YFriday, August 8, 2008

NDP, only without the ND.

I was watching the Olympics opening ceremony. I'm not quite certain, but I think it started at 8:08:08 on 08/08/08. I was eating dinner at that time. You can sense my excitement.

That's a freaking lot of 8s. Chinese people believe the number 8 to be especially auspicious. They came to this conclusion because the the number 8 sounds like the Chinese character for luck. The infallible logic of rhyming.

If ancient Chinese voodoo practices are right, then we can apply the Law of Rhyming Co-relation to all aspects of our lives. We can eat honey to get more money. We can drink water through straws (suck) to get more luck. We could also... well never mind.

Well anyway, I was watching the opening ceremony. To me, all these events seem vaguely similar to me. A country wants to show off, puts up this large scale show, where thousands of people are roped into wearing colourful and bizarre costumes. They move in synchrony, waving their thingies and forming words and shapes and other wonderful symbols.

I've seen this performance before. I see it every year. It's called National Day. The Olympics opening ceremony was basically Singapore's National Day Parade, only that it's held in China, and they spend much more money, because they are bigger than us. They are the same in spirit. There's the cheesy song, the cultural thing, the symbolic performance, the dancing.

However, the later part of the ceremony was different. The countries started coming out one by one, displaying their Olympic teams. All 205 of them. You'd think that after a while, watching people carrying a flag and waving would get boring. It did. I stopped watching. But one thing I noticed was the China performer girls that were hanging around were clapping and cheering whilst the teams walked past. Their enthusiasm was palpable. Later in the evening, I walked passed the tv on the way to the kitchen. I saw that the China performer girls' enthusiasm had deflated abit. They were probably tired out and pissed off from all the jumping around in high heels for an hour. That was funny.

So that was pretty much all I took back from watching the ceremony. Girls with tired feet. Sure there was the singing and chinese culture and some strange painting thing where they rolled around on canvases while painting it at the very same time. Okay that last thing was pretty cool. But all the mass dancing and drums and clapping, and costumes and history are so common. I saw similar things on tv at the WorldCup, previous Olympics, and of course, NDP.

National Day is tomorrow. Happy National Day? I <3 Singapore.

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