Every four years I find myself glued to the Olympic curling competition. It’s quite inexplicable that sport which features a rock and a broom can be so mesmerizing. But it is, and there’s just something fun about watching it. And now it seems that folks in a village in China have succumbed to the fever […]
Opening Ceremonies
Last night I received a text message from a friend who lives in Beijing, just a stone’s throw from the Bird’s Nest Stadium where the Opening Ceremonies of the Winter Olympics are being held today. She told me that every night this week there have been helicopters circling over the stadium and her apartment building, […]
An Olympic Flight Path
It’s a long story, but I’m in Beijing for a short visit. The inbound flight path from Detroit to Beijing yesterday took us over the mountains to the northwest of the city, where the alpine events of the Winter Olympics will be held in 2022. They’re getting ready!
There’s More Than One Way to “Go Green”
In February of 2001, the International Olympic Committee made their final inspection visit to Beijing to see if the city would be up to hosting the 2008 Olympics. In preparation for that visit, the city got a major “spruce-up.” Office and apartment buildings that had been a dull gray since their construction decades before were […]
I Miss the Chinese Curlers
For the first time since in years I am not watching Olympic coverage on CCTV5, the official Chinese sports channel. This means, of course, that I am missing out on watching the competitions the Chinese tend to do well in, like women’s speed skating and curling. Yes, I said curling. One of the funny things […]
My Brief Brush with (non) Olympic Glory
I spent most of the decade of the 1990’s in the northeastern city of Changchun, where I was the director of a program for Americans who were studying Chinese. Our program was a joint venture with a university there, so I and the foreign students that I supervised all lived on a campus. One fall […]
