I've Got to Admit, It's Gettin' Better

Well, a little bit after I posted yesterday, we found out that we, in fact, did not have to be at the venue at 9 in the morning, but at 2:30 in the afternoon as we had originally thought. So, we took the opportunity to go out last night for our comrade Andrea's birthday. So, that was a good time.

So, this morning, we got up and headed on over to Laoshan Bicycle Cluster, fearing more of the same of what we got yesterday: poor planning, lack of information, unrealistic "simulations" of what we will be going through on a daily basis, and language barriers. Well, one out of four ain't bad, I guess.

We got there and found out that we were actually doing Mountain Biking as opposed to BMX as we thought, which is no biggie. So, we hiked on out to the Mountain Bike track, which is carved out of this mountain. So, we stood there for about a half hour in the sweltering heat, which was fine. Then, we found out that we would actually be interviewing cyclists!!! They were two members of the Chinese team and we got their names. Krystyna, our boss, ran and grabbed as much info on them as she could, which wasn't a lot, so we could ask informed questions.

At this point, in my head, I was reveling in the fact that we wouldn't have to deal with Chinese volunteers posing as the athletes today. I mean, I appreciated it, I guess, but they really didn't have good quotes and the Chinese volunteers that got thrown into being the translators for the "athletes" really didn't know what was going on. So, imagine my disappointment when...

...we had Chinese volunteers posing as the athletes and Chinese volunteers that got thrown into being the translators for the "athletes" really didn't know what was going on.

So, we pieced together a flash quote report. Then, we hopped on over to the press conference. The big step of improvement today was that the translation was better, which helped. It was quicker, it was more cohesive and you could tell that, most of the time, they understood what we were asking.

So, like I said, today was better than yesterday. And, hopefully, tomorrow will be better than today. Because, really, that's all you can ask for, right?