Opening Ceremonies

I am so naive - I did question in my mind, what the time difference would be between the US and China. But my husband was the one that said, "you know this is going to be a recording, don't you?" Well, no, I was thinking it would be live - but of course, it wasn't.

That does not diminish all the cool stuff they had - but, for $300 million dollars, it should be pretty freakin outstanding.

I really couldn't see any of the athletes from the American team that I wanted to see in the parade of athletes - they mostly focused on the basketball players and the women's beach volleyball - gee, now why would they do that?

I have to say that GB was looking pretty bored throughout the whole thing, but at least he stood and cheered on the US team when they marched in.

It's amazing how many countries I've never heard of and have no idea where they are - geography changes daily it seems.

They talked about the 2000 Sydney Olympics and some guy from some small country that barely could swim the 100 free. I was wondering how that happened since I know there are time standards that you have to meet in order to go to the trials. I ended up googling this and found out that there were some invitations to very small countries that allowed them to come to the Olympics since they likely never would be able to do so. I saw a film clip of this guy from Equatorial Guinea swimming his heat by himself since the other competitors in his heat were disqualified due to false starts. He was awful and just barely finished the swim. I think the article stated there was a female swimmer from the same country who was even worse.

I fell asleep during the parade of athletes but woke up in time to see them light the torch. The whole production was technologically phenomenal - but now - on with the Games!!

Let me also add that NBC does get the gold medal for number of commercial breaks - I'm pretty sure there was a break at least every 5 minutes.