Olympic Torch Relay!
and the very next day, at 5.30 am, i got out of bed to go watch this historic event! ok, so maybe it wasn't that important, but still!
OMgoodness the amount of chinese people dressed in red made it seem like i was in China! with Australian tourists!
This is how Ursula looks like at 5.30. siao. Keep in mind that i came back at 3 AM in the morning... but thats hols! woo!
The view from the bridge was absolutely gorgeous. And below is the memorable area where someone bonked his head last year =P
Our first stop was the hot-air balloon show! Although i don't see wahts so fascinating about it.... lol. But they were HUGE!
This is a nice pic! the building in the back is the old parliament house, which looks newer than Malaysia's new parliament building.
After this, we went to the MAIN event... which we had to wait another 2 hours for... =_= But the atmosphere there was awesome! Plus the hot air balloons were all in the background
Thats the China flag! oh, there were TWENTY ONE THOUSAND CHINESE nationals in Canberra that day!! thats like, Segamat population!!!
No wonder the ang mohs looks so lost =)
This is the area around the main stage, which is a huge grasssy hilltop around 150 m wide?
There was even dragon and lion dances! COOL! I've never seen a dragon dance before..
FYI, it was freezing cold, around 8 c the WHOLE time i was there, so naturally our fingers froze and couldn't operate the hp, camera, and whatnot. I'm just glad i could hold my free breakfast! we queued up nearly 1 hour for it! but that made it all the more "best!" The looooong queue:
A brilliant sunrise, smothered in balloons
Finally, the ceromony begins! Of course before that there were lots of shows and cultural dances and stuff, but i'm too lazy to update. One thing tehy did, is smoke the whooole area with err.. smoke? which smelled bad. they said its some aboriginal reconciliation thing, but i know they're just trying to fog the area as well. Looks like there are mosquitoes in Aussieland!
And theres the friggin torch!! the one i woke up at 5.30 IN THE MORNING, froze my digits off, and waited for 4 hours to see!!
And to top it all off, i didn't even get near it! But i was THERE! Wohoo!
Oh, i forgot to mention about the tibetan protestors. I don't want to go into detail, but most of them were some silly ang mohs who didn't know the real situation and were just shouting "free Tibet!" as if that would do any good. One angmoh was holding the flag upside down. But they wrote in the sky! Cool!
There was even some Sudanese people holding the SUDAN flag and shouting free tibet!@!! Just goes to show how stupid most people are.
Why is her pic here????? lol
Of course with the torch running away, there was no point staying there anymore, and i wanted to SLEEP. so it was time to go...
...stopping to desecrate a national monument along the way..
This is the scene at the bridge on the way back! it was FULL! we couldn't get across because they wanted the torch to run first. Some crazy angmohs took a tibet flag and along the whole way, screaming "tibet, china out!" or some silly thing, in the middle of TEN THOUSAND chinese people.
And they got mobbed, which isn't nice, but it teaches them a lesson in stupidity. i mean, really. you do that in Afghanistan and they chop off your head on YouTube.
Lol although i'm Malaysian, but sometimes its fun to cut away the cultural boundaries and flags and symbols. Which is what the torch thing relay was supposed to do. Did it succeed? hmm... i'm still a Chelsea fan... =)
Forward China! (in Chinese this sounds much nicer) =P
