I of course did not have tickets for the the Olympic opening ceremonies, but I did have the next best thing a view from the 17th floor of the fireworks, with some new friends. One of the other students in TEFL course has an apartment that is close to the Olympic stadium. So he invited us over to watch the ceremonies on TV have pizza and watch the fireworks from his balconies.
Seven from the TEFL course showed up and Lenna my apartment mate and I invited Lotus whose apartment we are staying in. Watching the ceremonies was fun and we were sitting was a lot cooler than everyone in the stadium. During the ceremonies they would shoot off some fireworks and we would all rush over to the balcony only to realize it was just a teaser. My favorite part of the ceremonies was the mass Thai Chi segment. I have no idea how many people were in it but it was part meditation, martial arts movie scene and Busby Berkly spectacular rolled into one. The march of the athletes was interesting but hey need to figure out how to speed it up. You can only watch people walking around a track for so long.
The fireworks was not as long as I expected but they were good. They were the most spread out display that I have every seen. The line of fireworks must have stretched one or two kilometers. Although I think I missed the most interesting part of the display I think the did the olympic rings that would have been visible from the inside the stadium, but all I could see was a thin line of light.
When the ceremonies finished hit the street to find a taxi, only find out there were no taxi's available. The after 20 minutes of waiting we found out our route was blocked so the foreign motorcades could use the main highway. We had to circle almost all of Beijing before we got home between 2 and 3 am.
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