The day of the opening ceremony, I was bouncing-off-the-walls-crazy. I waited far too long [read: until the night before] to start planning Olympics-related activities, so it wasn't NEARLY as awesome a day as I would have liked, but I still had a few good ideas ready to go!
We started off by making laurel wreaths to wear around. Or for me to wear around, because someone decided it wasn't "cool" and refused to wear his for the rest of the day. But me? NO SHAME.
It wasn't until after lunch that I came up with a decent winter-olympics related game. Not having snow to work with outside is tough! I set up a makeshift "mini-curling" court, and we flicked 1 TL coins at a shot glass. I mean, a "toothpick holder." Yeah, that. I painted the tail of half of the coins with a stripe of pink nail polish so they could be easily told apart. Not my best/most inventive creation ever... but hey, it turned out to be rather fun, and we've played it a few times since then!
Another craft was, of course, making gold medals! I would have MUCH preferred to go the whole salt-dough-and-gold-paint route, but lacking any other resources, we just mixed a few different colours of playdough. I made the ribbons using an old friendship bracelet braiding technique, and we were good to go- except for the small fact that it takes playdough FOREVER to dry. One of our medals got a little messed up because someone (hint: not me) decided he wanted to wear it before it had finished drying, and the ribbon ripped right through! Playdough definitely isn't the most successful medium to work with, but it was fun to mix the colours together and see what happened. I think mine ended up being a mix of yellow, light brown, and bright orange; Hakan's was the same plus a blueish-greenish colour to give it that darker shade.
One of the reasons I was up super late was trying to come up with something to do during the boring parts of the opening ceremony. You know, the speeches, or when they spend too long focusing on one country that has, say, 230 athletes participating and takes forever to get into the stadium... those times. I ended up spending FOREVER tracing colouring pages from Activity Village, cursing myself the entire time for not thinking of it sooner so I could actually use a printer.
When it came time for the opening ceremony to start, I pulled up the BBC live stream on my computer, brought out the globes (one in Turkish, one in English), and gave Hakan the colouring pages- I thought we were good to go! I knew the performance was going to be outstanding as always, I had reviewed my geography skills to make sure I could ID all of the countries on the globe... I was ready to go!
And then Hakan got bored 2 letters into the alphabet part of the intro.
"What's this?"
"I don't know, it's in Russian. Just watch, it's a performance you see, not something you have to listen to."
"But what are they saying?"
"I don't know, it's in Russian. Why don't you go ask Leila to translate?"
"No. I'm bored."
"Just wait, there will be more interesting things coming up. There's going to be dancers and acrobats and cool music and all sorts of things going on."
"I'm just going to play on my iPad. You watch."
Then the parade of athletes started. Yay, something interactive AND educational! My favourite! This time, we got 5 or 6 countries in before the boredom started. It was difficult to try and translate the country names, especially since they're abbreviated on the globe. I would know I was looking in the right general area (except for the time that I COMPLETELY blanked on Armenia, then kicked myself 20 minutes later when I remembered that it borders Turkey), but couldn't figure out which name it was- "Is that one a city or a country? Wait, is that the full name or an abbreviation? I can't tell if that "c" has a cedilla on it, so I don't really know how to pronounce this in Turkish..." Needless to say, that got old pretty quickly, and he wasn't too keen on using the English globe. Around then, we were called down to dinner, so I didn't have to worry about it too much anymore.
When we returned from dinner, they were almost to the end of the parade. Maybe 6 or so countries remained. Of course, Hakan wasn't at all interested in watching, and despite my pleading with him to listen to the English-speaking announcers, colour the pages I made, and try to learn a bit of geography, he was back to the iPad. The actual performance started (shout-out to the bassoon player!), and he was still glued to the iPad screen. "Hakan... you're missing it..." "No, I'm playing a game. You watch." "Okay, but this looks really cool..." "No, I don't want to watch."
Ten minutes later, something cool happened in the arena, and I hear a very, very soft "woah" from behind me. Insert self-satisfied smirk here. Several minutes later- "Is that a TRAIN? That's so COOL! Woah, there are people INSIDE those wheels! HOW DO THEY DO THAT?"
MENTAL VICTORY DANCE.
Sadly, besides a few brief flashes like that, I never got his attention 100% focused on the astounding artistic display happening before us. To me, these performances are a fantastic way to learn a little bit about a different culture, of course, but even more basic than that, they're just cool to watch! I could be giving myself too much credit, but I recall finding this sort of thing so fascinating when I was his age. It really bummed me out that he wasn't willing to give it a chance. I had even made a mental list of questions to ask him about the performance- what his favourite part was, what he would make the performance if it were happening in Turkey, what role he would have wanted to play if he was one of the performers... but I couldn't have any sort of conversation about it since he just wouldn't watch. I'm still racking my brain - and Pinterest - trying to figure out what I could have done differently to get him more interested, but I've been coming up blank.
On another note, he is still 100% convinced that the Olympics are an American event. Despite me showing him all those countries on a map, showing him where Sochi is in relation to Istanbul (quite close, actually!), watching a British broadcast of the opening ceremony, and watching some of the sports on Turkish television (which he also got bored of quite quickly, unfortunately). So I don't know what that's about, and I can't think of another way to explain it!
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