Beijing Olympics: Games Living

The Beijing Olympics were a dream. Not the dream coined in China's Olympic slogan "One World, One Dream" as unity, and not the American-style dream that could come true or -- to many Chinese indeed -- had come true. It was a dream in the literal sense that too many spectacles too absurd happened too fast in a fixed yet elusively felt period of time.

One woke up afterward, and all the statistics, records, praises, bashes, shame and pride, seemed fuzzy and irrelevant;...
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The Beijing Olympics were a dream. Not the dream coined in China's Olympic slogan "One World, One Dream" as unity, and not the American-style dream that could come true or -- to many Chinese indeed -- had come true. It was a dream in the literal sense that too many spectacles too absurd happened too fast in a fixed yet elusively felt period of time.

One woke up afterward, and all the statistics, records, praises, bashes, shame and pride, seemed fuzzy and irrelevant; only vivid scenes of people living the games remained. And it is through those scenes -- the textures of everyday lives -- that the dream is best remembered.
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