GO USA! GO USA GO!

So can I just say I Love ♥ Love ♥ Love the Olympics! We went over to my parents house for the "Opening Exercises" as Otto keeps calling them. It was fun to watch it with mom and dad, nothing like dads random comments. :) Otto and I have had a blast watching them together. I am so glad he has this past week off from school it has been a nice treat having him around at night again. But that will soon change as he starts classes back this next Thursday night. I have been sick but I have decided this was a great time to be sick because I "need" to lay around on the couch to get better. So at the same time of me trying getting better for the most part, I am doing my part as an American supporting my country... I am sure they have heard me all the way over there a couple of times... Like the 4x400 men's relay where we beat the French. Then last night when the US girls gymnastics were so close to beating China and we fell off the beam, and then on the floor?!?! OHH it still hurts... We have tried to watch everything from Handball which I never knew existed, to fencing ,which I just don't get.

I think I am really enjoying theses games so much because I was in Beijing in 2005, doing massage and working with the doctors that work with the Olympic athletes. I was over there for about a month and I was able to see so much and all the starting of the construction for the games. How excited Beijing was to have the Olympics there. As you walk around Beijing they had Olympic themes everywhere on the Cities walls. They have art statues with the Olympic colors just in a little inlet type place on a random street. I can only imagine what it is like now. So it is fun when NBC take little tours around the city, showing different places some times I know where it is, so that is fun. While I was there we were able to visit The Beijing Shi Cha Hai Sports School it was the school that Jet Li went to, it was his training school, and so has a lot of their Olympic athletes. This was very hard for me to see. As they have said during the Olympics that they are picked at a very young age. They leave there family as young as 4 years old to come to these schools to train. They might get to see there families once a year, if they are lucky. The school training is extensive, all day long, very little regular school is done. The basic of reading and some other subjects but they work on the sport anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day.

This school trains for everything.. Ping pong, weight lifting, gymnastics , Tai Chi Quan, Some kinda of Martial Arts with a Sword, and so much more but we were allowed to see the kids ping pong which was a room of like 50 or more tables let me tell you I have a new respect for ping pong. They were insane, it was just very sad to me. Here is this room filled with 150 kids or more and there is no laughing going on the intensity in the eyes of the kids is something I have never seen before. A couple of the guys thought they were good enough to play with the kids but both was beaten by a 6 year old girl. We enjoyed watching that. We went in and saw watched them do the weight lifting for a minute and it was amazing. Got a tour of the medical area where they go to the PT and get worked on. I was in awe that my here is one of the best training facility in the world and my high school really had better stuff then they did. To see the kids laying on the bed who look so tried and just not how kids are supposed to look, no smiles. Then we went into where they were teaching the gymnast. This picture to the right of the little girl in the purple. Oh I was so close of putting her in my back pack and taking her home. We were in there for almost an hour watching and she apparently fell of the bar when she was doing her bar routine and she has to hang there for at least 40 minutes, she was crying no one was there to comfort her, nobody said anything to her just let her hang there and cry... they did nothing and it really broke my heart. She is not going to have a mom to go home to and say I had a hard day they were mean to me. She will just go to her room with 5 other girls and just wake up and do it all over again, and again.

So yes I do feel bad about the US team not getting gold but a part of me is happy that the Chinese got the gold. I have a new respect of what the Chinese actually have to go through even though mine was just a glimpse of there lives. I do feel for them. The pride they have for their country and the dedication they have is like no other I have ever seen.

But I do think the little girl in the black up top was the who beat us, I mean this was 3 years ago. She might be 10 now, umm I mean 16.