I’ve added some more pictures to today’s post to try to give you a different view of Beijing than you might see on television at home. It has stayed humid and smoggy, as you can see in the photo from my hotel window. I can see about three blocks and after that everything is lost in the smog. And this is a good day.
In that same photo you can see some of the old ‘courtyard houses’. In the close-up of one of the houses you can see a chicken coop on the roof. There are a number of these in the neighborhood. I read about lots of people dying in Egypt from avian flu because the birds they kept on their roof got infected and the feces drop down into their food – yuck! It sounds gross but it could happen here. No chicken for dinner for me.
The big story in Beijing right now is how all those people got bogus tickets online – and now all of the empty seats at every event. Many of the people only figured out that they had bum tickets after they arrived. Now lots of them are taking the risk to buy tickets on the black market (ticket re-selling is illegal here) and paying through the nose for them. In the meantime the Chinese Olympic officials are getting Chinese volunteers to sit in empty seats to try to make the venues look full. Sheesh.
There was no way they could fill up the softball stadium today. The China-Australia game was completed, but by the time I arrived for the US-Canada game the clouds had come in and it had started to rain. They completed the first inning but then there was a rain delay for over an hour. A bunch of us huddled out of the rain to wait it out. The stadium is so far from anything else that it wasn’t worth going anywhere else to wait. It looked like some of people weren’t so patient, though, because when they came back the stands were almost empty. Too bad. They completed two more innings and then there was a real downpour so at that point I called it a game and sloshed my way to find a taxi.
Good thing there is lots of shopping to do inside in Beijing.
