It's started

We hired a room in a restaurant for the day and from 2pm started playing board games and mah jiang (traditional chinese game) whilst flicking between Toy Story and Olympic stuff on TV. After dinner we gradually got nearer 8pm and all kinds of friends of friends turned up to pack out little room.

During the ceremony itself we would sometimes dash to the window to see the fireworks (we were about a mile or two away from the stadium) and other times go 'ooh' or 'aah' especially when there were hundreds of incredibly well co-ordinated people doing fancy things with oars, drums, lights or (memorably) block letters of a printing press. We all liked the cute children that seemed to pop up every now and again though we weren't always sure why they were there.

Everyone else translated occasionally for me -not really the language parts but the meaning of the cultural relevance and we all generally thought it was very good. Then came the painful 2 hours of athlete/country introductions only punctuated by some cries of 'hao shuai' or 'mei nv' ='so handsome' or 'very beautiful girl'.

The mystery over the translation of Great Britain was solved (Chinese translation was 'England' rather than UK or GB, so I wonder what the non-English parts of GB think about that) and finally the huge Chinese team turned up, the speeches could me made, the athlete's vow taken (in Chinese only strangely -maybe its only the Chinese who might cheat, desperate as they are to be a national hero!) and the flame lit.

After midnight we wondered outside but the fireworks did not go on that long, so we all headed home. Finally IT has started. It really is impossible to understate the importance of IT for China domestically or Internationally; yet at the end of the day most events can only be watched on TV and it will be over in a couple of weeks.

None-the-less, I'll try to make the most of it, lookout for things to do and just read the numerous media stories that try desperately to find a new angle on the event or on China and wonder what will go wrong... be it pollution (absolutely awful today for the cycling) or security (already been 4 people kicked out the country for scaling a pole and hanging a 'free tibet' flag earlier in the week and some others kicked out for unfurling something similar in Tiananmen; though none reported in Chinese media of course).

More reports to come, but feel free to read or delete as you wish!