Well, that was an opening ceremony, wasn’t it?
I was talking to Eric the other day, saying I’ve never seen an opening ceremony, let alone one for the Olympics. To be fair, there’s only been 5 since I’ve existed, so I have an excuse. But this years Olympics were going to be ‘the best ever’. I thought I’d best watch it, then…
It went on for absolutely ages, but I watched it. All the dances and whatnot going on. I liked the 2008 tai-chi dancers with all those patterns they made. Funky attention to detail. 
I watched pretty much all of it, including the 2-hour parade of all the different countries. I didn’t even know a place called Micronesia existed. I’ll have to ask Timi what its capital is. But we waited for Great Britain to show up and do their little lap, then we went to watch Neighbours. Then we came back to it, with about 30 more countries still to go round. Crikey.
But 8pm on the 8th of August 2008, the Olympic torch was lit. That’s convenient – 8 being China’s lucky number and all (Well, that’s what I got from that HSBC advert…). Some guy (I’m sure he’s important to the Chinese athletics community) finally lit it, after being lifted to the top of the stadium, making his way around the – quite awesome – giant plasma screen. It’s a really kick-ass torch, too. It’s basically the one they’ve been carrying round, just more massive and awesome.
All the time the guy was going round the stadium, I was humming the Mission Impossible theme tune, but apart from that it was a pretty awesome start to the games. One thing I don’t get though, is how they can make it a ‘green Olympics’ but constitute burning tonnes of fuel needlessly for the entire games. Hmm. They couldn’t even roast a dove like in 1988…
Correction!
The cauldron wasn’t lit at 8pm. The big-ass fireworks the 2008 drummers were counting down to occurred at 8:08pm on the 08/08/08, local time.