Summer Olympics 2008

It has been reported in the news all over the world in the last few days. More than 2 million people worldwide tuned in for the event. That event is the Opening Ceremony of the 26th Olympics.

I had to catch the show over the course of two days as I missed some parts of it during the live transmission, luckily for me, Astro does re-runs of the ceremony. The performances were the highlight of the show for me, though I am sure there are those who look forward to the march in of the athletes more.

I usually skip the march in as Malaysia is pretty far down the list of countries and there are 204 countries marching, but due to the system China used, Malaysia is a bearable 10th in line. Heh… (If you don’t know yet, the queue was based on the number of strokes required to write the countries’ names in Simplified Chinese, the less the number of strokes the further up front you are. The first word for Malaysia has five strokes according to my calculation, will check the dictionary and confirm this later.)

The performances at Beijing were directed by renowned director Zhang Yi Mou and they turned out to be just as artistically excellent, visually stimulating and thought provoking as his movies are. Though of course, not that I understood everything but the detail that the team went into for the clothes and performances, and the artfulness of it all is enough to satisfy me.

Strangely enough, I found the grand performance more enchanting than the grand fireworks, which were just one second pow-wow factor to me. My favourites are the moving blocks of words, the green humans which turned in white dots to form the dove and the way they ignited the flame – not the ignition itself but the process of running across the stadium walls with the projection of an unrolling scroll though they should have made it shorter.

I have moved on to watching gymnastics and diving now but I daresay, some of those performances will stay with me till the closing rolls around. Did China do a good job amidst all those speculation and criticism? I think they did, and they did it in style.