Lindsay Toler, the Lake Highlands resident and University of Missouri journalism student who blogged from Beijing before, during and after the 2008 Summer Olympics, returned to Dallas late Thursday.

On Friday morning, she was at The Dallas Morning News for a meet-and-greet with neighborsgo editors ... and News publisher Jim Moroney ... and a surprise reception featuring family - including mom Carol and grandparents Sport and Baby Doll, the inspiration for her trip to Beijing - and members of the Lake Highlands High School drill team and cheerleading squad.

Her "freedom of speech" blog post speaks volumes about all the things she couldn't say while in China. Here are a few other insights gleaned from conversations with "Lake Highlands' favorite daughter":

• Michael Phelps smokes. She saw him at the same Beijing nightclub where she bumped into - literally - gold medalist Henry Cejudo.
• Another Olympic News Service volunteer was deported for posting unfavorable comments on a blog about the host country. (ONS volunteers were technically Chinese citizens, and Chinese citizens are not allowed to criticize the country in public. Remember this, Modern Generation, the next time you complain about the United States in public.)
• The BBC contacted her after viewing some of her neighborsgo.com videosand asked her to blog for them. She said no. (They were offering the same pay we were - nothing, so as not to jeopardize her non-professional journalist standing - and she didn't see the community connection that she was making with neighborsgo.com.)
• Her most magical night in Beijing had nothing to do with the Olympics. It was her night at the ballet Medea - the one she had the "blind date" on - and seeing how "real" citizens reacted to it.
• There was no Coca-Cola in China when Sport and Baby Doll visited in 1979, but there's a Coca-Cola umbrella on every street corner today.
• There's a Pizza Hut at the airport, but no Dr Pepper.
• Scorpions really do taste good, but starfish really don't.
• The Mexican Wave and La Bamba, two Mexican food places in Beijing, are OK, but Mi Cocina is still her favorite Tex-Mex place (and where we went to lunch Friday).
• Chinglish - spoken or written English influenced by Chinese, often with stilted, humorous results - should be seen as more of a deliberate art form than a culturally insensitive target of mocking. (It's a lot like the many tattoos of Chinese and Japanese characters that folks have out there in this country. The tattoed ones may think the characters say "peace" or "serenity," when they really say "doorknob" or "make happy.")
• She posted the first YouTube video of the lighting of the Olympic flame from outside the stadium.
• China Central Television offered her a guest anchor spot for "presenting herself so well" during a televised interviewseen by millions with Yang Rui, the Chinese Larry King.
• She toured a couple Chinese media operations- state-run, of course - and was amazed that most of what she saw was content aggregation: People taking existing material and linking to it online or assembling it in print as needed. "There was very little original reporting," she said. Makes you wonder what China would do with a site like neighborsgo.com. Can you imagine all the stories waiting to be told by 1.3 billion people?
• She went to Beijing with the expectation of liking every experience, no matter how quirky or inexplicable. But she ended up really not liking a lot of what she saw or experienced.

So there you have it - a summary of the conversation that neighborsgo editors had with Lindsay Toler when she returned from Beijing.

Lindsay was in China for about two months. While there, she posted more than 170 entries, 100 photos and 20 videos on neighborsgo.comthat generated hundreds of comments and created a new community, affectionately known as The People's Republic of Lindsay Toler.

Thanks again for sharing your Olympic experience with us, Lin-Lin, and for showing us what a great storyteller with access - geographic/technical - can do to report in real-time and build a sense of community in this Internet Age.

We can't wait to see the "How I Spent My Summer" essay you'll write entering your senior year at Mizzou. Good luck with what promises to be a long and fruitful career in journalism!