Opening Ceremony

8 August 2008, Friday
The opening ceremony for the Olympics in Beijing is tonight but around here you couldn’t tell anything special was happening. Oh, there are some small advertisements but most of the push is on television. In fact the push on the telly has been going on for about year with the 5 fuwas (Chinese Olympic mascots) having their own show informing the Chinese about the Olympic games and appropriate behavior. As far a merchandising the Olympics here in Shenzhen we haven’t seen much. We did see a single Olympic tee-shirt at any of the stores we’ve visited and we visited many. The closest venue (equestrian) is in Hong Kong and it is not very popular for the Chinese. That venue just sold out a few days ago. I saw the local news that the reason this venue was not popular is that it is equated to the former colonialist powers or “royalty”. There is a sense that financially this Olympics will not be as prosperous as anticipated. The numbers of visitors to the capital is less now than one year ago and hotels are cutting prices as much as 50 percent. The general feeling is that people cannot wait for the thing to be over! There are many restrictions so the common folks hope it will be business as usual once the visitors are gone. We (new teachers) will head over to one of the local hang outs to watch the ceremony tonight.