Because It’s Been a Couple of Days

I’d like to keep the blog’s momentum going even though I don’t have any particularly good morsels of Olympic mayhem.

Part of that is because it is so darn cold here. It makes you want to stay in where it’s warm and not go out where the mayhem may occur. I will try to keep my whining about the cold to a minimum, but the windchill is minus-15 to minus-20 everyday. And worse at night. The opening ceremony is going to be brutal. (Thankfully, I won’t be there.) The Olympic Committee is pretty worried about it. My Uncle Donald could have told them it would be like this. He has repeatedly told me over the years that the coldest he has ever been was when he spent a winter in Korea during the war.

This morning was a bit of an ordeal. Doug Mills and I hopped on a bus, then another and then another trying to get to the downhill venue. The signs aren’t very clear about what buses will take you where and the bus drivers’ English is about as good as our Korean. We spent two hours on these buses and I swear I never lost sight of the ski jump that I can see from my hotel room. That’s not good because the downhill is about 45 miles from my hotel. We finally ended up back at the media center where we learned that the shuttles to downhill aren’t even running yet.

These buses, however, are quite the experience. There is a large screen TV in the front (that one of the drivers could not take is eyes off). And they are all decorated in some kind of disco era motif. One driver even had a soundboard next to his seat because, apparently, the TV is not enough of a distraction for him. The picture above is of one of the buses, with the TV airing something like the Today Show. The least they could have done was put on the Super Bowl! Yes, that’s the Pope, not Tom Brady.