We are open for business

We welcomed our first athletes into the Village today! For us this is very big as it means we are now ready to get this going. The Opening Ceremonies are still 10 days away, but we are ready. This is going to be awesome.

As I will be writing about the Olympic Village, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about this place. Where the Village has been built was an old warehouse district. One of the good things that the designers did was to keep the shell of some of the buildings and use them for some of the organizing committee offices, dining areas, etc. It adds a nice feel to the Village.

Like every place we have been to - at least for the last few Games - the plan is to tear a part of the Village down when this is all over, and to use the rest of it for low income housing. They will have to do a lot of work to these buildings to get them ready for people to live in them full time, but that is the intent.

One thing is clear - as seen from the picture above - they stick out like sore thumb. We are in this area with all of these old buildings and then there is a village of buildings like this. Interesting choice.

An Olympic Village is very much a city. We have a mayor, a retail area (called the International Zone) where you can do banking, make travel arrangements, buy "store" type items, a bookstore, coffee shop, and internet cafe's. There is a transportation area and of course dining opportunities. We have a phone book, and heads of various departments. And, like any city, the leadership of the various divisions do not communicate very well. It is very interesting.

Speaking of food - yes, the food is great. Of course the pasta and pizza are fantastic. The pizza - for those of you that have asked - is similar to our pizza. They tend to go with a thinner crust and every place (that I have been to) cooks then in a wood burning oven. A typical dinner - outside the Village - consists of several courses and generally lasts for two hours. As for the wine, I have not had any. But we have been made aware of a store just outside the village that sells wine (easy to find). But they have a twist. You bring in the bottle and they pour it from the tap and it only costs 75 cents. Like I said, I have not tried it, but I am told it is good.

The rooms are nice. We have radiant heat, which is great in the morning. I will talk more about the rooms later. Most of the apartments are 3 0r 4 bedrooms with a common area and two bathrooms.

One thing that many people do not know is that when the organzing committee gives you the rooms assigned to your team - it is up to us to set them up. The beds are in the right places, but we do the setup. And, in our offices, we set all desks, televisions, everything. In fact, yesterday we were living the dream our significant others will not allow when we were using massive amounts of duct tape on the walls and ceiling to run....CABLE. It was beautiful. All guys involved had to stop for a moment and marvel at what we had done. It brought a tear to our eye - I think mainly because we did not have someone (i.e. wives) telling us it looked awful, or that we didn't live in college anymore.

That is enough for today. There will be more later. Remember, we are just getting started. Be well and go USA.