Beijing 2008 Olympics

Today (8/8) is a "gianomous" (borrowing the word from Project Runway's participant Suede) day for the Chinese people all over the world as this is the first day of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Since it is such a memorable day, I try to get up early to watch the ceremony live. I knew in advance that NBC would not broadcast the ceremony live (that's a shame considering that our neighbor Canada has live coverage) so I turn to my online p2p stream tv. Luckily, I had no trouble getting up early at 7:45am (that's pretty early during summer time...) but I got right into trouble when I tried to use the software. Tvants seemed to be not working for the whole morning and that's wasted me like 15 minutes trying to solve the problem. Even when I was able to get a stream, its quality was so poor that it was buffering nonstop. After watching that buffering stream for another 15 minutes. I just decided to switch and use sopcast. That move might have just saved the day as the video did not buffer at all and I was able to watch it without any delay. Well, today experience certainly makes me dislike tvants more as it consumes lots of bandwidth and sucks big times continuously.

I did not have any recollection of the ceremonies that I've previously watched so I cannot really say whether this ceremony is the greatest of all time. I think it opened on a high note but got a little bit boring in the middle and ended better in the end. I did like the part when the drummers performing as that scene was pretty powerful to me. After the Chinese national anthem, a gigantic scroll was slowly opened up in the middle of the field and that basically set the stage for the performers (Some dancers and kids drew a picture on it so later the athletes could step on it when they entered the stadium... pretty weird idea to me!? I've heard that the drawing would be auctioned later... who will buy this kind of crap art...). The ceremony was supposed to glorify the four great inventions of ancient China, paper-making, printing, gunpowder and compass. Then when it got to a point when some ancient looking performers holding bamboo scrolls and reading, I just started to hate it. And this feeling won't get away until the ancient part was gone and the modern part came in as thousands of performers used their bodies to form a mini-bird's nest on the field and I thought that's a brilliant idea. I also like the part when some martial art masters performed kung fu together on the field (I guess I just like the action stuff more in the ceremony). In the end, I was totally blown away when former Chinese gymnast, Li Ning, was wired and literally sky-walking around the stadium while footages of the torch relay were being shown behind him until he lighted up the Olympic cauldron. At that moment, Li just became Chinese superman and it's incredible (kind of insane to me, too)!!! I meant this time I would surely remember that scene as it's shown how creative (or crazy) Chinese can get for the Olympic games. Overall, I read the nytimes.com and it revealed that this ceremony included 15,000 performers and that's surely another great example how well communist countries can mobilize their people in major events (of course, this time in a good way). Hopefully, China would do well in the Olympics.