Today I received my gold badge....for being a volunteer for 10 days at the Olympics! It has been nice so far, really an eye opener.

I was honored to be selected as support team for the Olympics Village. In the village we have a few roles that we are assigned. 

1. Reception for the buildings where the athletes are staying

This was the first role I was assigned to. Basically, it is a help desk for the athletes and staff members that are staying in the building. So my main role is to log in the request/complains into the system and the respective support groups will try to resolve the issue within 24 hours.  Issues spans from inquiry of lost items, loaning of cleaning equipments,  meeting room bookings and other housing related issues. It was pretty fun, but initially I was kind of intimidated because I have to type the requests in Japanese. Well I somehow managed with the help of my trusty google translation.

2. I&I 

I forgot what the I means but it is inventory control. I was assigned to this pretty late into the games so there was nothing must left that was needed to be done. My guess is that they do the checking of the interior of the rooms and make sure that the items are adequate. The only trip I made was for the Sweden soccer team. They were checking in and I just tagged along with some volunteer ladies and made sure that the Swedish person in charge of the check-in checked all the rooms and once they are ok, we hand him all the keys to the rooms. Well because of this one event, I managed to get into the rooms and have a feel of how the room feels like. I am sure it will be much busier on the 8th Aug when the teams are checking out.

3. Reception of the facilities

So other than the buildings in the village. There are also facilities like the gym and relaxation corner etc. To me this was the most fun. Helping out at the relaxation corner was the best because our roles are not defined specifically, but rather just help out whoever needs help in that area. So I pretty much liked it like this and I took the responsibility of managing the queue for the massage machine. So many people wanted to use the massage chair and it was really fun to manage and get the queue moving. Other than massage chairs, there are dart machines, sofas, TVs, switch games, shuriken throwing machine, some ball game machine and a few table tennis tables. It pretty strange that MOST of the people are able to play table tennis pretty well. I mean, table tennis is not that easy to play but I guess they have the sports "sense".

The other part of it is the gym reception. This was to me the most boring and tiring. Tiring in the sense that there is nothing much to do. Our main job is to count the people coming in and out of the gym, ask them to wear mask, make sure that there are enough towels, replenish wet wipes/sanitizer and manage the sauna and do equipment checking. It interesting to see how the athletes are training but just sitting down on the chair and watching them makes me really sleepy. Especially so when I have to wake at 4am in the morning just to be able to report to duty on time at 630am. But well, it is really amazing that there are already people up and training/exercising/stretching in the gym at that time. I was at this place the whole day today and I saw all the hard work they have to put in daily. Out of a sudden I felt a little sad for them. That they have to do this consistently (almost daily) and maybe with no prominent results at the end of the day. It was nevertheless, still very inspiring to me and I strive to become a healthier and fitter person.

4. Usher of people/goods

This was the most labor intensive and sun damaging. Just one day out in the sun helping to transport the luggage from point A to point B, I was burnt badly by the sun and my skin turned a different shade of brown. I wonder how long I will need to recover my skin.

Also, I was occasionally assigned to the village plaza where I have to check the accreditation access of the people going in and out of the plaza. This was pretty normal work, nothing too exciting or interesting.

Well that is about the different roles that I have tried. After my last day on 8 Aug, I will continue to volunteer for Paralympics. I am curious to see how both will differ and I will continue to do my best.

It has been pretty hectic and exhausting so far. I have had no rest since I started to volunteer as I made it so that I minimized using my AL - for days that I am volunteering, I am not working. For days that I am working I am not volunteering. So there goes all my weekends and public holidays. I will only have 1 day of rest in Aug. I feel that I am starting to fall to exhaustion soon but I will remember to give myself enough rest.

This turned out to be longer that expected. I feel exhausted.