So, I got back to Rwanda Thursday evening, and the Olympics
opening ceremony took place the very next night. Several things to note about this beloved
occurrence that happens only once every four (okay, two) years:
I don’t have TV at my house, so I attempted to find the
opening ceremony streaming live on the Internet, which it was by BBC… if you
happened to be in Great Britain. I searched a bit further and found that the
Olympics were being broadcast online all around the world… in 68 whole
countries. That’s 136 fewer countries
than are represented in the Games, and as you might have guessed, Rwanda
doesn’t rank in the top 68 countries on the worldwide web. So, being American and all, I checked out
NBC, which was showing the opening ceremony three and a half hours after it
actually happened but only to people who have cable and are in the US.
Out of luck? Not so
much. I found a stream of the BBC
coverage online somewhere! But, only so many feeds were available in my
country, and I was not one of the lucky winners, unless I wanted to pay $9.99
for the month. After much deliberation,
I decided it was a wise investment, as I would likely spend far more than that
on drinks at restaurants where I could go to watch the Olympics for
“free.” So, I paid ten bucks to watch
the Olympics for a month, and what do you know?
As soon as I paid it, the feeds got reallllllly bad, so I kept up with
things via Twitter. Just as I started to
find better feeds, they started getting pulled, purportedly because it was not
yet showing in the US and NBC was cranky about people seeing the ceremony live.
But did that thwart me?
Nope. I found another feed from
CTV in Canada to watch the parade of nations live. And do you know what they did? Went to a commercial break right before
Adrien Niyonshuti and the rest of the Rwandan team entered the stadium.
So then, I waited until the ceremony was playing in the US
(which was about 1:30am here), and I watched that thing, by golly. And I saw Adrien carry the Rwandan flag with
his game face on, and thanks to jet lag, I wasn’t even that tired when the US
team entered the stadium at 5am. I went
to sleep before they lit the flame, but then I woke up this morning at 10:30,
just in time to see a rerun of the lighting of the cauldron. Who knew I could have just gone to sleep like
a normal human being and woken up at a decent hour to watch the whole thing?
Watching the coverage from three different countries was
very telling about their different cultures.
The BBC had VERY few commercials.
NBC had them every ten minutes.
CTV fell somewhere in between.
And now I’m watching Eurosports coverage and the announcer just wished
the American swimmer would slow down so a Brit could qualify, which is not
something I’ve ever heard while watching the Olympics before…
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