Another side of Beijing

These games have been wonderful games indeed. It's been a great place to host an event such as the Olympics for multiple reasons.

Visitors can come here to watch/participate in the games and other activities, but then can also take travel within the city to see some pretty incredible historical/tourist destinations, some of which I've visited and detailed.

The other great benefit to the games being hosted here is that despite the high prices for hotel rooms (my friend's place being a wonderful exception to that), everything else is very inexpensive.

The tickets, if you could get them were comparatively inexpensive. My beach volleyball tickets are RMB 120, or about $17.50. Transportation is cheap: you can travel anywhere on the subway for 2 kuai, or about 29 cents. Taxis are plentiful and cheap as well. The food is good... and cheap. No matter where you are, from being in an event to being inside a top tourist destination, the price for a 20 oz bottle of water is 3 kuai ($.44) and a bottle of Coke is 4 kuai ($.58). Compare that with the 3 to 5 bucks (or more) you may pay at a major sporting event or tourist destination.

These plastic bottles bring up a related topic... where do the plastic bottles go? Everybody knows that China's rise has been due to China opening up it's economy to foreign investment to take advantage of the large, cheap labor supply. When you only have to pay a construction worker RMB 1,000 ($150) per month, you can build a lot of big buildings, stadiums, roads, subways.

Some people actually survive in China by collecting recyclable items and selling them. Shanghai is the same, you'll see very poor people digging through trash cans to find bottles to collect. Beijing has been the same. Some bottle collectors were so bold as to come up to us and ask us for our bottles while we were still drinking from them.

It is a striking contrast to see the glitz/glamour of the new in the big cities being built/maintained/cleaned by the extremely poor migrant works from the surrounding areas.

Wherever I/we were, these bottle collectors could be seen "working." Here are a couple of examples:




If you look hard enough, you can see the Olympic flame burning on top of the Bird's Nest in the distance (not the closer stadium, but stadium further back). I just think it's such an interesting contrast to see this in the shadows of the Olympic flame.