Stinger, Security, and Smells

Stinger
Last night I did my "stinger" in the pool aka a fast swim that stings and gets me ready to go fast in a few days. I wore one of my new suits and it, the stinger, went really well, as did getting the suit on for the 2nd time, haha.

Security
So let me tell y'all about the secuirty here. First off, on our way from the airport to the village our coach style bus was ascorted, or lead, by a convoy of policia/naitonal forces vehicles, with sirens blazing and some motorcycles speeding ahead to block off/halt traffic. Our bus was able to speed along ignoring stoplights and avoiding all traffic. I don't recall that we stopped even once, which sucked for my drive by shots, but got us to the village very quickly.
Second, at the gates of the village, and at the pool gates, there are armed, like automatic weapon armed, guards. In cameo gear and helmets. One time a car wasn't going to stop as one of the buses to the village was nearing so the armed guard jumped out in front of the car and aimed his big ass gun at the car. The car stopped. I can't remember the name of the guns they carry, some of the coaches were asking them when we were waiting for the bus one time, they told us that when they pull the trigger once, two bullets are fired and that in 1 minute it can do 750 bullets... I think they are comparable to M-16s? Crazy! Also for security, when the bus gets to the driveway into the village they are required to stop, where an armed guard enters the bus and make sures everyone has their accreditation (the tag that hangs around our necks at all times with our picture, name, country, etc on it, basically our life force while at the games). We also have to put our bags through an xray thing and walk through a metal detector when entering the village, like at airport security. But we don't have to take our shoes off :)

Smells
There are some bad smells in this place.
First off, the arrival area where the buses unload and also the bathrooms at the pool smell like "over ripe" porto-potties. Sometimes when I'm swimming at the pool, a strong stench of car exhaust wafts over the pool. There are a bunch of other bad smells. The only thing that smells good is the bakery section at the cafeteria, but only when the weird fish smell doesn't overpower it. The many other bad smells going on around the village and pool i can not identify. Oh, and there is usually the presence of sweaty/dirty man smell. hahaha.

In other news...
THE MEET STARTS TONIGHT!!!!
I'm so excited even though I'm not swimming tonight. I swim 100bk prelim Tuesday/tomorrow evening! YAY!!!! For those of you that don't know, the format is reversed here, they always do it this way in Brazil and will also at Olympics next year too satisfy the wishes of NBC. So that means prelims are in the evening, 7pm start, and finals are the following morning, 10am start. That means the last 2 days of the meet are only in the morning, finals sessions, because they are also doing semi-finals and finals for events 200m and shorter. Fabulous.

Right now handball is on TV. People are trying to figure out the rules. It's a weird game, the score is now 25-19 Dominican Republic.

That's all for now. Maybe later I will write about the pool or the village or the food.

Ciao,
Liz2