TV Watch: Amazing Race: Fish Eyes and the Great Wall

After all the hype and controversy of Thursday night's first Survivor episode, it's nice to see The Amazing Race back and doing what it does best: showing us a diverse cast of characters racing around the world, facing culture shock, and enduring physical challenges--all in front of the visually stunning backdrops of different countries.

While Survivor looks gimmicky by dividing its tribes by race, it seems to come more naturally to The Amazing Race to have contestants from different cultures competing against each other as they race around the world. Here are some of the contestants who stood out from the first episode:

• Sarah and Peter, the triathlete with the artificial leg and the prosthetist she's dating, seem to do a great job supporting each other--even when her artificial leg started leaking hydraulic fluid. They were able to overcome this problem during this leg of the race, but I'll really admire them if they make it all the way to the end.
• Bilal and Sa'eed, the first Muslims to compete in the race, seemed gung-ho about running the race--even if they have to deal with the team of cheerleaders who wondered: "Do Muslims believe in Buddha?" It's too bad that they were eliminated so early in the race.
• David, a Kentucky coal miner, and his persistent wife Mary, who I thought did surpisingly well in this episode, considering that she's never been outside of Kentucky or Tennesse in her life.
• Rob and Kimberly are the couple most likely to split up after the show. They're already arguing and sniping with each other this early in the race.
• Erwin and Godwin, the weightlifting (but smart, they claim) Asian brothers, inexplicably started playing with water pistols at the Seattle airport and were reprimanded by airport security.
• Tyler and James, the drug-rehabilitated male models, came in first because of their bricklaying and wall-scaling skills.
  
• Vipul and Arti, the sweet Indian couple, got lost and were the second team that Phil had to eliminate in this episode.
  

In addition to the surprise of having two eliminations during this first episode, I was also surprised that the "eat-exotic-food" challenge came so early this season. This challenge involved eating the Chinese delicacy of fish eyes (which I actually kind of like). Most teams didn't have a problem eating the fish eyes, although quite a few had trouble using chopsticks! The first episode also gave us impressive views of Beijing, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall of China (a section of which all the contestants impressively scaled using rope). Judging from this first episode, this looks like another great season of The Amazing Race. I can't wait to see next week's episode!