The Loneliest Place on Earth

I've decided there's no place on earth more lonely than an Olympic park once the games have ended and the world has gone home. So much effort and anticipation are poured into and Olympics on the scale of years and in the hopes of an entire host nation. Countdown clocks are erected all over the host city. As you drive home from work everyday you glance at the numbers dwindling down, not because you don't know how much time's left (you've memorized it at this point), but rather to experience sharing the same numbers with drivers around you, thinking, "It's coming! SO excited it's coming!!"

Then the games are finally here. They zip by in a super-stimulated tornado of excitement... and then they're gone. The park's empty, the clocks show "0," "00:00:00," and "00/00/00," and the space at the back of your mind that used to be filled with such glorious anticipation has been left vacant.

Standing at the Beijing Olympic venue was lonely, even though I was surrounded by so many tourists. It was lonely because there was no more purpose for the Bird's Nest; it was now, literally, an empty shell. The Water Cube was shut down, its lights turned off, to lie in locked-down stasis until it can be re-imagined as a water amusement park in years to come. The venue where Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympic champion of all time is now a hollow building made of plastic and drained of the water that gave it its name.

Seeing Sydney's Olympic park at Homebush was an even lonelier experience. Not even tourists were interested in visiting the site anymore and it was only 2005 (just 5 years since the Sydney Games). I was one of a handful of folks spaced throughout the entire park one day in February (summer Down Under). How sad! How empty.

Are the games worth all the money and painstaking effort poured into their staging, despite the knowledge that once they've ended, a life's blood will be drained and their bodies will become a skeleton of 17 days that lived and breathed? When I put it that way, it sounds like life, except that our mortal bodies are assumed into the earth after we've gone. These Olympic structures stand through time as a reminder of the desire we share to connect with one another as human beings while we've the chance to live-- to assure we're never alone or lonely while we're on this earth. How ironic.

A Chinese Obamanon!

What better way to celebrate my first blog post from Beijing than to dedicate it to the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama!

The election of our new U.S. president has galvanized people of all colors and backgrounds throughout the world, creating a sense of shared humanity rarely experienced in our cynical, divided human experience. Exhibit A: I spent the morning and afternoon of November 5th at a Tex Mex pub, the Saddle Cantina, surrounded by American Obama-philes in liver-soaked jubilation (thanks to Stella Artois, Hoegaarden, champagne, vino and strawberry margaritas), and in the company of new Aussie, Mexican and Slovakian friends, all overcome with the enormity of the moment as CNN projected that Barack Obama would become the next President of the United States. Such a moment is indescribable, especially in light of the not-so-distant memory of segregation. We wanted this change. We NEEDED this change. Now we have it!

It means so much to us, but for the rest of the world, this moment is also victorious. Just witness an Australian tear up as people of many nationalities embrace, cheer, stand up on tables and proclaim joy for your country, chanting "YES WE CAN," and you will understand how great the United States of America can be and how proud you can feel to be an American.

We have all earned the new puppy we're bringing to the White House on January 20th, 2009.