Election Day

I have not updated this blog in a long time and had somewhat forgot about it, but the events of yesterday make me want to share my experiences and thoughts. Yesterday was a historic moment for the United States and for the world and I want to share what the election was like for those of us outside the US and halfway across the world.

When I got out of class I had stayed a couple minutes to ask the teacher for extra help explaining some basic grammar points. When I got downstairs therefore I found McKinley impatiently waiting. “Obama WON!!” she screamed, running up and throwing her arms around us. I felt shocked, I hadn’t expected any results for several more hours, and now it was done. America had picked its new President and had in the process changed history. We were giddy with joy. We probably looked like silly school girls jumping up and down and giving everyone hugs. The crowd of other foreign students gathering outside the school was confused by our antics at first, but hearing the news many of them were thrilled as well and came to congratulate us. The energy and joy we felt was enormous, just as I’m sure it was for many of you. We got a phone call that a crowd was gathering at the Irish bar across from the U.S. embassy to watch the CNN coverage. We stopped by our apartment to drop off our school bags and then caught a taxi across town. I felt this enormous need to call my parents. It felt like such a momentous occasion that I wanted to share the joy and excitement with them.
When we got to the bar it was already full with Americans and other expats. I had never been there before and it was fun to walk in and find a very American bar in the middle of Chengdu, China. The two TV’s up on the wall were tuned to CNN and soon after we came in and settled into a booth at the far side of the bar the entire bar began to cheer as Obama walked onto the stage to deliver his victory speech. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Obama began, prompting another huge cheer. Then as Barack Obama began to deliver his beautiful and well crafted speech the entire bar went silent, captivated by the true power that come from the gift of oratory. I will probably never forget the next half hour. The entire place listened in rapt attention as Obama spoke. Occasionally people would cheer, many people began to cry or give each other hugs. What was so amazing about this experience was that the crowd was as mixed of a bunch as they come. There was a tall young guy with dreadlocks brushing tears out of his eyes, while on the other side of the room a middle aged redneck shouted out affirmations like she was in a church revival. There were people from all over the world, people of different ethnicities, different nationalities, different age groups all coming together to celebrate this feeling of hope and change for the future. It was truly a microcosm of the world, and it felt so good to be standing among all of them, enjoying the moment together and feeling extremely proud, for the first time in a long time, to say that I was American.

Home-stay

I’m sitting on the bed in my new home and it is an absolutely lovely morning. The sun is just starting to come in through the window, sending streaks of warm light across the room. In fact my room is immediately adjacent to the patio, so I have the screen door open and there is a warm breeze coming in. You all know how much I love the heat! :) Someone is downstairs in the gardens playing some kind of a traditional Chinese instrument and I can hear the notes drifting up between the traffic noise. The area I am living in is a huge gated community of lots of tall apartment buildings all surrounded and encompassed by this huge beautiful garden. There are fountains and pools everywhere and lots of meandering paths. The architecture and design is fairly European though, rather than Chinese. Yesterday evening my host parents took me to see the “work out area” which is basically a huge rec. center. Besides the traditional weight/equipment room there is ping pong tables, badminton courts, tennis courts, basketball courts, a dance area, mahjong tables, and two pools. Yes two pools, one outside for sunbathing etc, and one inside with lap lanes. The one inside has a huge glass dome ceiling so that you can look up and see the sky. Is it just me or is this insane?! I feel like I should be on vacation at some fancy resort.

My host family seems great. They are clearly extremely well off. The daughter is quite the little rich girl in that she has clearly been quite spoiled, but she is also incredible smart and precocious and has been making sure to take quite good care of me. She is 12 but comes across as older because she is so self-assured. The family seems to get along well. They laugh a lot and tell me that they have a very “joking” family. Most of these jokes go right over my head since they are in Sichuanese but they seem to have a good time. The mother and daughter act more like sisters than anything, which I feel like explains a lot about the daughter behavior. Both parents work for the government, the mom in taxes and I’m not clear what the dad does. Besides the immediate nuclear family there are two other women living in the house. There is an older woman who is apparently the father’s brother’s wife. I’m assuming the brother must have died. She takes care of most of the cooking and cleaning and acts as a housekeeper of sorts. She apparently grew up during “very bad times” and so she does not speak any Mandarin at all and is illiterate. She will be the hardest to communicate with. I like her already though. She smiles at me a lot, with a mouth full of very crooked teeth, and seems to have a lot of spunk. There is also a younger woman who helps a little with cooking and cleaning, but I am still really unclear on what her role in the family is.

I moved in yesterday and they took me to IKEA to get a little table and chair to study at. Haha that is right they took me to IKEA!! I realize that this is a globalizing world and all, but that was really quite funny. To be in Chengdu, China and be walking around picking out Swedish furniture, with the prop books on the shelves in Swedish and the cafe serving Swedish meatballs was really quite fantastic.

I am probably going to head back to campus around noon to help a bunch of the other girls move into their new place. They are renting this absolutely gorgeous four bedroom apartment right near the school. It is insanely nice, with beautiful views of the city, two balconies and hardwood floors. It is brand new as well, they literally got to pick out what furniture they wanted, request a western toilet, everything. The plan is that I will probably move in with them in February when McKinley goes back to the States. I feel kind of bad because my host dad is coming back from work to bring me back to campus. I feel bad because they keep having to bend over backwards for the helpless American. The idea is that he will show me the bus routes this time though, and then I should be able to do it on my own, so hopefully I will be a little more self-reliant from here on out.

Wow, this turned out to be a really long post! I guess I should wrap things up. I’m meeting my advisor for my research project tomorrow. On Wednesday we have orientation for school and our placement tests for Chinese. I guess that is what I should do for the next couple hours is brush up on my Chinese skills a bit.

End of Olympics

So the next couple posts are old, but I haven't been able to access blogspot to post them. The lovely Alexandra just helped me figure out how to get on, so should be able to post stuff now....

Hi again y’all!

Just wanted to check in. I’m on the plane headed to Chengdu at the moment. I’m very excited to get there and get settled in, but its also been really strange to have to leave Beijing and all the fantastic people I worked with. When you work that intensely with people, you really do become a family of sorts and you rely on them for everything, so it was really hard to say goodbye knowing that I probably wouldn’t see many of them ever again. On the positive side, I am certain that, some of them anyway, I will meet up with, and its lovely to think of all the places I can travel now and know that I have a friend there waiting to meet me.

Eddie is going to meet me at the airport and we will head straight to the school to register. I’ve had a bit of a scare regarding visa, since it will expire in a couple days and I need to get my residency permit ASAP. Hopefully should work out ok though, the key is that I won’t get my physical done, and this means I can stay in the country no longer than a year. I’m hoping that I will be able to stay awake the whole day. We had our work party last night, which wasn’t super intense, mostly a lot of dancing and singing, but I still didn’t get home until 3:00 or so. I didn’t even change, just laid down on my bed for a two hour power nap and then caught a cab to the airport. I’ve also got quite a bad little cold going on, so I’m hoping I can pull it together long enough to apply at the school and I don’t come across as some sick, wacked out American with bloodshot eyes. That would certainly make a great first impression eh?

I know I need to go back and fill in the gaps, gaps meaning the last oh two weeks of the Olympics or so, but I really can’t disentangle everything in my mind at the moment. I ended up going to quite a few events, we were generally able to get tickets to go in with the guests, and if not I usually managed to sneak in on my work pass. I saw swimming, badminton, diving, gymnastics, waterpolo, beach volleyball, a couple of sessions of Athletics and the final soccer match between Argentina and Nigeria. Not a bad selection considering that I wasn’t expecting to get to see anything. That being said, I actually was probably less aware of what was going on at the Olympics in general than many of you were. We certainly didn’t have any time to be watching events on TV or keeping up with the results for the various events. The only way I knew how an event went was if I was actually there, and even then I would usually have missed half the event and usually the last 10 min, running around getting water and snacks for everyone and getting things ready for their departure.

This departure part that I was discussing would often consist of what we called “line of sight”. We had these round lollipop shaped signs with the Lenovo logo on them, which we would hold in the air so the guests would know where to go. It got to a rather ridiculous point and became a kind of running joke, both with the staff but also the guests. For example, one guest rather pointedly told me“I can see the hotel in front of me, you can put DOWN the lollipop”. Amazing product placement for Lenovo though, since the lollipops went everywhere. I’m pretty sure it ended up in most pictures too, which means guests will be going home going “here’s us at the great wall, and the Lenovo lollipop sign” “That’s the Olympic Flame in the background, you can only half see it behind that Lenovo lollipop sign.” They were also popular picture items for local Chinese as well. This often made it very difficult to do your job as a lollipop holder since every 30 sec you had someone coming up asking to take a picture with you and the Lenovo sign. When you weren’t being used as a picture prop, you were being asked to swap pins. This apparently is a big thing at the Olympics, but I had never heard of it before. The Olympics becomes flooded with all these various pins, from sponsors, countries, sports, you name it. You wouldn’t believe how precious some of those pins become. The key is that you must wear them all on the lanyard for your Olympic accreditation. The goal is to have so many pins on you that you begin to walk slightly bent over from all the weight. This is how you know you have truly joined in the Olympics spirit. ;)

Outside of work we didn’t have much time to do anything else. I went by the Holland House one night which was a lot of fun. It is one of the the few national houses that you can get into without being a citizen. It is sponsored by Heineken and has a DJ and dancing every night, basically a big party. It is flooded with orange clad Dutch people though. And man are those people TALL, I’m not sure I have ever felt so small in my entire life as I did at the Holland House. We also went out to Sunlitun one night, which is the big expat club area. It was fun, but I wasn’t to impressed with the area. It was basically just very sketchy with a lot of glitz painted on top.

Can’t think what else to tell y’all about. Perhaps I’ll come back later and post a bunch of pictures and use them to tell a little better story. TTYL-Steph

Olympics Update

Sorry that I haven't posted in such a long time, but I literally haven't had a free hour that I wasn't working or sleeping. I don't have a whole lot of time now either, I just happen to be filling it at the front desk so I have some time to write while their are no guests coming up.

The job is amazing but exhausting. During the first few days I was going to the Great Wall a lot as part of the Advance team. This meant that I got to the Wall about an hour before the guests to buy tickets and make sure everything was in order. I was also in charge of the "Mongolian singers". Yes, that is right, we brought in singers from Mongolia to serenade the guests from the top of one of the towers. This was the best part of the job, because they were really cool guys and basically I would just get to spend the morning chilling with them on top of the Wall and chatting about Mongolia, music, whatever. It was really quite funny because I'd see the guests coming and go "hurry, hurry, get started" and they would change into their very traditional costumes and sing these really traditional gorgeous songs accompanied by the horsehead guitar and then as soon as the guest s were gone they would change into their street clothes and we'd go back to discussing Nirvana. haha!
I also got INCREDIBLY lucky and was one of the few staff people to get a ticket to the opening ceremony. I sat with our guests which means I was in the 18 row!!! The ceremony was incredible. I assume a lot of you saw it on TV so you have some idea. The sheer timing and coordination that it would take with those huge masses of people moving at exact times is impressive in and of itself. They also did a lot of things with lights that was really beautiful in the dark stadium. The opening act with the light drums was probably one of my favorite parts. There was also this really great moment where they sang this song that was both in Chinese and in English about how we are all one family.
Other than the ceremony I have gotten to go to two events so far. I went to Badminton a couple of days ago and I went to swimming yesterday. The swimming was awesome because I got to see Phelps win gold in a World Record time which was really exciting. I was sitting with a bunch of Americans which made it even more fun, because they were really into it.
There has been a LOT of problems as well. Lack of any regular sleep or meals being a part of it, but also a hugely disorganized management being the main problem. I can update all of you on that later.
Sending love to all of you!

In a Past Life I Must Have Been A Monk

This will have to be a rather short and incomplete update I'm afraid, since I am exhausted and need to get up in a ridiculously short amount of time. Sorry! :( All I can really say so far though, is that I must have been VERY VERY good in a past life to rack up enough karma to get this incredible job. We have spent the last few days going to all the places that our guests will be going next week, so that we will know what to expect. So basically, I am getting payed to tour around Beijing at the moment. A brief synopsis:

The first day I had the whole day free, so I went to the Embassy district with my roomate Katy, and then wandered around Beijing by myself. I got adopted by a Chinese woman who walked around Tiananmen with me and told me all about Map. Met for drinks at the Grand Hyatt where I met the whole work crew, who are AMAZING! The Grand Hyatt is also just incredibly beautiful, although I feel like such a scrub when I walk around with the rich powerful guests and the hotel staff in their perfect uniforms.
Other than the first day, the days are all starting to blend into one, but so far we've gone on a rickshaw/walking tour of the Hou Hai (the old hutong district near the Forbidden City). Gone by most of the Olympic venues. Walked and boated around the Summer Palace. Visited the Five Pagoda Temple. Tomorrow we are going to the Great Wall. And keep in mind that all of this is catered....
On the flip side though, the days are very long and you are working ALL day, so you constantly have to be on top of things and are exhausted by the end of the day. It should get even more crazy once guests start arriving. We have our schedules already and we will be working until 1:00am often and running of maybe 5:00 hours of sleep. So I really doubt that I will be very good about keeping this updated, although I will try.
Oh, and a note about these guests. They are not just VIP people, but what we like to call VVVIP. As in our first guest will be the CEO of the company. We also have some athletes that we sponsor that we will be bringing in for photo ops with our guests. These include people like Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh. Crazy!
Anyway, I'm going to shower and bed, but in summary absolutely amazing job, but hopefully I am still standing at the end of August!
Love you all and hope you are well!

Travel

Hi!

I arrived safe and sound last night. The flights went by quickly and over all everything went smoothly. They lost my baggage, but hey, you always have to have SOMETHING go wrong when you travel right? This is why you always pack enough to survive in your carry on bag. Hopefully they should be sending my bags to the hotel sometime today.
Otherwise everything went well though. My driver was very sweet and was still waiting for me when I walked out of customs two hours late without my
bags, and (wonders of wonders! :) ) I actually
understood pretty much everything he said to me! I really had no idea coming in how well my textbook Chinese would do in the real world, but I seem to be able to carry a conversation quite well. Given the conversation consisted of things like "Did you grow up in Beijing", "Oh, look at the weather, so much rain, it reminds me of Seattle" haha but STILL ....I'm stoked!
Not much else to report yet. My roommate arrived in the middle of the night last night and seems pretty cool. She lived in Beijing for three year so apparently knows her way around quite well.
There is internet in my room that is pretty cheap, so I should be able to keep this updated on a regular basis.
Love ya'll!

Off on Adventures

Hi!

As most of you know I will be heading to China on July 29th. I will be in Beijing for a month working at the Olympics and will then head to Chengdu, Sichuan Province where I will be going to school and doing research for the next year. This blog is to let you all know how I am doing and what I am up to, since I won't be able to talk to most of you on a regular basis. This is my first blog and (as some of you know) I've never been particularly good at remembering to write travel updates, but I will do my best to keep this page updated with posts and pictures.

Please keep me updated with posts or comments of your own. I will be missing you all terribly and would love to hear from you!