Watching the Olympics and listening to all this talk about Beijing makes me really miss that place! All I hear and see is Beijing this and Beijing that and I hate that I’m not there to explore all the really cool things that they did just for the Olympics =( I even missed out on trying out the new Beijing International Airport by a week!! 天天听着看着中国的旅游 hotspots ，新和旧的东西我全部都想看！非常可惜！

I can’t help but tune myself into the Olympic events everyday, especially now that we can watch it on CCTV! The problem with Channel 7 is that they give a lot of air time to swimming and other popular Australian sports, concentrating on the Australian athletes because that’s what our Australian market demands of them.

But this time around, CCTV gives me the choice of what to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever watched softball, equestrian, weight-lifting, judo， badminton， 乒乓比赛 什么的 during the Olympics before…

虽然我可以看别的运动，我还喜欢看游泳比赛，diving (especially synchronized diving), gymnastics… mainly the sports that involves a lot of gravity defying and/or contortion of the body O_o; The least favourite for me has to be the equestrian competition and the white water rafting.

我很像北京。。。 我想见我的北京朋友。。。

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On a side note, I’m starting to get really frustrated with always hearing 中国加油，《insert athlete name》加油，《insert team name》加油，《insert country name》加油. My goodness, how many times do they have to say “Jia You!” at least mix it up a bit… isn’t there something else in Chinese besides 加油??!

I thought I would use the Beijing Olympic Games as a good excuse for me to blog a little in Chinese…

BUT my vocab prevents me from writing about just how crazily fantastic the Olympic opening ceremony was! Only in China can you get a HUGE mass of people performing in sync with 99% accuracy. I enjoyed playing ’spot the mistakes’ during the performances just because it would be unfair if there weren’t any mistakes at the Beijing Olympics… it’ll make the Australian Sydney Olympics look bad!

Sydney 的奥运会不必北京奥运 Opening Ceremony 好。其实 Sydney奥运会已经过了八年，我差不多都忘了。。。 我才记得我们有 lawn mowers 和 Nikki Webster， 别的想不起来。

The Beijing Olympics though, there are some performances which I doubt I’ll easily forget. I especially loved the performance with the mass of drums which lit up in sync and the moving columns which was so in sync that I almost believed it was computerised.

我最不喜欢的是 the order of which each country entered the stadium! 我每次等澳大利亚队出来才坐别的东西。因为澳大利亚第一字是 ‘a’ 应该在前面的，可是这次澳大利亚差不多是最后出的！！My dad had to explain to me that countries were entering in order of number of strokes in their Chinese character… STROKES?! Poor Australia has way too many =(

Anyways, like I said great ceremony. Even the lighting of the Olympic flame was cool! Although, it would have been cooler if there were no mistakes…

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P.S. 过了几个星期，北京语言大学才挤过来我的 transcript, 等了差不多五个月才收到! 我的考试分都不错，我的听力比口语好的多。我觉得这是因为我看很多戏，不少没有英语字幕和dubbing所以我用汉语听，猜一猜戏的意思。

Yum! Green Tea Birthday Cake!!

What can I say 姐？Good choice in cake, if only I was here to eat the Lychee one! =P

Just recently, I found 公主小妹 (Romantic Princess) on CETV1 as well as Princess Hours =) I previously watched a couple of episodes of Princess Hours, but it was the female lead, Yoon Eun Hye, which made me want to watch it again. She’s the same girl from Coffee Prince and there’s just something about her which makes me like her.

Anyway, I just wanted to rant about 公主小妹 (Romantic Princess) because I actually watched the ending of this very short Taiwan drama and was left extremely disappointed. Of all the different types of endings they could have had, the last episode of 公主小妹 was definitely one of the worst ones I’ve seen!

Instead of leaving me smiling and feeling happy, crying my eyes out or even satisfied, 公主小妹 (Romantic Princess) left me with thoughts of how stupid the characters were. I mean, the characters were all making it seem like Xiao Mai leaving for 3years was a life or death event, and that it would be a tragedy if Jin didn’t see her before she left. She’s an heiress for goodness sake! How can she not be able to afford a plane ticket within those 3years?

I don’t think the director or whoever was in charge realised that the last impression is just as important as the first impression.

If they repeat Romantic Princess 公主小妹 on another channel, I’m going to attempt to watch those episodes I’ve missed. I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, those missed episodes make a difference to how I view the ending….

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On a side note, I’m starting to notice a strong trend with these drama’s that I enjoy so much. They all seem to be based on a manga / manhwa / comic! No wonder I’m such a sucker for these dramas… I can still think of a few mangas which I’ve read that I would like to see in Live Action, I have a feeling I won’t have to wait too long at this rate =P

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
-H. L. Mencken

Be it Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese or even Malaysian … I just love my drama. And this brings me to the topic of the wonderful satellite TV channels we get from China and around Asia. Although the satellite lets me view many many more Drama’s than I can dream of, channel surfing is a skill which needs to develop with satellite TV because of the crazy number of commercials which they air during and between programmes (most of which are repeated over and over and over and over again).

I’ve stumbled across a lot of great dramas, but one of the major problems is when and where these programs are aired. I remember this great Korean drama called 18 vs 29 and how I would tune in to JXTV and/or Fujian Channel to watch it every weekday. They aired the same episodes on both channels at different times so if you miss one, you can still catch it on the other channel. The problem only occurred when they stopped airing it BEFORE the Drama concluded!?

I thought that SURELY it was purely a mistake, an accident, or maybe the TV station suffered a seizure. After a week or two though, I finally gave up looking for the 18 vs 29 kdrama and settled onto watching the anime, InuYasha , on XingKong. Unfortunately the same thing happened, they stopped airing it before it was concluded! Boo!

The funny thing is that I would go through all this trouble looking for a drama to watch on satellite TV, but in fact, I still have drama which I have yet to even start watching on DVD!