Today is a special day for Google’s Doodle team. It had to create and publish three different doodles. Except in Brazil and China, Google is showing the Winter Olympics doodle. In Brazil, Google is showing a Carnaval doodle and in China, it is showing the Chinese new year doodle.

Although not as popular and well known as the summer Olympics, the winter Olympics is being held in the beautiful city of Vancouver. Canadians are very excited for this big event.

I was curious to know that there are some athletes representing Brazil in the winter Olympics. We do not have snow in 99% of the Brazilian territory and the winter is not as harsh as in Canada. It is quite hard to develop a strong winter sport team in Brazil due to the climate. It would be very expensive to maintain artificial winter conditions in such a hot country.

I guess the Brazilian athletes train in Canada.

The Brazilian Carnaval happens once a year and it usually starts on a Friday and it goes until the mid-day of Wednesday. Carnaval dates change according to lunar calendar, which is the same one used for the Chinese new year.

Chinese new year happens according the the lunar calendar. The new year can happen at the end of January or the end of March depending on the lunar cycle.

The Google China website is slightly different from the traditional minimalist look of Google. I think that the minimalist concept is very challenging for the Chinese aesthetic point of view. Take a look at one of the most popular website in China. If you compare Google’s homepage and Sina.com.cn’s website, you can see that Google may give an impression that something is missing in the eyes of a Chinese.

However, nothing beats the cuteness and fluffiness of a typical Japanese website (http://lolipop.jp).

Happy new year (year of tiger), Carnaval and Winter Olympics!

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