Olympics Ceremony - Wow~

Whoa. That Olympics ceremony was awesome. It was four hours long, although most of that was the national march. Now I'm going to describe as much as I can remember of what happened. The stadium was built in Beijing and was called the Bird's Nest because of its shape. On the top of the inside, there was a screen that went all the way around the stadium. At the beginning, there were 2,008(Get it?) drummers in this rectangular format. Every time they hit the drum, it would flash, so they made patterns and stuff with that. They also did this countdown using the drums. Many fireworks were used throughout the ceremony. Oh, and most of the commercials were much better than they usually are, which is awesome. There was also this part where this giant scroll unrolled itself and these people painted a picture on this piece of paper in the middle with their bodies. The part that was slightly confusing was that the paper started lifting off the ground and later floated in the air. Of course, we later learned that the scroll was actually a giant LCD screen, although it did unroll itself.

Later, the screen opened and revealed these printing blocks that went up and down and made waves and words. Although it seemed like they were programmed to do so, the tops of the blocks opened and people came out in the end. Obviously, a lot of thought and time went into all this choreography.

Then, the scroll opened up and a giant planet floated from it. Then, the planet would change into Earth, then Mars, then Jupiter. These people on it would run around on it. Remember, this thing is floating in the air. The cool thing was that the gravity looked like it was pulling all the people to the planet, so the people on the bottom were running upside-down, and the ones on the side were running sideways. Right before commercials, these fireworks would set off around Beijing.

There was a lot more stuff, but I'm going to skip to the end. Once the torch was passed to the last person, he was lifted off the ground and ran sideways around on the top of the screen on the rim of the stadium. He made it look like he was actually running on the screen, which was pretty cool. The giant torch was huge and had a giant red ribbon around it. Once he got to the torch(which was amazing), he lit a fuse that went around the torch on the ribbon and then burst into flames at the top. And then, of course, a huge fireworks show ended the ceremony. Among the many fireworks was one that depicted the five rings for the Olympics.

I tried looking for a video of some of the stuff, but I couldnt find any that I liked and would actually show everything well.

Although, I did find some pictures of the pyrotechnics for the Olympics. Some of them show how big the stadium is too. :)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/destinationbeijing/photos/galleryid=183811.html

They spent 450 billion dollars on this ceremony, although it still came out 100 times better than I thought it would be. Also, many people got married today, because 8 is a lucky number and since today is 8/8/08, its kind of like extra good luck.

Also, if you looked at the picture below the ones of the pyrotechnics, (pageantry) I really have no idea where they got those pictures from, since I didn't see them in the ceremony.

You know, here's a pretty good review of it.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/newscenter/news/newsid=184784.html
Oh, and here are some pictures of the costumes.(and more fireworks)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/destinationbeijing/photos/galleryid=162109.html

The whole thing was just really, really stunning.

-Edit-

Ok, I found a video of it all! (The drummers are at the end-ish part)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0808_HD_OCB_HL_EN197