List Time

With only a couple of days standing between us and a return to normalcy in the States, I figured it might be time for a little list. First, what I will miss most about China and living in Beijing:

1. Getting 40 channels of Olympic sports 24 hours a day. While my need for american football is growing, my need for water polo and synchronized swimming has been filed for at least four years.
2. Donata's, the pizza place down the street. Considering even the Chinese students here don't eat the food at the cafeteria, they've basically kept us all from starving weeks ago.
3. The Chinese volunteers that we worked with at the ONS office. Yao, Li, Raul, Winslet, Rita and Erik were fantastic, grabbing Chinese athletes we couldn't talk to and others as well. Hopefully they learned from us as much as we learned from them.
4. Some of the Chinese food. I may never be able to eat at Rice Cafe again after some of the better Chinese food we've had on our trip. But the bad Chinese food we've had may make me not really want to try.
5. Basketball with the locals. They may not really know what they're doing besides put the ball in the hoop, but they're a lot of fun either way.
6. Random singing guy at the outside track at 6 a.m. I really can't explain it better than that.
7. "Welcome to take Beijing taxi," every time we get into a cab.
8. Walking down a street at 2 a.m. and seeing a little old lady walking her tiny dog. And feeling 100% safe.
9. Conversations with cab drivers, especially the ones that throw random English words into their Chinese when trying to talk to us. And cut across eight lanes of traffic, and blow through red lights. Actually not much different than drivers in New York. I'll miss them nonetheless.
10. Not having to worry about what to wear to work, because you and about 1 million other volunteers are all wearing the same uniform.
11. Beijing Subway Musical Chairs, the game that lets you run over Chinese people for a seat because, hey, they're doing it too.
12. The China Daily, the official English newspaper in China. The reporting is, well, biased you can say. Lets talk about the article that says tall white guys with blue eyes aren't stared at in Beijing, when the guy across from me in the subway is burning through me with eyes.
13. I will miss the history of Beijing. The Forbidden City and Great Wall were great, and I'm going to be sad to not have those things around.
14. Krystyna, Ernst, Amy and Andy, our bosses at the ONS. They really were better than we could have ever hoped for, especially with all of the obstacles that we found during the Olympics.
15. Last but not least, 2.5 yuan giant bottles of beer. It equals around 10 cents a beer, which you're not going to get back home.

And now the things I'm looking forward to most about home:

1. This could easily go in the other column, but having everyone speak English is going to be fun. It might take some getting used to in crowded places though, because now we can't just say whatever we want.
2. Not having smog hide the sun, moon, stars and the sky in general.
3. As weird as it feels, I'm actually looking forward to getting back to school and work, if not as soon as I get home though.
4. Not sleeping on a mattress that's as hard as quarry rock.
5. Not having my toilet inside my actual shower.
6. Being able to grab some Taco Bell/Steak N' Shake/Q'doba/Subway whenever I want. Our entire group has been dreaming of food for weeks.
7. Driving a car again. I really, really miss my car.
8. When people form a line, people actually get in the back and don't cut it.

There's tons of stuff more, for both of these columns, but all of our time here has been too much for me to put it all down. Tonight's the Closing Ceremonies, so I still have a couple more posts before our time here is done.