Greetings again from Beijing!

On Sunday morning, we were invited to attend a meeting with the families supporting USA Women’s Field Hockey. We have traveled with this group of people to Russia in April in order to have the team qualify for Beijing. All of the families are tremendous supporters of their daughters, sisters, cousins, granddaughters and significant others. This is a very structured time for the women who have never experienced an Olympic competition. The families met with Dr. Colleen Hacker, 1978 LHU alumna and mental skills coach for the USA team. She highlighted what the typical day is like for our players. Her work as the sports psychologist with USA Women’s Soccer lead them to two Olympic gold medals and a silver. They also won the World Cup when she was working with women’s soccer. We all hope that her contributions will help Women’s Field Hockey accomplish the same…

Colleen asked the families to let their team member contact them. She told them to support their player’s goals by not introducing any family issues in the next two weeks. Evidently, Julie Foudy’s house [former USA Women’s Soccer Team Captain through the Olympics and World Cup] had an ant infestation in her home in the states. Colleen advised that they not share this with her during the Olympics. Any distractions are a challenge to a team sport, like soccer and field hockey.

How would you like to be told not to interact, not to share family matters, not to be anything other than positive for two weeks? The media plays a large role in any event like the Olympics. The families will be interviewed by NBC later this week at a day that has already been arranged. That will only intensify if the team is successful at winning a medal.

We did a little shopping today and enjoyed a delicious meal at McDonald’s located across the street. Conveniently, a menu in English was produced complete with pictures of the items available. We also wondered into Starbucks and I have added to my collection of Starbucks mugs from all over the world. Tried to recruit an 11th grader who works in Starbucks and had beautiful English. She is not certain about a major so perhaps we can help with that when she’s a little more certain of what she is interested in studying.

The world is a very small place, I have discovered too many times. This morning as I was riding on the elevator, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman on his way somewhere. Turns out he was born and raised in Williamsport and now lives in Pittsburgh. He is very familiar with Lock Haven and most complementary. I’ll spare you the details of other experiences I have had exactly like this wherever I have traveled. The world is a small place and experiencing chance meetings like this never cease to amaze me.

I thought you might like knowing a few things about traveling in China. There are many different western food chains in Beijing and sadly young people are into McDonald’s and the food it serves. Are there any young adults who like vegetable? Off the soap box. Television channels are mostly in Chinese as one would expect. CCTV has channels one through nine and carry lots of the sporting events, commentary in Chinese as expected. We also have all the English speaking news channels you might want to watch; CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC News to name a few. We are fortunate we have HBO with Chinese subtitles.

We have been traveling most of the time by taxi cab. This is rather inexpensive and not at all like traveling in a large American city. All cabs are registered and have the ability to print a receipt for travelers. The average ride is about $10 US or 50 RB [Yuan].

This evening [Sunday] we went to the USA – Argentina Women’s Field Hockey match. Rain began just as we left the hotel. Rain continued throughout the match. The crowd was large, stadium holds about 8,000 people. As we went through security, typical at every Olympics, the crowd began to push in anticipation of getting to an event. There are four sport venues at the Hockey site and that means a lot of people trying to do one thing, get through security before we did. At least here we didn’t have to do the airport thing and take off our shoes. I was wanded twice! I must look suspicious as a more than middle aged sports fan.

On the way to the seats at the Hockey Stadium, volunteers were handing out plastic rain gear. I hope we can do the same at our events when we know it will rain.

The USA tied Argentina 2-2, not a bad outcome since Argentina won gold at the last Olympics.

Leaving the venue was a great experience as well. We lined up with all 10,000 other people in attendance in the pouring rain waiting for one or two busses that take us to an undisclosed location. Help is always available from the thousands of volunteers. Advice was take bus 2 or 7 and get off at the second or third stop. Imagine 203 people on a bus built for 45 [according to Sharon!], wet, anxious to get home or where ever, it's dark and it begins to thunder. There might be a novel in this somewhere. Perhaps a how to survive riding the bus in China, tips to outsiders, might be a better idea. Sharon has become a Chinese national in her ability to get to the bus door. Trying to follow her never has met with much success. Finally, the bus manages to creep along, doesn’t seem to hit a speed of 25 or more due to the excess weight. We creep into the first stop and four more people get on the bus. At the third stop, we decide it is time for us to depart, not knowing how much farther the bus will take us out of our way, and like Moses parting the Red Sea, Sharon announces we are leaving the bus. Others follow to a bus stop with a name that means nothing to us but to others it is their daily experience of travel in a city of lots of people. So much for the eight people who had to leave the bus to let us exit, I am not certain what happened to them but hope they are at home by now. Sharon told me about a woman waiting at the bus stop who helped her off the bus, that white hair is good for something! One of the hotel workers tried to complement her by saying American older women are much more active than older Chinese women, I guess he know about Sharon’s bus riding abilities.