Here and There: Loving the Olympics

February 08, 2014

Loving the Olympics

Are you glued the TV more than usual for the next few weeks watching the Olympics? We are—and all of our neighbors too. When you walk past their doors you can hear the Olympic music wafting through the air.

Lady Hiva and I are really excited about the Olympics. We normally don’t watch much TV and when we do it is not sports, but the Olympics are an exception to that. In fact, in 2012 Lady Hiva and I watched Olympic Diving in a long line for a taxi in Beijing, China. The sleek Japanese divers brought quite a reaction from the Chinese audience we were with.

We are rooting for the United States, of course. But we both have a soft spot for the ‘underdogs’ too. We are excited to see that Tonga—Lady’s ethnic home—has a luge athlete. We rooted for the Japanese couple figure skaters that are competing having only been together for less than a year and other teams are looking at 10+ years together. We literally cheered when the Finnish woman cross country skier passed the chosen winner from Norway. We winced as skiers and snowboarders fell and held our breath when races came down to seconds between competitors.

Some of our friends had an Olympic party, complete with games and international dishes (which gets really creative when you have Foreign Service families bringing the food). We had fun seeing how excited they all were about the Olympics too. I made Tres Leches and died it blue and red…although it looked green and pink when it came out.

We even tried to be patriotic and wore our red, white and blue! GO USA!