Swisssssssssh! Swooooooooooooosh! Kabooooooooooom!

Did you see that opening ceremony?! In the words of the great Borat, "woweewoweewoooooow!" This mad spectacle of multi-coloured fireworks, swinging, twirling and flying people and wild flashes of a thousand colours surpassed even my wildest expectations. (And I had been taking sneaky peeks at leaked rehearsal videos.)

My favourite part was the exactly 2008 percussioners playing on lit-up drums. Or was it the puppet perrformance (with the four puppets all representing generals from the Three Kingdoms period), accompanied by that most famous piece of Beijing Opera, Farewell My Concubine? No, hang on. It was the lit up Olympics rings. Or, wait. The dancers doing calligraphy with their feet on that giant scroll. The equally giant printing press. Lang Lang's performance. The firework footsteps. The 56 dancers in ethnic dress. Li Ning floating his way through the Beijing sky to light the torch. Or maybe it was just Dirk's happy sweatiness. (Or sweaty happiness, whatever you like.)

It was an evening of many highlights, and one that I will not be able to forget for a long time. It was only the German press who couldn't stop in their frantic search for negatives and, frustrated they couldn't find any, resorted to calling the ceremony "propaganda" (because other shows of this kind are never "propaganda" for the host country, wha'?) and comparing the ceremony's director, Zhang Yimou to Leni Riefenstahl (which I have no words for. Absolutely not.)

Far away from such pathetically envious resentment, I celebrated the opening with about twenty colleagues and students -friends- in a local restaurant. Surrounded by a mountain of food, gallons of beer, and the fireworks outside reminding us just how much we are a part of this all, we had a happy, jolly and crazy night. At the end, my eyes still wet with excited emotion, I told my Chinese friends that they could, and should be, extremely proud of this fantastic, beautiful, joyous spectacle, which has finally put their nation on the map for everyone to notice.

What I'm not so proud of, though, was my fall out of the taxi on the way home, which was caused by too many Qingdaos and lead to a massive bruise on my thigh.

Some things never change.

Bis dann,

NadinePromoting Chinese-German friendship (no matter what the press tries to do!)

This is as far as I got- but with fireworks going up all around the neighbourhood I still very much felt a part of it