Chinese Curiosities

The questions I've heard most often since my arrival here in Beijing are: How bad is the smog/pollution and how's the food?

At right is a picture taken just outside the front of our media village. The Bird's Nest stadium is peeking around the corner and that indeed is a building shrouded in a smoggy haze in the distance. To the left is the security check-in we go through every day to take the shuttle over to the Main Press Center.

So has the pollution been bad? Yes. But the heat and humidity have probably been worse. The problem is they all combine to make things fairly uncomfortable at times.

As you can see in this picture on the right, the haze just hangs in the air, especially early in the day, when the young military patrols march through on cleanup detail before heading to their posts around the Olympic zone. There is a TON of fencing as seen in the picture blocking off areas all over the place. My room is just to the left, but I couldn't get to those stores on the other side of the fence -- a couple of restaurants and a massage parlor -- unless I walked out the front of the complex, through a check-point and completely around the fenced area. There's some pretty tight security.

As for the pollution, I haven't seen anyone wearing a mask or seen any need for people to be scrambling for respirators or anything. Most of the time it actually doesn't seem that much worse than L.A.

The food, so far, has been quite good, though I've only had a chance to get out a couple times and haven't been that adventurous just yet. The one night we went to a restaurant in a nearby hotel that specialized in serving meats on giant metal skewers. The servers would come over to the table and then slice parts of the skewered meats onto your plate; they started with duck, then went to roast beef, chicken, pork, beef brisket, sausage, lamb... It just kept on coming. Oh, I did start the meal with a salad though. The interesting thing was that in front of each person was a rock about the size of an ornamental soap. Each rock was painted green on one side and red on the other. If you wanted them to stop bringing the food, you'd flip the rock from green to red. Different...

The following night, I opted for a buffet with colleagues Grant and Scott in a different restaurant at the same local hotel. They offered everything from sushi and crab legs to cold meats and Asian hot pot. Everything I had was pretty good, even one thing from the hot pot I still can't even guess what it was. As Scott, my former roomate, comes back from getting his second plate, he points to some dishes on ice along a nearby wall and says, "You might want to avoid that section. The one plate has cat!"

Naturally, I had to check it out. As I walked over, I wondered to myself what exactly it would look like and if, by chance, it didn't look half bad, would I actually try it? I walked up and started examining the meat, which looked pretty normal to me. I then glanced up at little sign above the dish which read "Cold Cuts." Yes, he'd misread the sign without his glasses. And yes, I rode him about the fact that somehow his mind jumped right to cat and wasn't that surprised about it..

I've also had dinner at the McDonald's right here on the lower level of the press center, one of several McDonald's restaurants located nearby. The Olympics isn't just about athletics, its also about sponsorship and, not surprisingly, McDonald's is among the companies paying over $1 billion for rights to the Games. That's also why they gave us two things in the shower in our rooms: sponsor Johnson & Johnson's baby wash and J&J baby shampoo.

What is not in my bathroom is the thing to the right.

Yes, that's a squat toilet.

It requires strong quad muscles and solid aim.

I'm guessing..

I did not give it a try.

That contraption was in one of the hallways at Beijing Normal University, where the U.S. men's basketball team was practicing.

Among other things, I'm covering the NBA'ers during these Games, so went over to talk to LeBron, Kobe, Dwyane and the others for a couple of stories. That's LeBron holding court in the picture on the right.

Naturally, the U.S. team had to be difficult and practice somewhere different than all the other basketball teams. So we had to take a cab there because they don't run shuttles to Beijing Normal U. Finding a cabbie who speaks English in Beijing is real tricky, fortunately when we applied for credentials to the practice, USA Basketball gave us a sheet with directions to the facility in Chinese.

What we realized when we left was that it didn't have directions to get back. After wedging ourselves into this ancient sardine can of a taxi, it took a little doing to get the driver to figure out where we were headed.

The picture to the right is just outside the security entrance we had to go through to get into the university. Note the ever-present military guy on the right.

The USA Basketball folks had actually set up their office in an old Japanese restaurant in the University. And we had to walk through an old Chinese restaurant to get there; the office was the essentially the holding area for the media before we were allowed to go down to the court to talk to the guys before practice.

It was all quite strange.