Olympic Madness!

August 11, 2008 • 8:56 am • POSTED BY Lindsey Gice

The Olympic fever that is infecting the office was kicked off by an awesome Opening Ceremonies celebration that took place in Philadelphia’s China Town. This promises to be the biggest and best (and most controversial) games of our time and we wanted to start it off right by walking down the street to partake in the very culturally-appropriate festivities. We were met w/ a slightly chaotic mix of dance performances, elaborate cake cuttings, former Olympian photo signings, mascot meetings, lots of speeches, and a rap version of the official 2008 Olympic song. The mascots were my favorite part of the evening (as seen in the photo above of “Jingjing” the Panda, Kelly, Tereze and I, w/ Tim in the background) There were also all sorts of sports demonstrations which certain members of our staff got a little wrapped up in (and by “certain members” I mean Chris and his run-in with a bunch of karate kids- see below). We then went to The Vietman Palace (yeah, not Chinese, I know, but we had to be a bit loose in our interpretation ) and watched the mind-blowing Opening Ceremonies which literally made us shout with excitement (“THOSE WERE PEOPLE UNDER THERE!!!” for example).

See a bunch more photos in the full post

The main stage at the event

Tereze, Chris and Kelly approve of the eveing

Dragon Dancers are not afraid to push you out of their way

Me, obviously excited to be having my photo taken w/ Huanhuan, the big brother symbol of the Olympic flame who excels at ball sports. No comment.

Chris in his crowd-pleasing pursuit of Karate superiority.

I honestly don’t know what this poster is about (a little help from any Chinese speakers out there?), but I know it’s Olympics related and totally awesome.

Street-style table tennis. Sadly, the former Olympian players were gone by the time we found this