For those of you who don't know me, allow me to introduce myself... my name is Mike. Here are some things you should know about me:

- I am successfully unemployed (but, hey, I have a MFA and it looks nice tacked up on my wall, so I've got that going for me)

- I have seasonal allergies and athlete's foot (hellooooo ladies!)

- although I have lived in London, New York and Boston, I now reside in a small town that doesn't have a stoplight but does have several (manure-filled) organic farms

- I have never seen the Godfather Trilogy but I did make the unfortunate mistake of seeing Semi-Pro on opening weekend

- I love music and am (wrongly) convinced I know more about it than you

- I also love the Red Sox, fine wines, exotic foods, leather-bound books and a nice, crisp pair of socks (generally, but not necessarily, in that order)

- I blog here at at mike-nagel.blogspot.com

- and I'm going to China in just over two months

That's right, I'm slated to go to the 2008 Olympic Summer Games in Beijing, China as part of the Olympic News Service. All together now...

"Bahm dahm da-dum dum dum dum.
Bum ba-da dum ba-da dum da-dum dum dum dummmm"

If you don't think I wasted 10 minutes making sure I had the right number of "dums" in that , then you don't know Mike.

It took a while for all this to come together, for a number of reasons that I won't bore you with here. In the end, though, my college (well, no alma mater, since my final final was on Monday) was one of five schools selected to send grad students/upperclassmen to the Olympics to help with the news coverage. And that's the extent of what I know about the program. Everything else has been given to us in the vaguest of terms, because, basically, the ONS has never done this before. So, here's what I know...

- I'll be in China
- probably for two months
- they think I have a place to stay (at the Communications University of China) and maybe someone will even feed me
- we'll be covering the Games as a Flash Quotes Reporter, which means I interview out-of-breath, sweaty athletes who may or may not speak my language and then type those sentences up both furiously fast and awesomely accurately for my editors

And that's about it. I know virtually nothing else... But, screw it, who cares? My next travel adventure has begun and I'm pretty pumped about it.

For the past four months, I've been trying to assimilate as much information as I can about China. Really, though, before I started researching, I knew next to nothing about the country.

For example, if you had asked me yesterday which city housed Tiananmen Square, I couldn't have told you. The only words I know in Mandarin were "been-fau-tong," which means "marshmallow" and "meso-hoh-nee," which directly translated is "I have sex you long time for money." So, yeah, that's wicked helpful. The only info I had on China in my apartment was my bread machine and coffee maker (both have "Made in.." status). Discounting my weekly visit to my main guilty pleasure, Panda Express, I had almost no interaction with anything China-related. Oh, except for those wonderfully vague fortune cookies I always add "in bed" to (since I'm still mentally in junior high).

Turns out, I'm your typical, politically incorrect, American traveler after all.

I was going into this thing completely blind. But I have spent the past four months learning as much as I can. Or a few things anyway and I'm going to do my best to impart this vast resource of wisdom on to you as well as share my cultural experiences while I'm there.

First off - "Cesuo" means bathroom. You now know the most singularly important thing I do.

I'm still learning, I'm still experiencing... but I'll be sharing all along the way. I hope you enjoy!

This whole shebang does provide a great blogging opportunity... when I learn something, I'll share it with you. So, as I learn Mandarin, you'll learn Mandarin. As I find out the rules of ping-pong, you'll find out the rules of ping-pong. And, if I find out they do have Panda Express in China, I'll post a picture of me eating some of that delectable orange chicken.

Yum, yum.