For some of my friends who are curious about how the real Beijing looks like, here are some highlights from one blog’s survey. I agree with most of it. But I hope there will be interesting to know what the most surprising thing and the worst experiences are.

Repost: Most overrated Chinese story lines
Smog (31). Yeah, it was sci-fi horrible the first few days. And everyone obsessed on it, because there were no competitions yet and there was nothing else to do. But then it cleared, and pretty much never came back. We had a ton of blue sky the past two weeks, and the heat was overrated, too.

Most notable Chinese traits
Gold: Seriousness (34). The folks here don’t exactly cut up like, say, the Aussies in Sydney in 2000. The Olympic pastime among them was taking their picture in front of the venues, and 80 percent of them weren’t smiling for the camera. There was one moment of humor Saturday, when Jeff Duncan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to the Main Press Center help desk to get his going-away media gift: a genuine bronze medal. Jeff’s playing question, “Why not a gold?” was met with a surprisingly playful response from a volunteer: “Work harder next time.” That prompted The Metric Dash to chuckle and hold up a hand for a high five from the volunteer. She looked at the hand as if it were radioactive. End of high jinks.

Silver: Helpfulness (35). The Chinese service industry generally bent over backward to please. Of course, when you have volunteers on every street corner, in every hotel lobby and crawling around every venue, things tend to work well. One thing China never runs out of is manpower. One night at the patio bar of The Metric Dash’s hotel, there were 17 patrons and 15 workers. Not too difficult to get a waiter’s attention with a ratio like that.

Bronze: Diligence (36). One night, The Metric Dash left his BlackBerry in the back of a cab, and figured it was lost forever. Yet, 24 hours later, a note was in the hotel room inquiring about ownership of said BlackBerry. How the cabbie and the hotel managed to track down The Metric Dash remains a mystery. Regardless, it’s not the kind of thing you see happening in Manhattan every lunar eclipse. (The flip side of that anecdote was the dozen cab drivers who meandered around Beijing, hopelessly lost. The Metric Dash has never seen so many cabbies with no idea where anything is.)

Best Chinese things to experience
Gold: The Great Wall (37). Nothing else like it, anywhere.

Silver: The Silk Market (38). This is full-contact shopping like nothing in the Western world. It’s five stories of booths manned by astonishingly aggressive shopgirls, who literally will grab you and drag you into their micro-store in an attempt to sell you everything from shirts to jeans to shoes to luggage to, yes, silk dresses. Once you’re in, expect a hard-core bartering battle conducted on a calculator — you pressing buttons, them countering — with prices starting at roughly 10 times what you might end up paying if you play hardball. The saleswomen alternate between flirtation and anger, depending on how the negotiations are going.

Bronze: Opening Ceremony (39). They sure seemed great, back before we heard how much was fake and how badly some of the participants were treated. But the flame-lighting remains an all-time show stopper.

The original post is here.

Tags: beijing, china, olympic

Stunning Stunning Stunning Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony

Story of the oldest cultuer in the world was told through the newest technology.

Director of the openning ceremony said that there are three things the show tried to deliver: 激情(Passion)、浪漫(Romance)、梦幻(Dream).

Hard to describe in words and hard to show in pictures. You have to see it from NBC’s live Video. (it has better video quality than youtube.)

Congratulations, Beijing!

Tags: beijing, china, olympic