Going back in time

Facebook memories have become an easy way to look back on what you were doing a year ago, or three years ago, or 10-plus years ago. They might jog your memory and bring some things back to the forefront for a bit.

That happened today when I looked at some of my memories from two years ago. It was on this day, Feb. 2, back in 2022 that I landed in Beijing for my third Winter Olympics experience. That in and of itself is just another trip on the Olympic list, but that particular experience, that particular day, remains to this day one of the most surreal things I've ever been a part of and it made me want to retell the story.

With the COVID-19 pandemic still in full force, the Beijing Olympics used a number of different protocols to help keep everyone safe, including media members who were traveling to China to cover the Games. One of the protocols, which proved to be a giant pain in the butt due to airline travel problems, was having all games-related personnel arrive in Beijing on special flights, meaning we had to book certain flights from one of a select group of cities.

My flight came from Paris and for the most part was pretty normal, but when we landed, it was far from normal.

I remember walking down the jetway into the terminal to find a completely empty building. The terminal had been cleared of people and only Olympic-related persons were permitted in this one terminal. It was incredibly spooky, much like you were emerging from your bunker after the apocalypse (or I would suspect anyway). We moved through the terminal behind a couple of volunteers/employees who were dressed head to toe in hazmat suits. We got to one waiting area and we sat and waited as they processed our papers, one at a time. We moved on to another area, where again, hazmat suits greeted us as they went through more of our paperwork. And finally they led us all to a room where we had to sit and wait for our transportation to take us to the specific hotels where we were staying.

I know that the main reason for all of the precaution was to keep us, and thus, everyone else associated with the Olympics, safe, but looking back on that day, it's still weird to remember that empty airport terminal, the hazmat suits and the fact that I was on the other side of the world about to cover my second Olympics in a pandemic.

I'm glad I glanced at those Facebook memories this morning, it brought back an interesting time in my life and has me looking forward to July, when hopefully I will not be in an empty airport with people in hazmat suits leading us around.

Incidentally, in that short, weird voyage through the airport, I first left my passport at one counter and had to go back through a checkpoint to pick it up, then left my vaccine card at another checkpoint, which was eventually brought to the room where we were waiting for our buses. Maybe the surrealness of it all just got to me.

Flying in to Beijing two years ago for the Winter Olympics, not yet aware of the surreal scene that was about to unfold in the airport.