[This is my Trail] Things I learned from the Olympics

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Rachelle

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Sep 17, 2008, 10:59:48 AM9/17/08

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For all of you who asked, I did not have the chance to go to any of the Olympic events. Tickets were supposedly all sold out and hard to get (except that I kept seeing tons of empty seats on TV....but anyway). Also, where I live in Kunming is not at all close to Beijing. A round trip airline ticket is around $300 US (and probably even more during the Olympics). The train takes 48 hours. Been there, done that. Not again! Also, I don't really have any vacation time from work. Be that as it may, though, the Olympics were still really fun.

Here are a few things I learned:

Lots of new vocabulary. My coworkers were very impressed that I could hold long conversations about Michael Phelps' new world records in Chinese. I can talk about everything from "The Bird's Nest" to "Gold medal" to "world record" to "Breast stroke" to "Opening Ceremony" to "pole vault" to "alien" (used to describe Michael Phelps...haha! Apparently the Chinese media were also calling him 飞鱼 feiyu, which means flying fish). If you want to brush up on some sports vocab, you can check out: www.chinesepod.com/olympics or this great post on the Laowai Chinese blog.

China definitely knows how to put on a good show. I probably good have told you that beforehand, but obviously no expensive was spared. Would you ever have guessed that many people could be dancing, kung-fuing, etc. in unison? Only in a Communist country. Even the most cynical among us have to admit that the Opening and Closing ceremonies were pretty awesome. In fact, even the Opening Ceremony of the Paralympics looked pretty cool from what I saw.

The US still rules the world (even if we don't have the most gold medals). All of the best events were in the morning, so they could be shown live in the US. NBC apparently paid big bucks to make that happen. I'm still surprised China agreed, though. And it sucked for me because the only good things on during prime time here were fencing and rhythmic gymnastics. Haha. (Ok, those weren't the only things...but the team gymnastics competitions and almost all of Michael Phelps' races were on while I was at work in the morning.) Luckily, my office mate figured out how to stream all the events live, so I could dance around the office saying "one more gold medal for the US" (in Chinese, of course) every time he won.

China is now having a mid-life crisis. During the Closing Ceremony, I asked my roommate what China was going to do now. She had a 15 minute freak out session in which she kept repeating, "Oh this is terrible. What's China going to do now? The Olympics are over. You're right, Rachelle, what are we going to do now?" I guess China will now just go back to being in the news for tainted dairy products and natural disasters (I'd like the earthquakes to stop, by the way....a few weekends ago there was one on Saturday and one on Sunday that destroyed about 1000 homes up near the villages where my company works. We could feel the quakes in Kunming as well. Not fun.) My roommate later consoled herself (as did all Chinese) saying, "Well, we still have the Paralympics." However, since the Closing Ceremony for that was tonight, I really don't know what is next. A hot new girlfriend and a little red sports car?