I love the Olympics, but I really loved that I learned so much about the place this time around. Canada sounds and looks like a wonderful place...at least within 100 miles of our border anyway...then it just gets way too cold. Luckily, we taped the afternoon coverage everyday and we TIVO'd through the 6 hours in about 1 hour just to see if there was anything interesting to watch. If you watched or TIVO'd Saturday afternoon's coverage, there was a 45 minute story with Tom Brokaw about Gander, Newfoundland. I was SO excited when we started watching because I was shocked that prior to Tom Brokaw's initial story about Canada on one of the first days of the Olympics, I had NEVER heard about the people of Canada helping the U.S. out so much on 9/11. I was sad at the time that he didn't expound on the story.
Just watching how they diverted all those flights to Canada was amazing. For all the failures that occurred on that day, it AMAZES that within 2 hours there was not a plane in the sky over the U.S. and that there were no crashes on runways in the process of grounding all the flights.
I cried multiple times throughout the story...it was very well done if you don't count the tacky breaks for commercials at emotionally critical moments. I was hoping it would be on youtube this morning so I could just post the link, but so far it hasn't shown up and NBC hasn't said if they will re-air it. Hopefully everyone will get the chance to see it...and if you do, have tissues handy...lots of tissues.
We watched the gold medal hockey game after watching the story about Gander, and while I am USA through and through, the disappointment at our loss was not nearly as acute as it otherwise could have been, because if we are going to lose, it's best to lose to a country you like and respect. We are truly blessed to have our good neighbors to the north.
1 comment:
I loved the story about Gander too. With so much focus on the terrorist attack and the rescue efforts, we just didn't hear much about all the good that was also happening. I cried through the whole thing too. And I felt the same way about the hockey game. I fell in love with Canada over the last 2 weeks and I'm glad they won if it couldn't be the US. I always love the olympics but this time may have been my favorite so far and I'm sad that it's over!
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