The Olympics are usually an opportunity to showcase the host nation's culture. This year, athletes are sequestered in a bubble, and only glimmers of China seep in.
Not at these Cruise Ship Olympics, in which participants do not so much enter China as sidle up to it.Still, Yao Qian, who is staffing a cultural exhibit in the press center, said foreigners were able to experience something of China — pointing to a recent workshop inside the bubble where they learned how to write Chinese characters as part of New Year celebrations.
“I didn’t know if what you would find in the bubble would really be authentic,” Jackson Haselnus, who works for Olympic Broadcasting Services, the host broadcaster for the Games, said as he waited in the line. Which gets someone living inside the bubble to thinking: If you were able to travel outside of it, what would you come away with? What could you learn about China — a vast, diverse country with a long, complicated history — in just a few short weeks?
There are all the pandemic impediments, too. Masks abound, of course. And even when they come off so their wearers can eat, a new barrier appears: a sheet of plexiglass that separates each diner from her neighbor.
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