It's a nice day in Beijing today! Blue visible in the sky, for the first time in one week. It's warm but not sweltering. It actually feels, dare I say it, good outside. View at 4pm August 12:
The traffic- and factory- shutdown orders, and the weather rockets, and the cold front, and the thunderstorms, and the weather gods, and whoever else helped out, are all now doing the job. Congratulations and thanks to one and all.
2. Good translation!
Most visitors have already learned the two-syllable foundation of Basic Olympic Chinese: the cheer jia you! It's written 加油!, and for Americans it would be pronounced more or less "jah yo!" -- yo as Sylvester Stallone would say it in Rocky.
If this were being translated the way a lot of Chinese unfortunately is translated, it would be rendered in English as something like "refuel!" or "gas up!" 加油 is after all what you see on the sign over a Chinese gas station. Therefore the repeated rhythymic Olympic chants -- Zhongguo jia you! Aoyun jia you! -- would sound as silly as other "Chinglish" does: "China Gas Up!" "Olympics Refuel!" "China More Gas!"
But apparently someone involved with the Olympics had the wit to ask a native speaker about this -- and to come up with the vastly better English counterpart "Let's Go!" In the roar of a crowd, it almost sounds the same. Congratulations to whoever found exactly the right words here. Maybe this could be a precedent?