OLYMPIC GAMES BEIJING 2008: Keith Dugganfinds the charm offensive in full swing in Beijing as the locals prepare to impress the world
AT NIGHT in Beijing, the Bird's Nest looks like a fabulous baker's confection. The stadium has become the visual symbol of these Olympics for China. And, impressive as it appeared on the television images that have been circulating the globe for the past year, nothing compares to the reality of it. It is a wonderful thing and looks almost delicate as hundreds of cars shoot past on the motorway network and the high-rise buildings loom over it.
The Bird's Nest makes every other sports arena in the world look clunky and unimaginative in comparison. Already, the Chinese have blown previous Olympic cities away. As haze gave way to dusk, the Olympic boulevards were busy with local people stopping to pose for photographs at the main gates, where the great and the glorious will be ushered through tomorrow evening's glittering Opening Ceremony.
They are proud of this sight, of this week. What nation wouldn't be? Beijing, like most cities in the world, looks prettier after dark and because of the rainbow neon signs and symbols, you can actually see further than was possible at high noon, when the infamous smog lay like a blanket across the city.
Everyone in Beijing is talking about the air. Waiting for the bus at Peking Airport, a Dutch man gazed out at the hazy skyline and the dull silhouette of high-rise apartments. "For the breathing," he declared, after a long, languorous drag on his cigarette, "it is not good." Perhaps. But whatever poisons the Beijing air may or may not contain, the smog makes the city look more interesting.
It is like the London fog, except that is comes with temperatures warm enough to bake bread and not the freezing cold of our part of the world. And because you cannot really see any further than a couple of hundred yards, the smog kind of disguises the sheer size and scale of Beijing. As the jet planes delivered thousands of strangers from around the world, one couldn't help but think about how odd this whole event must seem to the citizens of the city.
They have spent almost a decade working towards this fortnight and, having exceeded the Olympic criteria on architectural splendour, they are now expected to rise to the Olympian demands that all visitors must be greeted in maniacally friendly fashion for the next fortnight. And the charm offensive begins in Peking Airport, where hundreds of kids direct strangers to their various routes and answer the same questions over and over and wish everyone a pleasant day, all the time. The general, stereotypical assumption about the Beijing Olympics was that, because it was a Chinese show, it would run like clockwork. It was therefore pleasing to see almost immediately that, when it comes down to it, people are people.
At the taxi rank, an Olympic courtesy car and a team bus vied for the same parking bay. Neither driver was inclined to give way. The bus won narrowly and, in edging alongside the footpath, managed to graze the fender of the Olympic courtesy car.
Well. You didn't have to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese to work out that the young car driver was one very disgruntled and alarmed hombre. He was out of the car in a flash, head in his arms. He couldn't have looked more worried if he knocked down Juan Antonio Samaranch, the nabob of past Olympics.
The bus driver ambled out of his bus, one of those unflappable shrug-of-the-shoulders type guys that you see in bus depots all over the world - in fact, I am fairly convinced he drove the Derry-Galway route for a while in the mid 1990s.
The pair got into a barney, the younger man looking as if he had caused the accident that would ruin the entire Olympics, the bus man looking bored and indifferent. Straight away, the incident had a rapt audience of nations. Stoic German badminton players, a seriously cheesed-off looking Latino lad and Olympic volunteers all stopped to enjoy the drama. The Dutch bloke, immensely cheered by this development, lit another smoke and edged up to inspect the damage.
And it didn't matter that we couldn't understand the language. Here was a piece of street theatre recognisable all over the world and it served to make China, in all its vastness, instantly more intimate and understandable. Maybe it was staged. Maybe the Chinese have employed their actors to perform impromptu everyday melodramas so that the "outsiders" will see that "They are Just Like Us".
For that, surely, has been the underlying insinuation as the hype of the Western media machine goes into overdrive: that the Olympics represent China's big chance to prove they can fit in. But the place is not so strange. The first thing you see exiting Peking Airport is not an effigy of Chairman Mao but a Starbucks.
The international symbols of commerce are everywhere. So too are the military figures, gunned up and solemn and standing guard across the city. Security is, as the cliche goes, tight, even at good old Hotel Tibet, where half of Ireland seems to be staying. That should be good news for the several tea rooms - Xinzhu Hall, Mingdu Tea Art Hall and Xiang Pala restaurant all specialise in endless varieties of tea. However, the Tibet does not appear to have factored in the humble hotel bar, a quirk that has proven deeply disconcerting for visitors from the Emerald Isle and other big drinking countries from the West.
As one peeved German asked, while going through the security machines at the hotel entrance, "who would break into za hotel zat has no bar, yah?" He laughed. We laughed. The Chinese security men laughed. "One City, One Dream" goes the Olympic slogan. The Beijing-ers want to live it, even the poor kid driving the Olympic escort car. In the end, the bus driver grew bored and simply walked away.
When we saw the young chauffeur, he was vigorously polishing his damaged fender with a cloth that bore the five ringed insignia, looking like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Which is probably how every man, woman and child of Beijing feels right now.
