COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:

How many times can a guy say “incredible” in a two-hour time period?

Well, I’m sure I came pretty close to the record tonight. It’s 11:30 p.m. Friday in Beijing, and I’ve just returned from witnessing a bombardment of visual and aural delicacies that, to be frank, left me a bit dazed and euphoric.

I’m talking about the formal rehearsals of the opening ceremony for the Summer Games that will be live on NBC Friday.

My Chinese presentation team and I arrived early at the National Stadium, or as it’s known here, The Bird’s Nest, because the intricately woven, award-winning Swiss architecture makes it look, well, just like a bird’s nest. The show opens with the military band performing songs depicting the rich culture and heritage of this ancient land. From there, things ramp up seriously. The place, which holds 70,000 plus and was packed, literally explodes, and yes, there’s fireworks, with an intensity that I have never seen in a performance before. The spectacular opens with a drum performance by more than 2,000 drummers, and that’s not even the big deal! The visuals that accompany it are stunning, and it gets better from there.

My sweet, demure Chinese announcer, Cao Xue (pronounced something like Tao Sure) turned to me and said, wide-eyed, “I am waiting for my next surprise!” China has approximately 1.3 billion inhabitants. Well, I think about half of them worked on this project. Just near 17,000 to be exact. You could feel the enormous swell of Chinese pride, and it was infectious. I’ll stop here because anything else I might pen would simply not do it justice.

A few words about my early arrival at the Beijing Capital Airport. I retrieved my luggage and waited in the new Terminal 3 for my contacts to pick me up. At $3.8 billion (that’s right, billion) to construct, it’s one of the largest buildings on Earth. I believe you could fly a small plane around inside. Du Shuen, my contact for the last six months, a 24-year-old master’s student, and our competition manager, Mr. Tien, found me before I got swallowed up in the bowels of T3. More about my presentation team, traffic, smog and Indoor Volleyballs Capital Gymnasium in my next installment.

MICHAEL VILLANI is a contributing writer to the Daily Pilot, and as the venue announcer for indoor volleyball in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, he will file occasional columns.