Olympic fever has been spreading and isn't a shame the Olympics were on during the holidays? I'd be glued to the telly all day! For now I've been trying to watch as much as I can, starting off with the opening ceremony on Saturday morning. Here are the highlights of the Olympics so far for me:
- Opening Ceremony - WOW. You'd expect nothing less especially given the millions they spent on it! It was only during the second time I watched it that I realised that those fireworks 'footprints' were actually in the shape of footprints! I did doze off a little bit during the parade of nations, but woke up briefly to see NZ come out, and then again for the final moments of the ceremony when the speeches were given and the caudron was lit. I have to say I really enjoyed the music composed for the ceremony and have been trying to look for more details on them! Apparently 18 composers composed music for the ceremony. The Beijing Olympics theme song though is called 'You and Me' (or 你和我).
- The rowing - possibly the only sport we have a chance at winning a medal in! Six wins out of eight in the heats with the other two coming second is not a bad start! I don't want to jynx it though so I won't make any predictions!
- NZ vs Brazil (aka Ronaldinho) - a 5-0 loss, what did you expect against the world's best in soccer? It's much like the All Blacks vs Romania. Even though we got thrashed at least we got to see our team get thrashed in a bit of style! I was personally surprised at how some of the earlier women's and men's soccer matches could be so exciting (NZ women vs Japan and NZ men vs China). You never know when a goal is going to be scored! In both of those games were leading till the other team equalised!
- Gymnastics (more specifically women's gymnastics) - the Chinese team look like they're made of children even though they're all older than 16 years (the rule I think) but they were great, and are coming first I think. What was more spectacular (for the wrong reasons) was how the gymnasts were slipping off the bars one after the other! The Chinese gymnast who was thought to have a good shot at getting a medal slipped off, the American slipped off....There was also a British girl who had lost her balance on the horse and was about to fall off several times! Fortunately she didn't though!
I've fallen victim to the commercialisation of the Olympics and after discovering McDonalds are selling these small soft toy keyrings of the five Olympic mascots (BeiBei, JingJing, HuanHuan, YingYing and NiNi - 北京欢迎你 or Bei Jing huan ying ni which means 'Bei Jing welcomes you' which is pretty clever!) I went off to McDonalds after picking Aonghas up from work to buy a Happy Meal to see what they were like. Today after uni I went to McDonald's and there was an Asian girl at the counter. I asked her if they sold a different toy each week but she told me she had a variety of them, so I ordered a Happy Meal (she gave me some funny look!). She overfilled my Coke but that was all good. What was even better though was that when I got home I discovered she had accidentally put two toys in my Happy Meal! Good on her! I might try see her again!
It's also great to see the Olympics being screened on at least four screens at the Business School. We don't get that over in Grafton. All we get on our LCD screens are photo slideshows of random things nobody takes notice of! After watching so much of the Olympics though, I really want to visit China and Hong Kong (nothing's changed about that)!!!
Bring on the Olympics, and hopefully a medal or two for New Zealand!!
No comments:
Post a Comment