Perhaps one of the coolest things we had the opportunity to do was go to the water park that is inside the Water Cube (where the water events in the 2008 Olympics were held). The pictures online made it look fantastic, and we wanted to see Olympic Park anyways, so we thought we’d give it a try. We thought it would be fun, but did not anticipate such a crazy experience. First of all, they had easily the most intense water slide I had every seen: it is a body slide, and to enter, you have to open this soundproof space capsule looking thing that is angled almost completely vertically. The capsule closes, and a nice British woman calmly counts down, “three, two, one,” and suddenly the floor swings back from beneath you, and you plummet to a near-freefall for perhaps a bit over a second. I had never seen anything like it.
After we had finished with that, we decided we’d relax a bit in the wave pool—next thing we knew, there was loud electric dance music playing, stage girls were dancing, and we had a jumbo-tron zoomed in on our group of six; when we noticed this we started dancing around like crazy and splashing everywhere, after which the rest of the more conservative Chinese swimmers in the pool followed suit. It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life: one second we’re lazily bobbing up and down, the next we’re jumping around like madmen (and woman), about 15 ft tall on the big screen, and leading a pool of Chinese people with our horrible dancing, all with water flying everywhere. Unbelievable
No comments:
Post a Comment