July 18th in China, Meeting new people-Amber and then some Aussies!

I woke up and kind of felt like taking a little time to myself this day. I went to Pizza Hut by myself where I sat and ate a 9 inch pepperoni pizza and drank some nice good ol' iced sweet tea. It was rather relaxing and I enjoyed just taking my time and being on my own for a little change. After enjoying my quiet meal I headed back to the hotel and filled out a few postcards and headed out to find a cab to take me to the post office. I had a piece of paper with post office written in chinese on it. I must have approached 3 or 4 different taxi drivers and none of them would help me. They just kept waving me off, so I was a bit discouraged. Luckily next to the west gate, which is where the cabs are always waiting, there is a olympic volunteer host booth where locals can volunteer to be a representative of Beijing and show hospitality to visitors. So I walked up to the group of volunteers that were hanging around the booth and asked about the post office. One of them actually walked me completely across campus to the Post office. Her names was Amber, she is a chinese girl my age but is not originally from Beijing. She is here studying literature. She and I had a pretty good conversation, I was very impressed with her English and she apparently was very impressed by my pale skin, saying, "You are very beautiful." HAHA here in China the whiter you are the better. LOL After we got to the post office I traded my phone number with Amber because she said that her and a group of friends get together every week a few times a week to play volleyball and I had told her that I played. So I was excited to make a new friend. :) Hopefully I will get to join in on a game of volleyball. After she left I went into the Post Office and was able to mail off 7 postard for 31.5 yuan which is like 4.60 USD. After I left the post office I was able to find my way back to the hotel with no problems and I stopped to get myself a cold coca-cola on the way. When I got back to the hotel room I had an idea, because the day before I found out I would only be working for part of the games until cycling was over and then I am done. So I had an idea to try and contact the coaches and PR people for the USA baseball team. I have worked the past few years as a coaches assistant to the MU coaches so I thought why not try? What could it hurt?? So I e-mailed all my bosses at MU as well as a few sports broadcasters that I know and I also was able to find the e-mail of a USA assistant coach and the team's PR guy. It was worth a shot. After sending out those e-mails I got ready to go out with Allie because I ran into her while on the way back from the post office and she invited me to come to a get together that was with all the Aussies and people that Allie is going to be working with in the water cube. it was fun, I had nothing to wear so my roomie let me wear some of her clothes and we got ready and caught a cab to head to the pub where the get together was. I met several people from Australia as well as Allie's boss. It was fun to chat and mingle and hang out with everyone but I was getting tired around midnight so Allie, Whitney and I took a cab home. The only problem was the cab driver didn't understand us and instead of dropping us off at the West gate of Renmin University, he dropped us off at the East gate. But we thought it was fine, we could just walk across campus. We failed however to realize that the driver also dropped us off on the wrong side of the road and there are like chest high fences between the traffic lanes...haha. So umm instead of walking the 3 blocks or so to get around the fence we all decided to climb over the fence. I was fine until my foot got caught and then I fell in a rose bush. Whitney also fell over the top of the fence, but its ok, I was there to break her fall! haha Eventually we all made it over and headed into the East Gate. We stopped to buy some grilled chicken kabobs from a street vendor and then walked to the hotel. I was pretty beat so I talked to Micah a little bit (because it was technically the 19th, which is our 6 month marker of being together) and after chatting with im I pretty much konked out. lol