News-Record.com

Greensboro's Caroline Lind, who is competing in the women's eight rowing event for the U.S. in the Olympic Games, is keeping an online diary for the News & Record. In between getting ready to row for the gold - her team is a medal favorite - Lind will send dispatches describing her experiences in Beijing.

Tuesday, July 29

Today is my second day in China and the journey here as well as being here has been extremely interesting so far. My Olympic experience started off three days ago when we flew from Princeton to San Jose State for “processing”. We stayed there for one day and one night but this was where we got all of our USA Olympic gear! All of the USA athletes got a shopping cart and walked through a room full of stations with USA workout gear, matching travel apparel, and the outfits for the opening and closing ceremonies. My shopping cart was completely full by the time I had made it through the room! Since it is nearly impossible to utilize all the gear we all pitch in a large chunk of it to give to our spares who don’t get to go through the same processing.
However, more exciting than all of the gear, was that I got to meet the Governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger! My teammate Elle Logan and I got him to sign one of the hats that they gave us and we also got a sweet picture with him! The most surprising thing was that both Elle and I were taller than him!
The next leg of our journey was a 13-hour plane flight to Beijing from San Francisco. Flights never seem quite as long if you have all your friends to hang out with during them so it wasn’t too bad. The Olympic rowing venue is situated about 20 to 30 kilometers outside of central Beijing in the Shunyi district. Because of the location we are staying at a hotel near the course instead of staying in the Olympic village which can take up to an hour by car to reach. Staying near the race course is nice because it gives us a chance to stay away from the distractions (such as the other Olympians, who I am dying to meet!) and focus on the race. For the last week of the Olympics, after our races are done we will move into the village.
The most interesting things so far are :
1.The toilets - which are not like western toilets but instead holes in the ground that you have to squat over to use. However, in our hotel we have a western toilet.
2. The security – in order to get into the hotel and the racecourse we have our identification checked every time and one must go through a security screening exactly like at the airport – x-ray scan for bags and a medal detector for people. I have certain jewelry that I always wear and so every time I set of the alarm and have to be wanded down; so now I immediately hold out my arms to get checked. It’s not so bad now but when more teams arrive I think it may cause delays getting in to the course and hotel.
3. The air – it’s pretty smoggy here, so far I have not seen any blue sky and it just looks white all the time. Although this morning it was stormy and windy which cleared out the air a little bit and from the race course I could see mountains off in the distance!!