Olympic Green at Night

I guess I am getting used to working the night shift, but the hardest part has been figuring out when to eat. The routine I've fallen into is to have dinner shortly after midnight when I get in (ususally a stir-fry or curry on rice from the NBC commissary, which has been OK), and then have breakfast at around 6am, and lunch around noon. This way I am having normal meals at just about the normal time, except I'm having them in the wrong order.

It has been very slow at night. NBC has really cut back on the amount of production that occurs here, and is doing a lot more back in New York. In Athens, the two control rooms were busy almost 24 hours a day with several shows (Primetime, Late night, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemnudo, USA, etc...), but here all of the cable shows are being produced from New York.

This means that when I get in, there might still be a basketball game going on (and if it involves the USA, it is being shown back home), but other than that, the studios are "dark" until about 5am (well, Control B is usually recording some intro's for a Gymnastic's show on the Oxygen network, but that's it). Between 5am and 6am, the Control A crew shows up, and the venues start checking in with COMMs. Then things usually get a little busier. We have been lucky so far, in that there have not been any major COMMs problems.

Tonight, it was very quiet, so I slipped out onto the Olympic Green to take the night shots that appear in this blog post. The last one here is a short video showing a panorama of the area between the Bird's Nest and the Aquatic Cube.



It is beautiful and quiet on the Olympic Green at night. But even at 2:30am, it is still sticky hot and humid, and I was sweating by the time I headed back inside (to the freezing cold IBC, where I needed to put my hoodie back on).