The first year I was here I had trouble explaining what a “mascot” was. I had a picture of my college mascot “The Fighting Blue Hen” (University of Delaware) but it just didn’t click until this year when I associated my UofDel chicken with their Beijing Olympic Mascots. They were originally called “Friendlies” but for some reason they changed it to “Fuwa”. Fuwa means, roughly, “wishing good fortune to the young people” or more efficiently said “good luck dolls”.
If you put the names of the mascots together it says in Chinese “Beijing (Bei Bei & Jing Jing) Welcomes (Huan Huan &Ying Ying) You (Ni Ni)” It is common to hear Chinese names, especially childrens’ doubled up like this. And it definitely fits into China’s cutesy theme that they have for most of their everyday outfits.
I only found a couple of web sites that were informative about the mascots and I was sort of looking for some coloring pages of the mascots online – but I haven’t been successful in that search – anyone else know of a good young student friendly web site for my Frederica Academy Lower School students?
Here is the official Beijing Olympic Web site.
http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/n214068254.shtml
and here is one about some of the other Olympic mascots
http://www.mapsofworld.com/olympic-trivia/olympic-mascot.html
Side note: I forgot to give credit to the Ya Yas and Dottie for my amazing language barrier breakthrough for drilling me using the crude Chinese word flashcards I had made. Dottie did it many days during our lunch break and I made all the ya yas do it during our weekend retreat at Margie’s. Many xie xie’s
