Column from today's WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hello-from-pyeongchang-where-its-tomorrow-1518431084
WSJ subscription is a great investment btw..
Hello from Pyeongchang, Where It’s Tomorrow
Early, early thoughts from a Winter Games 14 hours ahead of home
By: Jason Gay
Greetings from the 2018 Winter Olympics, where, you’ll be reassured to know your rugged correspondent is typing while wearing long underwear over long underwear. I know you’re all eager for my clumsy cultural generalizations—so let’s get right to them!
1. It’s cold here, y’all. Not cold-cold—the first couple of days were mild enough for rum cocktails—but it’s turned frigid and windy enough to cancel Alpine skiing, make me walk backwards on the sidewalk and remind everyone that Sochi 2014 and Vancouver 2010 were basically beach volleyball tournaments.
Thankfully, your rugged correspondent braved the Super Bowl earlier this month in Minneapolis, which was a Jedi training camp for freezing your behind off. Minnesota: You toughened me into human Gore-Tex! I haven’t had to do long underwear over long underwear over long underwear yet, but I have a zillion heating packets and I’m traveling everywhere with BACKUP MITTENS.
2. Backup Mittens is a great name for your family’s second cat. Well, we had Mittens, but a coyote got him, so this is…
3. Underrated sports accomplishment: Being the first Team USA member to win gold, as Colorado snowboarder Red Gerard did Sunday. I think First Gold’s the best medal: There’s tons of attention, NBC dips you in prime time rainbow sauce, Wheaties sends you flirty messages, and you can basically goof off the rest of the Games. Or tear up the town. “If we’re not in jail,” Red’s brother Brendon Gerard told the Washington Post, “then something didn’t go right.” Hey, Red’s just 17! He’s got another event! Everybody knows 17-year-old kids have no interest in going out and…oh, never mind. Yikes.
4. Short-track speedskating has haughtily declared itself the “It” sport at these Games, and will likely prove to be, owing to the regional fan base, but “It” status has been temporarily hijacked by figure skating, which has minted new American fame comets in Adam Rippon and Mirai Nagasu. Four years ago, Rippon and Nagasu sat on the couch together and sad-ate In-N-Out burgers as they watched their teammates compete in Sochi. (Correction: There’s no such thing as sad-eating In-N-Out.) Nagasu even pulled off a triple axel—the first American woman to do it in the Olympics. You know how hard it is to do a triple axel? Think of that the next time you lose it when Phil Mickelson shimmies and chips out of a bunker.
5. Everyone’s making a big deal about music with lyrics debuting in figure skating, but the taste has been pretty conventional: Coldplay, “Moulin Rouge!,” Celine Dion, Beyoncé. When does someone skate to Merle Haggard? Cash? Screamin’ Jay Hawkins? Iggy Pop? The Chipmunks? If someone skates to The Chipmunks’ cover of “My Sharona” I will buy them a Kia. Or steal it, with help from Red Gerard’s family.
6. There’s always a have-to-have-it souvenir at the Olympics, and this year, it’s a pair of Stan Smith-style Pyeongchang 2018 sneakers, which may not be appropriate footwear for trudging through the slush at biathlon, but are handsome and nicely priced at KRW 50,000 ($46). Get them while they’re hot—or before the Adidas lawyers pounce!
7. There are a bunch of robots hovering around the premises—it looks like Journal tech nerd Joanna Stern’s living room—but, as far as I can tell, all these Olympic robots can do is sing, tell you the weather and vacuum. Thankfully, they do not seem capable of writing a third-rate sports column, but my Journal bosses have their fingers crossed for Tokyo 2020.
8. Double-underline this: The interplay between South and North Korea is the story of these Games thus far. Slopestyle is cool and all, but it’s been riveting to watch the reaction locally to the presence of North Korean athletes and Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The other day, local TV endlessly replayed a loop of Kim’s departure from her hotel—out of the hotel, into the car, out of the hotel, into the car—as if they were breaking down Buccaneers pass coverage. Now there’s fierce backlash—admonishments that a fawning media is airbrushing a dictatorial regime, and allowing North Korea to swipe the spotlight from the host. Meanwhile, my editor, Jim Chairusmi, was mistaken by other media for a North Korean journalist. Jim is Thai and from New Jersey.
9. I have no idea what is happening with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but please: no spoilers.
10. There is a 14-hour time difference between Pyeongchang and my home base in New York, and it does turn the world slightly upside down. Whatever you’re watching at home on NBC in your Boba Fett jammies is happening the next morning here, and it feels as if I’m skipping ahead chapters in a book. My kids think that “Daddy lives in tomorrow,” and they’re not technically wrong. At these Winter Olympics, Daddy does live in tomorrow—until, of course, he’s replaced by a robot.