Beijing Impressions, Day 1 continued

Well THAT was quick. I overlooked the fine print in the spectator's guide: the Olympic Green is not a commons. You have to have a ticket to an event at one of those venues for the day to get in. I guess I'll just have to wait to get those nighttime pictures of the Water Cube. There's hope; I'm hunting down some additional tickets as we speak.

Being here, you'd hardly recognize China for the totalitarian society it's made out to be, except for one little thing: it seems like there's always someone watching. Not electronically, but in person. Every single checkpoint of any kind, no matter how insignificant, is manned by a guard. They're standing on little boxes along fences, and at freeway off-ramps. You can't look lost for more than a few seconds without someone appearing from out of the blue to help you. It's... well, it's something else.

I'm convinced that at least 10% of Beijing's 17 million people volunteered for the games. The volunteers are EVERYWHERE. There's pretty much always one in sight from the moment I leave the campus. The venues are teeming with them. They've even got 24/7 information booths set up at every single subway stop.

Several of the Beijing subway lines are brand spanking new, and boy, can you see the seams. Almost none of the transfer stations actually involve two tracks crossing. Instead, most of the transfers will send you down a long tunnel to a new station - and that's if you're lucky. A few of them actually send you outside and around the block.

It's also... well, not slow exactly, but I get the impression that the stops are a lot farther apart than, say, the Washington D.C. or Paris metros. It's covering roughly the same geographic area, but with many fewer stations.

If it weren't for the dorm's convenience store downstairs, I would have long since starved to death. I'm far enough out from the major tourist areas that the nearby restaurants have zip-zilch-nada in the way of English. One of them even transliterated the menu into Pinyin without translating it, which strikes me as worse than useless.

Even this ramen I'm eating right now is more complex than anything you could find in the states: it has no less than three different flavor packets to add. Oh well; it may not be haute Chinese cuisine, but it is authentic Chinese cuisine...

Tomorrow morning I believe I'm headed to the Summer Palace, so that ought to provide some nice photo-taking opportunities.