Justin Correia is the brother of Maritza Correia, a member of the U.S. Olympic swim team. He and his family have joined Maritza in Athens for the Summer Games and will be providing an ongoing diary of the experience.
It's Sunday, and I woke up at a decent hour, just in time to watch some of the swimming events on the Greek TV stations.
We saw the Americans do very well for themselves, and we were quite pleased with everyone's performances. I am going to try to get tickets to see more of the events live, but tickets are very hard to get if you don't have some already.
With everything that happened yesterday behind us, we decided to come to the Nike hospitality area. Nike had set up at the Athens college for their athletes and their families. It's been very pleasant -- actually I'm there right now as I write this.
We saw Carl Lewis walking by, and my mom waved to him, and he waved back. We are hoping to get a picture with him soon. About lunch time, a lot of the track athletes walked in, and we struck up some conversations with a few of them -- not just American athletes, but Nike's athletes from around the world. Jamaica, Australia, Kenya ... it's unbelievable.
Today we are planning to do some shopping and hopefully buy some souvenirs for our friends back home. The prices for items here are very reasonable -- we haven't really seen anything very overpriced.
So today has been a much better day. The only thing that was troubling -- and it was a minor thing -- was that I felt a bit of anti-American sentiment today. When I was walking to the train station, I had my flag in my bag waving behind me. A group of Greek men were standing on the street corner and as I passed by, one stuck his tongue out and pointed at my flag. The other men just stared me down.
I didn't care. People are always going to have their opinions, and it's not going to bother me. They can say all they want. I am American ... and proud of it.
