Back so soon, you ask?
I’ve had my fill of the Far East these past few Games — South Korea, Japan, China. Marco Polo has nothing on me. I didn’t have to take the Silk Road, but my journey did seem endless. More than 24 hours from JFK to my hotel in Beijing, with a long stop in Paris and a long, cold wait in the Beijing airport.
But my room is nice and it’s about three times the size of the room in Tokyo. Good thing, because with the restrictions, I’ll be seeing a lot of it. Our hotel is surrounded by construction fencing which is manned 24/7, lest we try to make a run for it to the grocery store across the street. It’s so tantalizingly close. I imagine it’s filled with gluten free delights of all kinds. Soy sauce appears to be in just about all the meals at the Main Media Center and at the hotel, so pickings are slim for me here. The breakfast buffet is pretty good though. Lots of scrambled eggs to get me through the day.
Today, I hopped on the TG-30 bus to figure skating and when the bus stopped I was the first off to get off. As it turned out, I was also the only one to get off . Hmm, that seemed odd. I wandered around until a friendly volunteer informed me that I was at the short track training facility. “How do I get to figure skating,” I asked. She pointed to a building about a couple of hundred yards away. But I had to wait 15 minutes for a shuttle to take me there. We’re in a closed health and security bubble, so one has to take a shuttle bus even if the venue is across the street. We can’t ever leave the bubble. If I had just stayed on the bus for one more stop! But that’s why we show up early, to iron this all out before the Games begin.
And, of course, to get the blog off and running. Or is it skating? Let’s make the best of this, shall we?
Eat at Joe’s 
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