When Words Collide, Sentences Form

The Olympics are coming! The Olympics are coming!

The Olympic Museum; Lausanne, Switzerland (Click the picture to make it big enough to see.)

And, I, for one, can't wait! I love the Olympics. From the unveiling of the U.S. uniforms (for the first time in a long time, in 2006, including an American-born company - Nike, along with perennial Canadian favorite, Roots - in the process) to the lighting of the torch during the opening ceremonies, to the medal count on the news, to the last insane and unknown sport's conclusion...I love it. I am a sucker for the Olympics. Whether it's a story about a speed skater's sister's battle with leukemia to an alpine star's favorite movie to a hockey player's visa issues while playing in the NHL, I absolutely love it. For two weeks every two years (yes, I love the summer games, too - and was thrilled beyond belief when they split up the Olympics so that I get to watch this stuff every two years instead of every four years) I memorize crap about curlers from Austria (I got to try curling this past winter - what an underrated sport - that is freaking fun), biathletes from Zimbabwe, snowboarders from Japan and mogul stars from England. From Ali's emotional torch lighting to the insanely hilarious Kerry Strug incident, I eat it up. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

When I lived in NY, the greatest thing in the world was getting the live Candadian feeds of the Olympics on our satilitte dish that measured the size of half of the countries entered in the games. (I'm pretty sure that my small hometown doesn't have cable yet...at least not on the road I lived on...and I can remember my dad going out to the dish in the back field - we had 40 acres or so - to move the dish, while we set up a relay chain of my mom watching the TV to my sister outside the window and me halfway between to my dad shouting if the picture was clear or fuzzy in order to get it into focus. What a sight. No wonder my family is so weird now.) But we got to see everything before it was shown on the American stations! Of course, we were in NY so we got the feeds from Quebec - in French. And it was fun while I was in HS and was taking French in school and could understand every 18th word, but pretended to know that the commentator was saying that Maria Munoz-Juevos from Bulgaria just fell off the balance beam and broke her tibia and that the underdog from Ethiopia just overtook her on the floor routine. Thank goodness for parents that humor kids and over-encourage them. (Now, instead of that, though, my mom likes to think that I speak Spanish and French fluently enough to tell someone to reprogram a car's complex internal computer to water her orchids on the 3rd Sunday of every odd month. She's going to be sadly disappointed when I get home for Christmas and I can't do that. I should study up. I have a month. I bet my parents never knew how much of an impact the Quebec feed of the Olympics had on me. Now they do. My dad also didn't know how much the pine tree in front of our house meant to me until he cut it down. Or how much I always wanted to see him slaughter a duck and never understood why we always had to go to the front of the house with my mom when a duck was being prepared for dinner. Hmmm. I grew up on a farm in case you couldn't tell.)

But, back to the topic at hand. I absolutely love the Olympics. And everything about them. On the day after I graduated from college I flew to Switzerland to spend two weeks at the house of my doubles' partner on the tennis team who was from the French part of the small country. She happened to live near Lausanne, Switzerland - the home of the Olympic Museum. The pictures above are from that trip. From the upper left corner, going clockwise and ending with the middle picture:

* The Olympic flame that they keep burning in front of the museum. You can't see the flame itself in this picture - but it's there. I swear.
* The amazing view of Lake Geneva from the steps of the museum. It's absolutely breathtaking and this photo doesn't do it justice.
* Britt (my friend/doubles partner) and The Steph on the steps leading up to the museum.
* The Swatch statue in front. Hey, it's Switzerland.
* The Olympic flag, center stage.

The museum was unreal, the views were unreal and the city of Lausanne as a whole was, yes - you guessed it - unreal. But back to my point - I love the Olympics! And I can't wait for the next edition. If I could be in Italy going to every event and sleeping next to no time at all in order to wait for the next starter's gun to go off - I would!

posted by Steph @ 9:05 PM