One year to the Olympics!

It’s the one year pre-anniversary to the 2008 Beijing Olympics! It’s heard not to get caught up in the Olympics fever here. There are billboards everywhere advertising the upcoming Olympics, and exhorting the local people to love it. Which they seem to do. It’s going to be China’s great debutante coming out to the world.

We’re enjoying racking up the information and crazy statistics about the Olympics prep. For example, more money is being spent on this Olympics than all the Olympics since 1976 combined. About $9 billion US plus. That includes “small” capital expenditures such as a brand new airport, 5-8 subway lines built in five years, various new stadiums including the famed Bird’s Nest National Stadium pictured below, the Olympic Village, the Olympic Park surrounding the Village, and about 30 other parks destined to function as “green lungs” around the perimeter of the city. But it’s not just the building frenzy, it’s also the campaigns to reduce public spitting (a personal fave campaign of mine, but none too successful) and to encourage orderly queuing; it’s the daily English lessons on Beijing TV and on the cabbie/traffic radio station; it’s the 2 week experiment later this month where all nonessential government vehicles get taken off the road to see what impact it might have on the constant summer smog. Every crazy detail leading up to the 2008 Olympics is being masterminded by some extremely obsessive central planner, and we love it! Even the opening time is super-special Chinese-auspicious: 8/8/08 at 8:08 pm. There are giant digital readouts of the countdown in days, hours, minutes, and seconds spread out all over the city.

Peter went to a transportation conference last weekend, where the opening session was held at the Hall of the People, off Tiananmen Square, so that’s what’s pictured below. The rest of the conference was at the International Convention Center, near the Bird’s Nest, so we took that as an opportunity to check out the Olympics’ most famous architectural piece. It’s so amazing looking. As you can see by the surrounding construction work (photos taken on a Saturday morning when work was nonetheless in full swing), there’s still a lot to do.