One year to go - Beijing, we are ready..

Major activities this month in Beijing marking 'one year to go' to the start of the 2008 Olympics on 08/08/08.

Festivities include celebrations in Tienanmen Square; a month-long series of pre-Olympic international sporting activities to test out the new facilities and the launch of a catchy theme song - 'Beijing, we are ready' - sung by pop stars from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Apparently, all the venues apart from the national stadium (nicknamed Bird's Nest), are completed - on time - and the Bird' Nest will be done early next year. But it's not all blue skies for the Olympic preparations..actually, the skies are the main problem. The pollution levels in Beijing are not coming down fast enough despite moving major factories out of the city over the last few years and planting lots of trees. The 3M cars in Beijing are, apparently, a major cause of the problem as car ownership has risen much faster than expected. So, for four days this coming week more than 1.5M cars will be taken off the road to test the impact on pollution levels. Even licence plate numbers Friday and Sunday and odd numbers Saturday and Monday. It turns out our car is included in the test and finding a taxi to get to work next Friday will be a challenge, but less so than being off the road for 10 days next August.

We should be hearing soon how we did in the first round Olympic ticket lottery which closed end of June. This first lottery was only open to China residents who have an account with Bank of China or a Visa card (some positive re-enforcement for the official sponsors). We navigated our way through the complex on-line booking system along with another 700,000 hopeful applicants. You could apply for up to 10 events and there was a maximum placed on tickets for each event depending on perceived popularity (only 1 ticket per applicant for the opening and closing ceremonies, for example). A system of cascading entries into the lottery at different prices levels as well as optional entry into alternate events if your main entry failed meant that, after an hour, I gave up that trying to optimise our combined applications and just stuck in applications for a bunch of different events. We went for the opening ceremony, some diving, swimming, synchronised swimming and a few of the athletics finals. Let's see what happens.

However, we are getting into the Olympic spirit early by attending, this weekend, the finals of the women's beach volleyball Olympic warm-up event. Twenty four international teams are playing, all week, at the newly built beach volley ball court/field(?) at Chaoyang Park in the east of the city. 17,000 tons of sand have been shipped in from China's tropical beaches in Hainan province to create, apparently, the perfect playing surface.