Beijing 2008 - Day 3

Beijing, 太热了(too hot)! But the beer is cheap, the food is good, the girls are hot and there is some crazy ass Olympics shit going on here. I don't even recognize this area anymore, it's changed so much in two years: new buildings, roads, landscaping, everything. It's like they just built a new city on top of the old one, which is basically what they did. There a fleets of thousands of cars, all brand new and identical, parked in neat rows in gigantic parking lots, presumably waiting to shuttle the masses around. There are armies of farmers, imported from the country side, building brick sidewalks with slippers on, uprooting trees, sweeping expansive intersections with brooms of grass tied together, cars whizzing by only inches away. There are colonies of tents set up on the side of the road for these poor people. I had to go to the police station for "accomodation registration." There was a counter with a very overworked lady operating a red rubber stamp on forms and dutifully filing them into books that clogged an entire wall of the station. Not a gun in sight. According to my Chinese friend, the police have no need for guns because if any real trouble were to start, they would just call the army in. How comforting.

The Chinese have gone all out for this. Everything is new, frantically built just to put on the best face for all the 老外 (literally, "old foreigner") that will inundate this part of the city. All the roads into the Olympic complex are closed, creating unbelievable hassles for all the poor fucks who have to live around here. They will even close the institute where I work, presumably for security purposes. Someone told me that they are afraid of ethnic minorities from XinJiang province (read muslims) attempting to bomb some of the new construction. Is that what the state media reports? Propaganda, or...? I didn't want to go there, but that's the word on the street. At one point, I remarked to my professor about how nice everything looked. His quixotic response was to scrunch up his face and say, "Yeah, but what about the future? Who will maintain all this?" Hmmm.