...and plans change again

Hello everyone! Sorry I have been very slack with this blog posting, but life here has just fallen into the routine and I do not find much to write about!!! I have decided, however, that I will be coming back to the US in January and will be there for a few months working and figuring out my next step. I think I will try to come home around the middle of January. I can't wait to see you all!!!

xoxo

Another site to see!

So Fabien has created a joint blog and Picassa picture website for us in China. They are both in French at the moment, but I'm sure we'll get it bilingual in the future, so feel free to check it out! Especially the pictures because he has put up more than I have! :)

the blog: http://ailinyefabian.blogspot.com/

(Ailin=my chinese name-- Ai = love and lin= a beautiful kind of jade, and "ailin" sounds kind of close to Erin)
(Fabien is also Fab's chinese name: Fa= France and bien= to organize (which, if you know Fabien well, he's very very good at)
Hence, our combined blog!

The Picassa picture website: http://picasaweb.google.com/ailinyefabian

new pics

Check out http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.e.callender where I have posted new pics of the Olympic Green !

Exciting news! (for some of you...)

Okay I've been putting off telling some people for a little while, but I will just go ahead and throw it out there- (and no, i'm not engaged, nor pregnant....so calm down:)

Since Fabien is here in Beijing as a study abroad semester with his university in Paris (he's getting his Master's from Sciences Po University), he will be studying until February. But his university wants him to benefit more from the language and culture here, so they have asked him to say for an extra year after his semester to work in China. So, since he will be here for a year and a half, I have decided to stay as well:) I've just gotten a job teaching English in a kindergarten and will use this time to learn some Chinese and just soak up Asia. So, we will be in Beijing now until January-ish of 2010...and will hopefully always have an extra room in our apartment like we do now, so please come visit!! Come on, how often do you get the shot at a free room in Beijing! :)

So that's my news...I know it will be quite the adventure and I'm very excited about seeing how it will be. Post-Olympic Beijing will surely be a sight to behold and study and i'm very interested to see how it reacts when the highs of the games wears off. Should make for some interesting writing!

I think about you all at home often, and am hoping to plan a trip back to NC sometime around Christmas, depending on what my finances allow.

Also, October is going to be a fun month because I'm going, along with my friend Meredith from UNC, on a trip to Thailand and Laos! I can't wait to get there and take lots of pictures to share:)

So keep on the lookout for more updates on my new slightly more permanent life in Beijing!

the end of the Olympics and Fabien's arrival!

As you can tell from my lack of blog posts in the past weeks, (so sorry!) things in Beijing have been a little hectic! The Closing Ceremony was last night and i'm sure all of you have seen it by now- not as grand as the Opening, but a la Beijing nonetheless! What a master of production this country is and what a spectacle everything is.
The rest of our days at the shooting venue were very fun and very memorable. We witnessed so many medal ceremonies and I'm shocked at the different reactions. There was an Indian guy who had said on his profile that he got into the sport for the fame of it (yeah....okay...) and then when he finally won his first gold medal- the first medal EVER for India in an individual sport- he could barely be bothered to give more than a three-word answer to the questions asked of him. "I dont know what i'll do when I get back to India," he said, when asked with how he feels returning to India as a hero. "I don't really like to be hassled." Seriously??! You just won a medal, and a GOLD, at that, and you dont want to be hassled? Okay, lets trade. You give me your medal and I'll be the one who's hassled, how about that?! :)
The most exciting even however came at the very end. The very last shot of the very last round of the very last match to be exact. Some of you may have heard how American Matthew Emmons lost the gold medal in one shot. It was a scandal! Okay here is the story: Emmons was in first place the entire round (which is a series of ten shots ranked 0-10.9-- 10.9 is a perfect shot). He was 3 points ahead of the second place shooter, which for shooting is a lot. This meant that he could realistically shoot a 6.7ish and still get the gold. For a shooter at this level, a 6.7 is unheard of- it would be a tragedy to get that kind of score. So he pretty much had it in the bag. He's always the last person to take his shot in the round, so here he was in the last shot waiting to get that gold. And he shoots, and we wait for the score to pop up....and it's a 4.4. A 4.4!!! Impossible!!! So, he moves down to fourth, and the Chinese scoop up the gold. It was such a scandal! In interviews with him and his wife (fellow shooter from the Czech Republic Katerina Emmons- see my previous blog for info on her) they both said that some things just aren't meant to happen, and he pulled the trigger just slightly too hard just slightly too early and thats the thing with this sport- its so intricate and mm count so much. There's always London, he said.

So witht that event to end our Olympic experience, we were all pretty satisfied with our time at the shooting venue! :)

Here are a few random shot of us working: (well, "working":)


Taking a break and playing with the ONS scooter...its so fun!

Look at those journalists in action

On to the mixed zone to be a part of the interview madness- the really cool thing about shooting vs. a more popular sport such as basketball is that since shooting is not as popular, there was never a swarm of media and therefore we were all able to ask a lot of questions and actually interview the athletes. It was quite an experience to talk to someone who just won an Olympic medal!

The finals hall of the venue


So after shooting ended, I was very excited because Fabien arrived the next day! I went to the airport to pick him up and we took the very nice and new metro line back to Beijing! We've spent the past week getting settled in and buying some stuff for the apartment that we have rented so as to make it a little more like home thousands of miles away:) We also bought bikes to explore the city with and to make transport a little easier. Everyone in Beijing has a bike! It's so cool:) The day after he got here, we went to see track and field in the Birds Nest and we had lower level seats 7 rows from the track! It was so cool! We then went to boxing that night and saw France kick China's butt:)

At the Shooting Venue

On our first day at work as Flash Quote Reporters for the Olympic News Service (ONS), we were able to witness a monumental event- the first gold medal of the games was given at the Women's 10m Air Rifle competition. The winner was Czech and she is actually married to an amazing shooter for team USA. The couple met at a previous Olympics, fell in love, and got married:) What a story!

The first day was a lot of running around, chasing down athletes for interviews, quick typing, sweating, and sheer enthusiasm for being a part of the actual Olympics. I caught myself, at various times throughout the day, just stopping for a brief second and realizing wow, i'm at the olympics. Inside the buildings. Meeting the athletes. Touching the walls and floors of the building. Shaking so hard that it was actually difficult to take notes! The adrenalin rush was intense all day long.

Our work life consists pretty much of first watching the qualifying rounds to see if any of those favored to win do not place in the final 6 or 8 (depending on the event) and then going to watch the final. After the final, we find the medal winners and any "big losers," (those favored to win who did not in fact achieve that goal) and interview away. On Saturday, i got to interview the bronze medalist from Croatia who was not on anyone's radar before the finals and who ended up with a medal! She was so excited abou it, you could feel it. I actually did not think i would have the chance to ask any questions, and then she ended up walking past all the media having only talked to the Croatia media, so I ran up to her and asked her about whatever I could come up with on the spot. We got some okay quotes but at least we got something!

In the afternoon, i got to test out my French interview skills (which are a little rusty I must say....) because a French shooter was a favorite who finished 26th in the qualifying round!!! He was ranked 3rd in the world coming into the event, so it was a pretty big letdown. Anyway, I got my point across, stuttering and stumbling away, and I was the only (so i'm told....) journalist to have talked to him! So that was pretty cool:)

Today (Sunday) at the venue was a little less hectic, now that the media have toned down a bit. Everyone was only here the first day because our sport got the first medal of the games, so once that excitement was over, shooting fell lower on the list of AP and Reuters priority. But that just gives us more responsibility, so it was okay!

This morning we attended the Women's 10m Air Pistol qualification and final, and the final brought a very interesting mix of athletes. China with gold, Russia with silver, and Georgia with bronze. With the current circumstances involving the silver and bronze medalists' home countries, we all knew this was an achievement for the headlines. After the medal ceremony, the two women hugged and kissed on the cheek in a moment of sportsmanship that ignored outside influences and exuded sheer joy. The press conference was full of questions of this symbolism, the lesson the world should learn from this show of affection, of unity, and of the difficulties facing the bronze medalist from Georgia. The comments were all along the lines of the fact that politics does not involve sports and that the Russian and the Georgian are friends and have been for a while, and that there is no reason they should not embrace. It is what the Olympic Games are all about- what they aim to show the world is that unity is possible, at least for a few weeks....

The final match of the day was Men's Trap (where they shoot clay targets from under the stage where the shooters are standing and they have to shoot the flying targets in mid-air). This was a really fun event to cover because it's very laid back and outdoors, and it's actually very exciting. There was a shootoff for 3rd place, and it rained pretty much the entire time. This made note taking very hard when doing interviews! But all in all, it was a fun and accomplished day, and we had a great time:)



Us American volunteers in our super hot uniforms:)
Jen, me, Addy, and Julia
























The madness of the press conference for the first medals awarded at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games!!!!

08/08/08

August 8, 2008- The Opening Ceremonies!


So where do you go while in the host city of the Olympic Games to watch the amazing kick-off party? That was the question of the day. And no, we were not offered tickets to the event. As volunteers in Beijing, we are pretty much on the bottom of the Olympic-affiliated foodchain. As normal city dwellers, we've got it pretty good I must admit. Free transport on the subway with our accreditation, looks of curiosity and respect from Chinese men and women, ease of access to pretty much where ever we want to go in the city, and did I mention free public transportation? :)

We started our journey off at Chaoyang park in Eastern Beijin because we read online that there would be big screens in the park where people could watch the games.

Now, among the many, many, MANY things i'm learning every day in Beijing about life in this wonderful mess of a country, the thing that is reiterated the most is the fact that you can never assume anything to be what you think it will be or thought it was. The (seemingly) obvious, logical choice of a way to do something is rarely the method that the Chinese find appropriate to handle any situation. Granted, with so many people and so many mouths to feed, the country has to come up with some way to employ its population, but it's just insane to me the amount of inefficiency and just plain unconventional ways that this country possesses. One example is that on every bus, there is at least one and most often times two people working- riding the bus all day long- to check tickets, sell tickets, and announce stops, even though the bus announcement speaker system announces them too and even though the bus drives is very well equipped to make sure people pass their bus cards over the sensor and listen for the beep. But the workers sit there in the oftentimes unairconditioned buses looking bored but gracious and watching the people on the bus pass their time.
So the crazy unconventional thinking that we came across on ceremony day was this mind boggler: these screens set up in the park- 3 of them at least- (and we're talking bigggggg TV screens that take some time and effort to set up) were due to be shut down at 7pm, one hour before the start of the Opening Ceremonies. Now I dont know about you, but if i was going to set up such a scene for the "pregame" of the ceremonies, i might think it logical to just go ahead and leave them up to show the actual event. Crazy, I know. But this is not the case in China. You can never walk the shortest path to anywhere because something you had never thought could become a barrier will always drop out of nowhere and make things more complicated.

So once this idea failed, we had to think of a gameplan. We heard that there would be yet another TV screen set up on Wangfujing Street, a large pedestrian street in the downtown area, so we decided what the heck, if we are in Beijing for the Olympics we might as well jump on in and join the masses downtown to watch the games among thousands of Chinese enthusiasts. And boy, did we get what we bargained for here. All in all, i'd say this TV screen attracted between 7 and 10,000 people from all around the world.

Here is a brief glimpse, at about 6:30pm (The show started at 8).



Facing the screen (we would end up in the very front)

"Zhongguo


Watching the Ceremony


Which, by now I'm sure all of you know, was a fantastic production on China's part. I was blown away not only by the sheer size of the spectacle, but moreso by the intricate choreography and the showcase of culture. Sterotypically known as "China's coming out party," this show was its opportunity to really show they world, hey, this is China- we are here, we are intense, we know what we're doing, so pay attention. And wow did it work- for one night at least....which is another thing i've learned about China, especially relating the the Olympics. Their motto is go big, or go home.

The viewers at Wangfujing were chanting for China the whole time, and were really into it. The girl below caught my eye because half her face is painted red, white, and blue American, and the other half if red and yellow Chinese. It was pretty cool to see the juxtaposition.


Another thing that really impressed me was that the Chinese spectators also went crazy and stood up and cheered if there was someone present in the audience from one of the countries marching in the ceremonies. It really showed a welcoming and it was a genuine appreciation for these people coming to their country, experiencing their world, and participating in the Olympics. It was really good to see in a time when hatred is so prevelant.

Jen (my roomie) and me among the madness


So we decided to leave the street before the end of the ceremony because if we didn't, we'd be stuck in the madness trying to leave until the wee hours of the night, and since we had our first day of work at 8am the next day, we went home. But we also hadnt had the opportunity to eat dinner, so we stopped at the McDonalds by our university. And this is what we saw:

Apparently MacDo is the place to be!!!! So we got our food (p.s. never ever order a grilled chicken sandwich in China- their idea of chicken involves no part of the breast whatsoever and only unidentifiable chicken meat with the skin still on....) and stayed to watch the lighting of the torch with fellow students at the Golden Arches. Quite a nice and crazy end to quite a nice and crazy day:)