Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Okay, so it's not really St. Patrick's Day for you yet, but since I'm in Beijing, China it's already Monday for me! I arrived in Beijing on Saturday with the National Women's Water Polo Team for their test events this week. The flight is always long (4 movies long), plus we had a tough head wind so it took us almost 13 hours to get here from San Francisco. As soon as we were checked in at the hotel, it was off to the pool for a training session. Gotta stay awake until bed time to help with the jet lag! Plus some physical activity helps your body clock reset!


Sunday morning was sightseeing time for the team. The first picture is from a jade factory we visited on our way to the Great Wall. It's green and it's St. Patrick's Day, so I started off with that! We went to the jade factory because the Olympic medals that will be awarded in August will be inlaid with different types of jade. Unfortunately, there wasn't one there for us to view, but it got the team excited nonetheless!

The section of the wall we went to this time was different from my last trip. We went to Juyong Pass and did a little climbing from there. Just imagine a never ending stairmaster! As always it was enormous and hard to comprehend the amount of work that went into building it. Our bus tour guide said that prisoners worked on the wall and would just be buried in the wall as it was being built when they died. I'm not sure if that's just local folklore or the truth, but it made you think each time you put a foot on the next step up!

Today is a training day for the team and meetings for me. Most folks out side of the Olympic movement don't know how much background work goes into staging something as massive as an Olympic Games. Even just our little part for the American delegation has required years of meetings and prep work. Come August we'll see if we did our jobs correctly!

We're here for a little over a week, so I'll try to post again as the week goes on!