The opening ceremony of Asian Games 2018 was held at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium on 18th of August, 2018, just a day after the independence day of Indonesia. It was to celebrate the start of Asian Games and to welcome the athletes from various Asian countries to Indonesia as the host country. It was also being live broadcasted by various national television stations and overseas. Such as South Korea that giving slots for this opening ceremony in 3 of their television stations: MBC, SBS, and KBS 1.
I'm just gonna straight up to give my opinion about this and that is only one word: Spectacular.
I'm actually not a fan of opening and closing ceremony of sport events like this but this opening ceremony was beyond amazing. The singers, dancers, actors, and all the people behind this event did a great job introducing the various cultures of Indonesia to the world. I'm just gonna be honest that this opening ceremony was even better than the Olympics one in Pyeongchang and I'm really glad and proud that many overseas people got to watch this as well.
The show started with President Joko Widodo riding a motorbike and did some impressive riding skills on his way to the venue (we all knew it was a stuntman). It was a funny moment to start with. And the show continued to the impressive Saman dance, a welcome dance performed by 1500 female students from various high schools in Jakarta.
Well, I gues we just have to skip to my favorite part of this show that is: flag-hoisting.
I've never seen other countries hoisting their flags with a flag-hoisting troops for events like this. They usually just let one person to hoist the flag all the way up, but this time, our flag was hoisted by Paskibra, a flag-hoisting team which all the members are still high school students. And I feel like, this was to show the world and other countries of how much we really respect our national flag. With the flag being carried by one person in the middle as if the other members were protecting it.
With the set of a mountain that represented our rich natural resources, a ship, the performers' costumes, and some technologies such as LED, I thought it would cost a lot of money for this show to happen but later then, it was revealed that the budget was small for a huge event like this. 10 times smaller than the Olympics opening ceremony in Sochi, Russia, and the available budget was even for both opening and closing. So, props to the creative director, Wishnutama, and other people who made this great show succeed even in a limited budget.
Many people showed their impressions of this show through social medias. This opening ceremony even got many praises from overseas people and medias. Many of them said that this show was a scale of Olympics, not Asian Games.
This opening ceremony prove that we don't need too many unnecessary sophisticated eye-catching technologies to show the world how much of a big country we are. Just with our identity as Indonesians and our rich cultures, ethnics, and various religions that become one, we can show the world who we are: a country which upholds unity in diversity, Indonesia.
