Being in Beijing now means you absolutely have to visit the tourist obligation number one, the OLYMPIC AREA, the place where IT all is going to happen in August. It doesn’t matter how you think about all the publicity the Olympic Games get in all its forms, a bit too much in my eyes but who am I, you cannot just pass it here. If it’s not the big displays everywhere with the seconds countdown till The Day or the huge posters of sponsors of the games, it’s the image of the five rings on all the beer bottles here and there are many beer bottles.

So yesterday, Sunday, had to be the day. We planned to have a quiet walk around, and may be over the area with the different stadiums. This was a wrong idea! What we didn’t know was that just this weekend for the first time athletic games were organised in the big stadium and that this was a great opportunity for many Chinese families to admire their own spaghetti building from the in and outside for a reasonable price. Because the price for an Olympic ticket is a bit outrageous for a normal Chinese income. So it was sold out which in itself should already have been a good reason for an extreme bustle but the parking facilities and the Olympic subway line are not yet ready. Result? Traffic chaos! But nevertheless we could have some walks along the fences that stretched away for many kilometres with also a lot of military guards.

A few kilometre north of the central stadium, the blue building for the swimming (see photo) and this spectacular skyscraper in the form of the Olympic flame another area is found with for instance the tennis (see photo) and the hockey stadiums embedded in a lot of green and parks.. Here it was remarkably quiet.
The conclusion is that costs didn’t play a role, cheap labour is still abundantly present and finding ground so near to the centre of the town has not been seen as a serious problem by the government. In this way a spectacular concentration of sports facilities has been build. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the months of June and July form a very precious supply of time that is very much needed to complete the picture.