Day 2 in Harbin

After my first nights sleep on my bed that feels like a piece of plywood, we got up this morning and met for breakfast. Not a fan of the Chinese breakfast - all I ended up eating was an apple and a piece of cinnamon bread that wasn't very good. After breakfast all of the male and female officials got on a bus to go to the men's rink for a morning skate. The men are playing their games at a brand new rink that was just finished last week and the women are playing at the older, bigger arena. They gave us a tour of the facility when we arrived - it is obvious they are very proud of this building. There are actually two sheets in the arena, but the strange thing is they are one on top of the other. The zamboni actually uses an elevator to move up and down to each ice surface. The other strange thing about this rink the lower level rink has no glass, just netting at the ends. After our tour of the facility we all went on the ice for a 45 minute skate. It felt so good to skate and get my legs under me after all of the travel. The only thing that sucked about the skate was despite the fact that this rink is only 2 weeks old the air still reeked of smoke and we were all feeling it as we skated. Definitely not something I'm used to. After our skate, we all came back to the hotel for lunch and then had our big meeting. In the meeting we covered the typical stuff - rules, procedures, etc. We also got our assignments for the first day. I am working Great Britain vs Canada with a girl from China and a Finn. The girl from China speaks no english so that should be interesting.

After the meeting was over we decided to venture out into Harbin for a little bit and do some shopping. We ended up at some mall about 10 minutes from our hotel. The mall was really different in that it was organized by category. For example, all of the shoe stores were at one end, all of the sporting goods type stores were at another end, all of the women's boutique type stores were together - very different from all of the malls at home. The stuff was all pretty cheap compared to what we would see at home as well, for example a pair of shoes in the Nike store were only about $55 when at home they would probably be around $90 in the US. I didn't buy anything, mainly because I am going to have enough trouble bringing home all of the stuff they gave us in addition to my own stuff.

Speaking of stuff, man did this tournament ever hook us up. Apparently the World University Games are a bigger deal than I originally thought. Basically it is an Olympics for athletes that are attending a University, so for example, all of the women's hockey players are attending school somewhere, whether it be in their home country or they are playing for a US school. The Chinese are really treating this like the Olympics; the Chinese president is attending the opening ceremonies tomorrow night, most of the events are televised, and all of the events, including women's hockey, are apparently sold out. I'll believe it when I see it, but that will be pretty cool working in a full arena that seats 5,500 people. The other thing that makes this very Olympic like is the amount of stuff they gave us. Late last night right before we were about to go to bed we got a knock on our door from the welcoming committee. They gave us each this nice wheeled bag and told us it was a gift on behalf of the all of the different groups involved with the games. Laura and I thanked them as they left and then we both opened our bags. Inside there was sunglasses, a winter hat, gloves, ski pants, a winter coat, a vest and a pair of insulated shoes. All of the stuff is this Qiaodan brand - the logo looks distinctly familiar to the Jordan logo. But it is all really nice, good quality stuff - how I am going to get it all home is another story. Stacey said this swag was almost as nice as what they got at the Olympics in Salt Lake.

The other thing that was great about today was we got to know some of the other officials. On the girls side there are 3 from the US, 3 from Canada, 3 from Finland, 1 from Sweden and 2 from China. On the men's side there are 3 from the US, 3 from Canada, 3 from Finland, 1 from Sweden, 1 from Belgium, and 3 from China. I ate dinner tonight with a few of the Finns, Canadians, and one of the Swedes. My favorite part of dinner was when we were going over the pronunciation of everyones name. The one Finn is named Annsi and when he said it the french Canadian girl says "Annsi, kinda like Beyonce only without the be." We were all dying laughing and now will never forget Annsi's name.

I posted a bunch of pictures from yesterday and today on my site, feel free to check them out! www.picasaweb.google.com/connolly.kate.