Olympic Feat

I think I should win a prize in endurance -- 44 hours without sleep! Between the time I woke up Tuesday (without enough sleep) to eat breakfast at Wolfang's, to when I arrived home in Fishers at midnight Wednesday night, plus 6 hours because of a time change, I only dozed briefly on a plane. Still, the trip was fine. From Granada to Madrid I had some fascinating conversations with two girls from my program, I succeeded in amusing myself in the Madrid airport for hours before my plane left, then I had the best "person stuck next to me on the flight" experience I've had in my life -- a Romanian student now working on his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois. We're facebook friends now. When not talking to him, I read my copy of Pride & Prejudice in Spanish.

The most story-worthy part of the 8-hour wait we had in Madrid's airport before boarding our plane was a fluke of where my ISA friends and I had dumped our bags. Around 8 in the morning, we noticed the check-in monitors directly in front of us light up with "Beijing." No one thought much of that, until we started seeing professional staff running around...carrying signs bearing the trademark 5 ring symbol of the Olympics. That's when we realized that this was one of the chartered flights to carry the Spanish Olympic team to Beijing! As we waited, all sorts of athletes began showing up, completely decked out in their red and gold swag, and started to check in. I didn't want to be an obnoxious American girl who treated them all like celebrities...but another girl in my group, did. So we walked up to one of the groups and started prattling away in Spanish with them. (We figured that these athletes weren't in sports famous enough to have had enough celebrity attention to be annoyed with the attention now). We talked to some members of the swimming, diving, and field hockey teams, taking pictures, before letting them go on their merry way.

And as a flashback to last months' post about how I bring good luck to the sports franchises in places where I live, I would like to link to this recent article from the New York Times -- which acknowledges the dominance of Spain this summer. I only hope that success continues in Asia for the next few weeks!