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A soulless ceremony By Yossi Melman I should have been excited, but I wasn't. I sat a few dozen meters from the track at Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium and was one of the 91,000 lucky individuals who had tickets for the opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games, an event that dozens of millions of Chinese and many other millions around the world would have loved to attend. As I waited for a bus en route to the stadium, a young Chinese woman who works as a tour guide and speaks good English started a conversation with me. When she heard that I had a ticket to the ceremony she almost fainted and immediately pulled out a camera. First she took a photo of her holding the ticket, then one of me waving it in the air, as though I won the lottery. A few hours before the opening, some rich Chinese businessmen were offering $30,000 for tickets whose face value was $700. Still, from where I sat, the ceremony looked soulless. No doubt, the production was grandiose and the ceremony rich in color, but it was somewhat schematic and mechanical, even a touch militaristic. The occupants of the seats next to me, a Dutch businessman and a U.S. journalist who have been living in Beijing for years, said it was representative of the new Chinese spirit of opening up to the world and showing off its ancient civilization, but that it also displayed the difficulties of freeing themselves of the shackles of the Communist past. Everything ran like a Swiss watch, not a knock-off Chinese one, but still the ceremony lacked spontaneity and a smile. Advertisement In my opinion there were two emotional moments that stood out. The first was when giant Chinese basketball player Yao Ming walked alongside a little Chinese boy who barely reached his knees. The second was when members of the Spanish delegation started to dance while circling the stadium, ignoring the pleas of Chinese organizers that they complete their round. Countries with Chinese populations like the two Koreas, Singapore, Taiwan (or Chinese Taipei, as the breakaway territory called itself) and Hong Kong, which still competes as an antonymous territory under Chinese sovereignty, received huge applause. The Israeli delegation also received a lot of applause as did the U.S. team. But the cheers subsided when the image of U.S. President George W. Bush standing up from his seat in the VIP lodge to applaud his countrymen appeared on the TV screens. The crowd sent a signal approving Americans, but not their president. The ceremony's artistic director was Zhang Yimou, the director of the Chinese movie "Hero." "It had lots of power and drum rolls but his movies are better," said Adi Talmor, an Israeli who speaks fluent Chinese and lives in Beijing where he works as a tour guide. Yimao was quoted in the ceremony's program as saying his aim was to put together a happy event. Going by Friday's final product, he failed. Bookmark to del.icio.us   A Model Zionist How did Bar Rafaeli conquer the U.S. blogs and gossip columns? A lost pillar Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to be laid to rest in Ramallah, mourned for 3 days.

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