Aug 4th, First full day in the Village.

Sorry for putting all the posts in together, but I don’t have a lot of time to get them on every day.

This morning I woke up around 7am, Keith and I went for a little breakfast down at the cafeteria before our 8am debriefing with the R.C.M.P. We just went over some of the security factors and some of the stuff that we can and should not do while we are here in china, basically just to make sure that we know all the rules. After the meeting we headed back to our rooms to get our stuff ready for practice and to also get our Gis ready for GI check and patches which we also did this morning.

The practice venue is about 20min by bus to get to; once we got there they took us in and showed us where the Canadians would be practicing. Every team has their own sectioned off matt area, by sectioned off I mean with big curtains around it – which is pretty cool, “secret training” lol. Anyways, like I said before in my previous posts, practice is now at 100% but shorter. Today I did some warming up, which was just basic drills and uchi komis – then I had 4, 3min rounds with different partners. I finished up with some gripping drills and stretching out. After practice we got back onto the bus and headed back to the athletes village to shower up and get some lunch. The cafeteria is crazy – so many different types of food and it is also open 24hrs a day which will be great when I am done making weight :P. After eating, we took a little walk around to check things out. You defiantly won’t find anything as good as it is here – from the training equipment to the village itself! Anyways we didn’t do any shopping today because we were kind of tired and had to get back in time to get our team gear. Although we did have time to stop by the “PIN” trading center for our free Coke bottle (recycled) T-shirt, which is pretty cool.

At 4pm we headed off to get fitted for our team gear. Overall the teams T-shirts, shorts, hoodies etc are pretty nice, the one thing that sucks is that there are no Olympic rings on the gear, but whatever. There are however two things that I really didn’t like – well let me correct that, NO ONE liked... and I don’t just mean people from Judo, I mean people from all sports. The opening ceremony outfit is the better of the two but its kinda weird and well not that nice to look at. But the Closing ceremony outfit takes the cake that’s for sure, this outfit consists of some wired dragon covered pants, with this t-shirt that has some funny patterns on it as well, and to top it off we have to wear this bandana type thing with the same dragons stuff on it. Let just put it this way, it’s like karate kid meets red paint and dragons outfit. Oh well I’m pretty sure at the closing ceremonies I will be still celebrating my Medal :P(hopefully) and will probably be tipsy ;) enough to bust it out without a problem. Anyways after outfitting we headed back to our apt in the village and got ready for our run.

We ended up going for about a 30min run to get a little sweat going before dinner. Don’t worry the air isn’t as bad as people are thinking, or at least I didn’t have any problems. After dinner we decided to go check out the village at night, so we walked around for a bit in the international ZONE (where all the stores and fun stuff is). I guess every night there is a show on, so we decided to take some pics and watch for a bit. We ended up catching the end of a magic show and also a little bit of some Chinese dance, which was pretty cool, but we started getting tired so we headed back to our apt and went to bed!!..