Olympics - From a Shanghai Perspective

8/08/2008 at 8:08 pm night was start of the XXIX Olympics. Watching the ceremonies from a location in China was a special treat for us. Really, who didn't think that it was awesome? We made a reservation for about 10 of us at Malone's in Thumb Plaza to catch the excitement. And it was exciting. Albeit in Chinese! One downside to watching live here was that meant we watched the CCTV feed, not a nicely translated, and as it turns out, interpreted, opening ceremony. I had many favorite parts, with the opening drums probably being one of my favorites. I am sure you have heard by now that many of the synchronized scenes were conducted by soldiers. Your country can do that when you are not fighting wars around the world! (sorry, political commentary not intended!) . It was interesting to watch in a location with about 50% international and 50% Chinese. Let's just say that the crowd was not overwhelmingly for the US. You can get a sense of that watching the video on You Tube of the US team entering the stadium. They were clapping for the team, but booing at the clip of Bush! And you have also heard about the scandal of the two-girls-one-song situation. Oh, and the footstep fireworks (which really was my favorite euphemism, "walking through history", that was great!) were taped the night before to ensure clear visibility. But com'on, really, besides those little things, it was an awesome display. You can see from our pictures that we all had a great time. It did take a quite a long time though! Finally, many Tiger beers later, the finale of the Lighting of the Torch. Tom and I rode the scooter (it is about 3 miles from our house) so we had a bit of a wobbly ride home (someday I will blog about drinking and scootering). By the way, Tom and I purchased a DVD of the opening ceremony. Pretty awesome to re-watch!!!

Since the opening night, we have been watching table tennis and badminton non-stop! In Chinese. Here, you get a totally different set of sports to watch and you get to see about 5-6 different CCTV channels (who says controlled media is bad???). In the US, it is probably the basketball, volleyball, swimming, etc. Plus since it is usually only NBC, CBS, or ABC, you are limited to the edited version! Here, we get to watch hours of rifle shooting and weight lifting. And as of right now, China is pretty solidly kicking our butt overall. But, the track and field events have started, so maybe we will draw a bit closer soon. We are missing a lot due to the language, but we simply augment with Internet updates.

Final comment regarding the Olympics was a funny comment made by Natalie. She was watching with family in the US and stated "I don't know who to root for, the US or my country". And recently she told my mother that it was kind of like cheating: She wanted both the US and China to win, so whoever won, she was happy!