Weinberg freshman Annalie Jiang escaped four weeks of the polar vortex by traveling to the palm trees and 50 degree weather of … the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

After an online application and two Skype interviews with a representative in Moscow, Jiang was accepted as a consecutive interpreter with the Gorki Media Center, the press headquarters for the Mountain Cluster sports, like skiing, snowboarding and luging. Her job was to interpret English, French and Chinese for journalists and anyone else who needed assistance.

“There were palm trees, and of course they decided to have the Winter Olympics there,” Jiang joked. “It’s like the Florida of Russia. The Russians were all confused, too. They were like, ‘This is not my country.'”

Thanks to the weather, Jiang spent her free time visiting the nearby beach, which was by the Black Sea. On the job in the press room, she was able to rub shoulders with a few athletes, like Slovenian alpine skiier Tina Maze, who won two gold medals in Sochi. At press conferences, she met competitors from the United States, Canada and Switzerland. After attending a snowboarding event, she rode the bus back with American snowboarder Faye Gulini. 

“She was still in her uniform, just casually got fourth, just sitting with all the normal people,” Jiang said.

While hanging out with her fellow volunteers, she experienced a taste of the Sochi lifestyle. This involved things as small as drinking a lot of tea (“Every meal and then all the time in between!”) and as large as the difference in accommodations compared to Western culture.

One of her favorite moments involved biathlon, a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting that stems from Scandinavian military training exercises. Though it’s not very popular in the U.S., Jiang recalled a group of Russian interpreters getting fired up while crowded around a TV screen.

“One girl went to the bathroom, and she ran all the way back so she wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “They got to the shooting part. And (the Russian athlete) missed a target, and collectively, they all cursed.”

Interacting with the diverse body of volunteers, athletes and journalists was the first time Jiang had really applied her language skills. In the future, she hopes to continue using them in her career. For now, she is thinking about majoring in international studies and biology. She also wants to take up a fourth language — possibly Arabic, or Russian since she was briefly introduced to it.

Having returned to campus, Jiang is back to her normal routine. She works with NSTV, a sketch comedy group at Northwestern, doing their lighting and sound recording. With her roommate, she enjoys sampling different Evanston restaurants each Sunday. Like many an ill-fated college student, she loves watching hours of TV, including “Orange is the New Black,” “The Walking Dead” and any show involving spies, like “The Americans.”

Looking back on her experience, she says she will remember the novelty of working with so many other trilingual or multilingual individuals.

“You can just carry on these conversations in all these different languages,” Jiang said of her colleagues. “I could converse with them in Chinese, and they could just turn around and speak Russian to the other people.”

She says she will also take with her the unique feeling of being completely immersed in working, watching and talking about the Winter Olympics. As a former figure skater herself, the Games have a special place in her heart.

“I mean, just the international scope of being at an event like this,” Jiang said. “For four weeks, I was basically living and breathing the Olympics.”

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