Closing Ceremonies

By now, you folks back in the USA have had a chance to see the closing ceremonies, so this won't be a spoiler.

The main theme of the show was that even though the torch has gone out, the people can each carry the torch in their hearts and become collectively a "human torch." It's a nice setiment, and the imagery was stunning! Probably the overall image was better on TV (particularly if you have high definition), but our seats were on the sixth row, so we could see lots of details. Rebecca took tons of pictures, and I'm sure she'll be saying more on her blog.

There was lots more security in going to the closing ceremony than there was when we simply attended olympic events. We went through at least three security checks involving an electronic pat-down and we had to show our tickets at least six different times. At one checkpoint, someone accidentally (we hope) set off an alarm for radioactive material, and you should have seen those volunteers scrambling! They quickly decided that it was a false alarm.

Once we got to our seats, we all had a gift bag full of mementos and props. Before the ceremony, there was a training session where we learned when to flap our glittery paper or our fans and when to turn on our little battery-powered torches or play our drum replicas.

One of the biggest surprises is that we were told the ceremony would last four hours, but it was only two.

I have more to say, but we have now arrived in Japan and are getting ready to go see the Panasonic Tokyo Center this morning - then on to Kyoto by bullet train this afternoon.