Hello everyone! Forgive me for slacking on my blog the past few days, but things here have gotten a little crazy now that the Games have officially started! Everyone in the village is getting excited for their events to finally start, me included! Ok, so let me see if I can give you a quick recap of the last couple of days. The U.S. Olympic committee has rented out Beijing Normal University for athletes to train without having to worry about sharing training space with other countries. This may make us sound a bit spoiled, but is actually really nice, because last year at Worlds in Japan it was tough to find a lane to work out in with all those people- not to mention dangerous! The other perk to training at BNU is that they have an American chef over there so American athletes can shuttle over there for meals during the day. The dining hall here is ok, but it can get pretty repetitive. Anyways, the training facilities at BNU are great. Here are a couple pics of the track and weight room.
  After practice yesterday I took a shuttle out to Nike hospitality with a couple of friends. Which reminds me, did you know that taxis in China are super cheap?! A 30 minute ride cost like 7 U.S. dollars!! Of course, everywhere you want to go you need to carry a "taxi card" which basically just says the name and address of the place you are going in Chinese. If you don't have that, prepare to be driving around aimlessly. Anyways, Nike hospitality is basically a place where Nike sponsored athletes can go to hang out (there is a nice athlete lounge here with tvs), eat (great food!), get massage treatment, and of course get free Nike stuff. (As you can see, I have been taking full advantage of eating outside of the village the past couple of days). So I left there with yet another bag of clothes and shoes, which I’m not quite sure of how I will get home. And the coolest part … they made us triple jumps spikes in red, white, and blue to match our uniforms! Check ‘em out! (I did jump in them today to break them in, so they are no longer sparkling white :(
 The U.S. Olympic committee has been kind enough to reserve an enormous amount of tickets to other events for all U.S. athletes to have. Every evening, they leave out a stack of tickets in the U.S. athlete lounge for the following day’s events and you can go and take whatever you want. So today I went to check out Lindsey Berg and the U.S. women’s volleyball team play Cuba. It was packed and the crowd was extremely energetic. We even saw a few people dressed up in some interesting "costumes." Cuba is a great team, and the U.S. couldn’t quite stay in the game today, but it was still fun to go watch Lindsey. I am not allowed to blog pictures of competition venues. However, I AM allowed to blog pictures of me and anyone else (with their permission) INSIDE of the competition venues. Confusing, I know.
 Tomorrow I am going to check out some diving and also go to the U.S. men’s basketball game so that should be fun. I have been gathering pictures of the village so I can hopefully give you guys your tour tomorrow sometime. It’s a big place so it’s taken a while to capture it all! Right now it's 10am for you guys but 11pm for me.... it's still so weird that I am sleeping all day when you guys are awake and vice versa! Goodnight!!!
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