Saturday, March 24, 2007

The FINA Openning Extravaganza!!!

Oh my God! As Tal and I raced up the stairs of the Rod Laver Arena - usually centre court for the Australian Open, but converted into an Olympic sized pool- we were handed goodie bags and just made it to our seats after dodging hundreds of children dressed from head to toe in cerise for the opening ceremony of the FINA world swimming championships. The lights dimmed and a volenteer who must have been a prefect in her past life, turned around and told us to get out our lights and start waving them around. What? And the we looked around - everyone had a star light which changed colours and was waving them around welcoming in the Diva to sing us a song and the Aboriginies to give us some spiritual meaning to the whole performance. This was only the beginning of the cheesiness - soon we were treated to a reinactment of the pool being built, had acrobats twirling from the ceiling before a hundreds of pengiun dressed from head to toe in licra tap danced for us to River dance. Then came Shannon Knowl the Aussie idol who was then joined by some chicky who is an ex Neighbours star, we had a Ian Thorp basically coming out of the closet and a parade of nations!! How Aussie could you get???

Afterwards Tal and I walked back towards the city and Fed square through Batman park which has some crazy art instalations which I think can only be truley appreciated if you have taken a large amount of drugs - weird light intalations and songs about fish, a feild of mushroom like sculptures with the city scape in the background, massive tiled and painted sculptures... But fun - we were like kids in a playground!

2 comments:

Craigasaurus said...

Was that you that ruined the ceremony. I saw a small patch where two ladies were waving the stars lights out of tune and really ruined the show.

Better start practicing for London Olympics

Greg said...

How does one wave out of tune?

Hehehe.