On Monday, I had the opportunity to go to the first dress rehearsal of the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games, but what I saw then hardly compares to what was shown last night! When I saw the dress rehearsal we didn't see all of the spectacular special effects that went on last night and we didn't have the buzz in the crowd that was obvious on TV last night, but we still gave it a 7 out of 10. Last night however, watching it on TV I thought was awesome - a real Olympic performance! And it was so nice to see Canadians celebrating all that is Canadian beyond just our athletes. I love being Canadian and we are usually so quiet about celebrating who we are that to have such a huge part of the opening ceremonies putting Canada front and centre was fantastic! Go, Canada go!
Hopefully the opening ceremonies for the Paralympic Games will be just a stunning! My parents are coming and this will be their first ever Paralympic Games experience and I'm pretty sure they really don't understand exactly what they are going to be involved in and I'm hoping the opening ceremonies will kickstart an unforgettable experience for them.
A few days ago, I received an invitation to attend the closing ceremonies for the Olympics from Gordon Campbell, but Andrea and I will be in Canmore at Nationals so I can't go - how disappointing!
As a lead-up to the opening ceremonies, on Thursday afternoon I was invited to go up to Metrotown, a huge shopping centre here in Burnaby, to take part in a cultural celebration for the city of Burnaby leading up to the Olympics. I thought it would be a small function but when I got there, there were huge crowds. The group that had invited me (I have forgotten the name because I was invited by a fellow board member of the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame) had photocopied a photo of me at the World Cup races last year at Mount Washington and added "Courtney Knight, Paralympian" to the photo.
I was surprised of the huge line-up of people that wanted me to autograph the photo for them. I've never been into getting autographs so it was surprising to me that people wanted mine. Most of them were kids, which explains part of it, but there were more than a few adults in the mix too! There were some funny moments too! One woman asked me what type of sport "Paralympian" was. Uh, wow....long story! Another woman thought that my photo was a ticket that would get her into the Paralympic Games. Well, no, sorry! One man wanted to know what he could win if he had one of my photos. Hmmm....nothing? And another man stopped to ask me for directions on how to get out of the mall, which I helped him with so I guess I also doubled as mall customer service! I stayed for about two hours before heading home.
So today will be busy with lots of errands to run, a workout to get in plus other commitments. So I had better stop typing and get organized!
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