Italian Engineering

Can you guess what this is a picture of? Remember the story I told you about the "leak" we had in our roof and the three guys who did not speak any English coming to fix it - well, this is a picture of the fix. Serioulsy. Much like the Fiat, it may not be pretty, but it works. I am
happy to report that since this fix, we have not had a single leak. In the spirit of fairness, I must tell you that the last few days have been amazing weather wise. We have been walking around in short sleeve shirts and the sunshine has been incredible (this picture was taken at night). So is it the Italian engineering, or Mother Nature who is keeping us dry? Time will tell.

Nice post by Bob. Thanks for telling us about the GPS system you have in your cars - that is great. Maybe you should send a few into the bus drivers that TOROC (acronoym for the organizing committee) has hired. Why? Well yesterday our speedskaters got on a bus that works out of the Olympic Village. This is a bus that has one job - take people from the Olympic Village to the speedskating rink - and bring them back. That is it, nothing more, nothing less.

Yesterday the athletes got on the bus to go to practice. The bus drove right past the skating rink. When the athletes - who are from the United States - told the Italian driver, who had been hired by TOROC, to turn around because he had passed the rink, he did.

So now he is headed down the other side of the street coming up on the rink, and....he nearly passed the rink again. The athletes had to tell him where to go. Beautiful.

Oh by the way, the rink is literally 500 yards from the village. As I sit here typing this, I can clearly see the rink. It could be a long Games.

Like I said, two experiences, one Games.

We had a little fun with some of the maintenance men. We are having a bit of a heat problem in some of the rooms here in the village. Mainly, there is not any heat in some of the first floor apartments. So we - well Michelle - calls TOROC to ask them to come and fix the problem. She then asks me to go and watch what they are doing (those of you who know me realize that this was probably a bad move). I ask one of our NOC (National Olympic Committee) assistants to go with me. NOC Assistants are volunteers who speak both English (in our case) and Italian.

So the two of us go over to make sure that the maintenance guys are working on the heat situation. We walk into one of the apartments that we have here and there are 5 guys standing there, laughing. One of them is the guy that Eric had been hand gesturing with when we had the roof problem. Anyway, I ask the NOC Assistant to find out if the heat is on and what the problem is with the apartment. So she does, and the leader of these 5 guys - who was a scruffy dude, definitely named Alessandro - motions for us to follow him. He opens the door to the room, touches the floor (remember, radiant heat here) and then stands up and points at the thermostat and says (at least this is what the NOC Assistant told me he said), "if you want heat, you must turn up thermostat." If only we had thought of that.

I hope everyone is doing great. We had another team check into to the Village, so it is starting to feel more and more like the Olympics are coming. Just so you know, I am occassionally adding pictures to the snapfish site. I hope you enjoy. Until next time....