Olympic Village

My name is Fei Ye and I'm from the United States of America. By birth I am a Chinese; however, I grew up in the beautiful country of Hungary and then later on moved to the US. Right now I'm attending Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications and majoring in Broadcast Journalism. It is with great honor and privilege that I claim to you my reader about my experience with the National Olympic Committee (NOC). For the Beijing Olympics, I'm a NOC assistant, where I'm going to serve, manage, and assist the US national team.

In the following gallery you my reader are going to take a first look into one of our training sessions, where we have lived in the Olympic Village for one night and spent two days there in training. A country was assigned to the NOC assistants by random selections and the "fake" teams came to greet us. By fake, I mean that those people are not actually athletes or chief of missions, but rather they are Chinese government Officials pretending they were for example, Americans, Germans or French in order to assist the NOC workers on these two-days of training.

During those two days, the weather was extremely hot topping 38-39 Celsius. Because there were some problems on the organizations of the event, there were at least 3 people who have gotten dehydrated. The event included a welcoming ceremony for the teams and a flag-raising event. The very famous ping-pong champion Deng Yaping also came to the event and has greeted us with warm words. Assistants and government officials both lived in the Village and tested every part of the living quarter to make sure everything was on schedule in welcoming the real athletes.

One of the main entrances to the living quarter of the Olympic Village, where a total of about 10,500 athletes are going to reside during the entire Olympic games.

NOC assistants are waiting in the NOC office for the country that they are going to serve during the two-day training. Everyone's heart was filled with excitement as we all waited for the announcement.