matta

One of our PhD students is fluent in English, Chinese (Mandarin), French, Greek, and Turkish. And I don't just mean conversationally, I mean fluent.

Her son (who is 5) is fluent in 4 of those languages (all except Chinese). She and her husband speak the other 4 at home, and he picked all of them up. In fact, she picked up Chinese by accident (started working with a Chinese professor and just picked it up listening to him speak to others). A year after learning her first word, she was sent with the study abroad students to China to teach in Chinese.

BDLOU

As far as sleeping in or going to sleep earlier. Which would you rather do, arrive at a pit stop, sleep for 8 hours and get up and start the race OR arrive at a pit stop, sleep for 8 hours, go to first task and wait for 4 hours for it to open?

It certainly is an excuse but I don't doubt it is extremely frustrating to lose a big lead in that manner. It has to be done though to make for better TV. My issue is why wait 20 minutes into the show? Why not just start everyone at the same time on each leg? This penalizes the bad teams by giving them less rest time. I guess they do have mandatory rest periods but I don't understand why because most legs they take 10 hour flights. Isn't that rest time?

DRG

I'm sorry, but sleeping on a plane with those uncomfortable seats and all the commotion around you is nowhere near the same as sleeping in a nice warm bed. Besides, I'm sure the racers all need showers after each leg considering all the running and dirty work they have to do... otherwise they would all look and smell pretty foul rather quickly.