Wow! Brilliant! Or to put it in Mandarin, hen hao! The opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics was magnificent! Plenty of performers, plenty of drums, plenty of entertainment. The central theme was the display of ancient Chinese history, art & culture. There was the giant Chinese scroll, the drummer & opera performers. There was also children donning various Chinese costumes, too. There's also a little Chinese girl who sang Ode to the Motherland. All the performances were presented in a very creative & imaginative manner. I dunno how they pulled it off, but they did it so brilliantly. Millions of Chinese worldwide would have been proud of the display.The Olympic song was performed by China's Liu Huan (apparently, a popular male pop singer in his country) & UK's Sarah Brightman (nice to see a Caucasian sing in Mandarin!).
After all that performances, came the traditional entry parade of athletes (each nation with a flagbearer). In keeping with Olympic tradition, Greece entered first & host nation (China) entered last. Apart from that, the order of entry is different this time round, because the teams didn't enter in order of the Roman alphabet. Instead, teams entered in order of number of strokes in the first Chinese character of the country's name, starting from lowest number of strokes. That meant Australia was one of the last nations to enter. As always, the parade took ages!
After the parade of nations finally finished, came the speeches by the Presidents & the torch relay & the lighting of the flame cauldron. And then, the spectacular fireworks came! Very spectacular. I've never seen fireworks like that. It was magnificent. I think overall, this is the best opening ceremony I've ever seen of any sports event (including past Olympics, World Cups & other major international football tournaments like the Euros).
So, with the grand, majestic opening ceremony of the Olympics, China has announced to the world that it has really arrived to prominence on the world stage. Let the games begin!
2 comments:
That said, did you also notice the enormous amount of 'saving face' throughout the entire ceremony?
Firstly there was the fake girl lip-synching her song which was sung by another 10 year old, but was too ugly for the cameras.
Then there was the 55 second sequence of firework footprints which lead to the stadium - they were actually computer generated images.
Also the children carrying the Chinese flag who wore traditional dress from the 55 minority groups in China - these children were not actually from the minority groups!
And the content of the ceremony was slightly hypocritical. Did you notice how the Confucian scholars were hailed, yet during the cultural revolution of the 60's Confucian scholars were heavily persecuted. And there was no mention of the difficult years during the Cultural Revolution itself - the modern era was only represented by neon lights...
You could say the opening ceremony actually lacked a lot of substance...but then, that's Chinese culture for you... :)
Lip-synching & computer-generated fireworks - I was aware, & was going to include that as an "addendum" to the post. But your comment beat me to it....
In particular, if the story is true, the lip-synching thing was appaling; fancy deciding the singing girl she's not good enough to be in front of cameras. Goodness gracious, some people....what message does it send to the girls?? The singing girl had a right to be recognised in front of the viewing world, & the officials should have had enough pride in her voice.
Then again, someone mentioned that the lip-synching thing story was the other way round, i.e. the reason they went about that was because the pretty girl couldn't sing well enough, so they had to get the singing girl to dub at the last minute?
The fake fireworks - well, again, the viewers got cheated. But at the end of the day, it's "just" fireworks - not as bad as the lip-synching thing.
My 2 cents....
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