumplings offered for breakfast and at the evening meal and stuffed with an assortment of meats. I think they can be pan fried, but I like them steamed as the ones in the picture are.

All in all, we weren't gonna starve in China. I certainly didn't lose any weight anyway! For team leaders, coaches, and staff, it's OK to be adventurous in these trips with the food, but during the Olympics is another story! Although we found several unfamilar foods to our liking, during competition is not the time for athletes to be experimenting with unfamiliar foods. And that fact is the reason I continue to go to Beijing prior to the 2008 Olympic Games.

I'm not scheduled for anymore travel until the week after Thanksgiving (San Diego, CA). Knowing my life, something will happen between now and then to post about, so please keep checking the blog and I'll try to keep you entertained!!

Random Chinese sights

I still have the food post to do on the traditional Chinese lunch we were treated to, but I felt like doing a random post tonight. I got back last night around 7:00 p.m. I'm always amused by the airline snacks. It depends on where the plane originated from and on this one, we had Ramon noodles!

This picture that looks like a smiley face is the electrical outlet in the hotel. This is actually two seperate plugs, the one on top accomodates two straight prongs and the bottom one is similar to the one we plug U.S. clothes dryers into. Just like in Europe, the power is 220V. The first picture is of a street cleaner's "truck." Yep, that's his street sweeping broom sticking up out the back!

One of the great pasttimes of Westerners in China is haggling. I know it's part of different cultures, but I just don't like it. Westerners always say "they'll be offended if you don't haggle." Are you kidding me?! That's like saying people are offended by tipping. Yes, if you tip outrageously in a very poor country, it's perceived as showing off. But really, do you honestly think your waiter is offended that you left him an extra 20 cents that for him will probably feed his family for the evening? I heard someone say that South Korea was ruined by Westerners. That after Westerners started going there, a purse that used to cost $15 now costs $30. So what?! Some father is now able to send his kid to school because I was "robbed" of $15?!

I feel the same way about haggling. Here's an example. . . a shirt I wanted was 80 yuan. I offered her 50, but she stood firm at 80. OK, I say, I'll give you 80. Did I just get taken advantage of? Let me put it in perspective for you. 80 yuan equals about $10, 50 yuan equals about $6.50. A middle-aged woman with only a few teeth left, all of which are half-rotten, is holding out this shirt towards me with calloused hands that have obviously seen more than her fair share of manual labor. I just bought a silk shirt that I really liked and that will be a conversation piece everytime I wear it for $10. A conservative guess is that I make probably 50 times what she does in a year and I have been lucky enough to be born in a country where I have had the freedom to do things she can't even imagine, much less dream of doing herself. Now tell me, who do you think got the raw end of that transaction?

For those of you who followed the posts during the Winter Olympics in Tornio, you'll notice that the toilet in this picture is similar to the one in Italy. Before you get grossed out, it's just cardboard and paper in it. This is a brand new toilet that was just installed into a new building we visited that was still under construction. The toilets in the hotel are regular Western-style, so I was quite amused that folks would still install these squatters after having been exposed to the luxery of the sit-down type!

The last picture is also of the same construction site we visited. Look in the picture behind the woman standing in the foreground. That guy is one of the workers sitting in his "home." He's sitting on a bunk bed and his clothes are hanging in the right side of the picture. There were two sets of bunkbeds in here, so I'm assuming this area is shared by several people. The inside of this building was reminiscent of a house having dry-wall installed. If I would've had to stay in there more than the few minutes we were touring, I would've had a mask on so I wouldn't breath in so much construction dust. And these people were living in there. All construction sights in Beijing have temporary housing (little shanty shacks) on the construction site for the workers to live in. Rickety at best, they really are quite sad. Luckily, construction sites get done pretty quickly with so many people working on them, so hopefully they don't have to live like this for very long.

My intention isn't to make everyone feel bad with this post, I just wanted to remind us all that we were lucky to be born where we were and that we should always be thankful for what we have. No matter how down on your luck you think you are, these people will work their butts off for their whole lives and never be able to rise above the conditions they are currently living in. Just something to think about. . .

The Scavenger Hunt

While me, Terri, Paul and Chris (three other USOC employees) were taking a few hours of down time at the Great Wall, the Team Leaders whom we brought out here to see their Olympic venues were on a scavenger hunt. Our International Games Division is quite inventive and came up with a Beijing-wide scavenger hunt to make these representatives from each sport learn their way around the city. It’s hard to explain to your athletes how to navigate the pitfalls and share helpful hints for getting around it if you haven’t done it yourself. Chances are that cabs will be a very competitive commodity during the Games, so our folks wanted to make sure the Team Leaders used all resources in the city.

They were divided into groups of three and given a relatively small amount of money and a digital camera and sent on their way. They had to come back with a train ticket, a picture of themselves riding in a rickshaw (bicycle taxi), a picture of themselves with a waiter where they had lunch, a picture of one of the various Olympic countdown clocks around the city, a unique gift from the Silk and Pearl Markets, a picture of Chairman Mao’s portrait hanging on the outer wall of the Forbidden City, a picture of the Olympic mascot figures in Tiananmen Square, had to find out how many floors were in the hotel that will serve as headquarters for the IOC during the Games, and they had to trade an Olympic pin for something.

We all met up in a restaurant in a park near the Forbidden City to have dinner and each team gave a report of their adventures. The evening was hilarious and proved that the day was a very worthwhile adventure for the Team Leaders! They relayed tales of adventures like the rickshaw driver stopping at an unfamiliar area of the city halfway to their destination and changing the price of the ride to waiters and random people bending over backwards to help them find their next object on the scavenger hunt list. It turned out to be a great team building exercise and they came up with some great items to present.

So, our day ended up with some interesting food accompanied by a live traditional Chinese music performance during dinner. Today we have meetings in the morning here at the hotel then we visit a venue site in the afternoon. Until tomorrow. . .

The Great Wall of China

After a meeting in the morning, four of us hired a car and driver and made the 1.5 hour journey to the Great Wall. You can’t just rent a car here in China and drive yourself around. Only Chinese citizens are allowed to hold a driver’s license and drive. It’s probably just as well because a few of the Chinese folks who were schooled in the West we have been doing business with say they won’t even drive here!

Just like the drive to Zu Cheng, the journey up to Mutianyu was quite the experience in terms of both the scenery and the ride itself! We went to a well preserved section of the wall north-east of Beijing. This section of the wall was built during the Ming Dynasty in 1404 BC! It’s hard to describe how massive this thing is! It sits high up on a mountain ridge and runs along the ridge for as far as the eye can see. Thankfully, the pollution has been less the last few days and was even less as we moved away from the city.


We took a chairlift a short distance up the mountain to the Wall and climbed around a bit. It’s much more a series of varying inclines of stairs than it is a level foot path (think the “incline” in Colorado Springs). You can see how far back the Wall goes behind Paul in the picture. Instead of the chairlift, we took a toboggan ride down. It was really quite fun! It was a little sled you sit on and ride back down to the base of the mountain along a metal track a lot lock a bobsled run. There was a handle with a brake so you could control your speed on the way down. I was really moving for a good bit of it until I caught up with some guy ahead of me and had to slow down. One of the guys running the thing was yelling at me in Chinese at one point as I came flying around a corner. After talking with my friends at the bottom, I realized the guy wasn’t yelling for me to slow down, he was yelling for the guy ahead of me to “go faster”!!!

Once at the bottom, we walked around the various vendor stalls set up along the path to the chairlift. Unlike my experience in the silk market last time I was here, no one grabbed me and tried to pull me towards their goods. There was just a lot of “hey Lady” and “you want to buy?” as they held out some item. Of course I was drawn to the food stand that had a wide variety of nuts and dried fruits. I sampled so many pieces, I was full by the time I actually bought some molasses and sesame seed covered walnuts!

I can only attach five pictures to a post, so I’ll tell you about the evening in another post!