jiejie
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Posts posted by jiejie
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What were the results of the tcar-bans during the test-period to clear the sky? Worked it?
I was here during that time period last year, and it did wonders for traffic movement, but didn't do much for the air. There are other factors than just automobile exhaust. I firmly believe the biggest single factor in air quality will be shutting down the factories around Beijing, and particularly in the provinces south of the city. When the summer air (always from the south) blows that factory crap up, the mountains on the north and west sides of Beijing trap the stuff like a soup bowl and it has nowhere to go.
I was out of Beijing for much of this June, but since I have been back around June 28, we have had only ONE marginally decent air day. The rest have been terrible, very much the norm for summer in Beijing. I'm going to start recording observations again on July 20, when the new regulations kick in, and we'll see how things progress as the days go on.
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This is my first Olympics, and may be my only one in life, so I'm going all out and want to see/experience so much. I've got as my priority tickets: swimming, diving, athletics, M/W gymnastics, M/W basketball, W football, beach volleyball, water polo, canoe/slalom, rowing. Also have tickets for archery, canoe flatwater, volleyball, handball, rhythmic gym, hockey, baseball, boxing. So with multiple events on most days, I'll be exhausted, but at least I live here and won't have to fit in sightseeing (which is even more exhausting than spectating sports).
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It is still a month out from the Games. I hope it is on the site in the next week or so as I need to plan those transport links to finalise what events I go to and what tickets I give away.
<...snip>
Puppy, if you are concerned about transport options and whether you can the timing work between events/venues/etc, please email me (in my profile) with your preferred daily event schedule, also any specific questions. I've already done this for one GB'er who needed to make the same kind of judgment calls on the feasibility of moving from event to event in a timely manner. And identified a couple of spots where he had some non-workable back-to-back event combinations, and where he had to make a decision to leave event early or arrive late at next event (or get rid of tickets). This goes for any GB'er attending the Games who may be reading this and feels they need an opinion. I'm quite familiar with many of the venues and just about anything having to do with transportation options between them. As well as how long it takes to walk from venue to transport, and to get through security at various places--these items can eat up real time and need to be included in your planning.
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I was also told an English-language version was downloadable, but could not find it on the website--it obviously doesn't exist yet. At this point, who knows if BOCOG will even bother putting one up--with the tight ticket and visa restrictions, they may figure only a dozen foreigners will be showing up for the Games anyway so why bother?
I've got hard copy of the actual publication, but it's Chinese-language only although the graphics of the information is quite understandable even if you can't read the verbiage. If no English version (downloadable or otherwise) is issued, at least try to get your hands on a Chinese version when you get to Beijing. -
As for the thirsty crowds, Coca-Cola is the official sponsor of all non-alcoholic beverages, and only their products will be sold in the concession stands. Based on my own observations at various test events, the #1 seller was water, followed by their non-fizzy locally produced drinks, and only distantly the standard carbonated cola.
This setup is nothing new for 2008, it's been this way for some time. Otherwise, why would any company ever want to be a sponsor. I assure you, for what KO (and the other sponsors) had to deal with/put up with under BOCOG these last few years, being allowed to provide beverages to the concessionaires is small compensation.
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You CANNOT bring any liquids into the venues, that includes drinks and that includes drinks from the official sponsor, Coca-Cola. This is a security measure, not a revenue protection effort. You should assume that the security at the checkpoints (which are generally at a distance from the venues themselves) is as stringent as airport security checkpoints. Even liquids such as eye drops, etc. will be questioned and very possibly confiscated.
I doubt that if an individual shows up wearing a Hewlett-Packard T-shirt instead of a Lenovo one, that anybody will care. However, if 5 busloads of 200 people show up wearing H-P, that might provoke some interesting dialogues in real time.
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<snip...>
Now to the big question:
With all these pictures of the stadium why hasn't anyone gone into the restrooms to find out if the squatter toilet problem has been fixed and taken pictures?
I'd like to put this to rest once and for all. I've attended 5 different events in the Birds Nest this year, on both the first and second floors (tiers). And believe you me, peed plenty of times all over the stadium....uh, in the Ladies Toilet facilities of course. Each toilet area is huge, with maybe 40-50 stalls each. And most of those are WESTERN toilets--I'd say maybe only 1/3 are squatters. For those of you unfamiliar with Asia, squatters are frankly, more hygienic to use in a public facility, and I personally prefer them even though I'm a westerner. What's not to like? I don't know about the mens, as you guys need fewer toilets to begin with. Wall urinals are wall urinals for taking care of that business. The most offputting thing about the restrooms is that the walls are completely painted in black, except for the inside of the toilet stalls themselves, which are painted bright red-orange like the red you see on the outside of the stadium. In close quarters, this effect is quite off-putting. It really does make you want to hurry up and get out of there.
I think this entire toilet issue at the major venues (Nest, Cube, NIS) has been caused by a bit of irresponsible journalism a few months back. I suspect said journalist saw a squatter or two, and didn't bother to do a good check of the entire restroom and other restrooms, to see all the western toilets. Must have been a male journalist.
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The Chinese security forces aren't messing around! Check out This Link and be sure to enlarge the pic of the "backpack flamethrower." Some of the comments below are funny!
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Excellent. CP, I'll assume you're a party of one? As for Dadong, one thing I like about them is that besides great duck (not the greasy stuff people love to hate), their other regular Chinese dishes are pretty competent as well. Any others?
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If you're a GB'er who's going to be in Beijing on August 8 and is interested in dinner beforehand, let me know either on this thread or by email in my profile. Not PM, please. I'm getting together a small international group of expat friends here, and we're happy to have visitors who have no other plans. However, anyone jumping on my bandwagon will have to trust my choice of restaurant, which will be centrally located. I'm a pretty good restaurant picker and it will be one of reasonable cost, not a hoity-toity one nor a "dress up" place.
Participants will get instructions on how to get to restaurant location, not to worry. There's a practical limit to group size, so if this gets oversubscribed, I'll take people in chronological order of commitment.I expect that any semi-decent restaurant or better will be booked solid for dinner, as not only is it Ceremonies night, but many couples will be getting married on this most auspicious of days, and will be having wedding banquets. I'm going to start asking around, but I expect to have to make some sort of booking within the next 10 days, estimating a number as best I can. For any of you who know Beijing, my initial thoughts are Dadong Roast Duck (location near East 2nd Ring Road) and Xiheyaju (Ritan Park area). Could end up being somewhere else, though. You can expect it to be Chinese, with multiple dishes served "family style." Dinner will need to be early, about 17:30, in order to get finished and get to one's selected live-site (for Ceremonies watching. I'm going to attempt to pick a restaurant that is in reasonable proximity to at least one good live site--of course, everyone is free to go where they wish.
For those of you who have a ticket to the Opening Ceremony, I sadly advise you to give this offer a miss. Based on an 20:00 start time and the time it will take to get 90,000 people through security queues, I suggest you get to those queues by 18:30, allowing plenty of time for your chosen mode of transportation. (P.S. Eat a good meal midafternoon, as the Birds Nest concession snacks leave something to be desired.)
Of course, this does not preclude having other GB get-togethers/happy hours, etc. on other days.
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so will grasshoppers be a cheap feed in Beijing?
Although not a particular habit of Beijingers, grasshoppers are eaten as snacks over much of Asia. When you fry them up with a little oil and secret blend of herbs, they taste pretty much like peanuts.
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I have to admit that I always thought that you were tough and sometimes a little unfair to BOCOG.
But I now admit that BOCOG ticketing handling is a spectacular failure on many accounts.
Most surprisingly, I can't believe the IOC had so little control over the whole ticketing process (which is sanctioned by the IOC).
Every one of NOC's posts that I have seen has hit the BOCOG nail on the head. Of course, those of you who know China will know that if there is a way to turn anything into a giant clusterf**k, the Chinese will manage to find it. Why they make things so hard on themselves and everybody else is beyond comprehension. (This isn't limited to the Olympic preparations, by the way.) A lot of it has to do with a certain amount of nationalistic arrogance and the belief that if they put any foreigners with experience in policy-making positions, they will somehow lose face by admitting they don't really know what they're doing. Ditto for even taking the advice of foreigners. Also, Chinese culture at all levels is not proactive, people and organizations just basically react to events. Sort of like falling into the potholes and then trying to figure out how to get out of the situation, rather than looking ahead and steering around the potholes to begin with.
I'm waiting for more people, especially the intl press, to start catching on and asking where all the "missing" tickets are--the ones that were supposed to go for public sale and didn't quite make it there. From what I've been able to ferret out, it's a significant number, and hard for me to believe that they will all magically appear at the venue box office windows for last-minute sales.
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Does anyone else find this "1-Ceremony-ticket-per-customer" limit a bit ridiculous?
Has this been done for past Games? Something tells me no, it hasn't.
BOCOG did this in order to give the maximum number of Chinese people the chance to get a ticket in the Phase 1 lottery, due to the huge population demographic. Most of the winners had other family/friends that also put in their own applications, but the odds of 2 people in the same household getting a Ceremonies ticket was almost nil. Also, even if that occurred, the seat assignments would have been done randomly and separately...you could end up anywhere in the respective Category. Everybody, even the Chinese public themselves, thought this was a stupid idea. Chinese don't like to do ANYTHING (eat, travel, attend events, etc.) alone. Of course, the international agents didn't follow the same path, although some (i.e. CoSport) still limited requests to 2 tickets, which I think is fair.
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...snip...
If you had enough common sense to secure tickets online and navigate the maze of all the ticketing delays, visa requirements, etc., I think you would have enough common sense to get to your seat -- especially with the help of ushers who will be trained to guide 'gaijin' to their seats.
Uh..wrong country..."laowai" would probably be the best term for Beijing. But keep "gaijin" handy, as it will be useful for you to use in 2016 in Tokyo.
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The Spectator Guide does have useful information in it on the special Olympic bus routes, stops, venue access locations and security checkpoints, and all manner of goodies. I think it's less about the venues themselves, but about what happens getting to them and between them. However, I don't think any of it is really essential to know everything before you show up in Beijing. The one thing that could be helpful is if you are trying to interweave general sightseeing in Beijing around attendance at Event Sessions, and have a general overall plan for your overall time. Particularly if you have never been to Beijing before. However, I'm not sure the Spectator Guide is the most useful tool for figuring this out...probably better to come up with a Best Guess plan and then ask a Beijing resident.
And I agree, it is unbelievably poor form to not have at least an English language version in print, it's just not that hard or expensive to do. Under normal circumstances I would say this is just typical Chinese thoughtlessness or screwup. However, in the context of the various fiascos, some of them BOCOG-originated and some of them (like the visa regulation debacle) courtesy of the Chinese gov't, it seems to be yet another in-your-face "Foreigner Go Home/Foreigner Stay Away" message delivered by the lot of them.
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...snip....
If it is not legal does anyone know trustworthy ways of swapping/trading or selling Beijing tickets that can't be used?
Truthfully, the only surefire way when two strangers are transacting business is a face-to-face deal, where each party can inspect the tickets and the cash. With a few exceptions for people I already know, or who come recommended by someone I know, or maybe a few of you GB'ers
I'm only doing face-to-face deals for Olympic event tickets (non-Ceremonies). I've done a couple of deals already for tickets I wanted, by scoping out two separate Chinese sellers auctioning on ebay. They had left a trail that led to their emails. I contacted them by email, told them I was living in Beijing, and if their auctions didn't work out, contact me and we could meet and do a deal on the spot, with cash in their hands and cut out the middlemen. I also gave them the price I was willing to pay...well above face value of course but fair to both sides given the market value of the tickets in question. We all came away happy campers. -
Here in Beijing, there are quite a few English and Chinese websites with Ceremonies tickets advertised. Everyone here is well aware of the looming transfer deadline for the Opening. Those who bought a ticket for resale are getting antsy, as they pretty much know they are limited to finding someone already here, in order to both go to BOCOG physically and do the transfer process. Will be interesting to see if the (still) outrageous asking prices start dropping like a stone in the next week. The main issue with tickets bought on the mainland is that they are all singletons due to the one-per-customer limit. I suppose a 4-hour long Ceremony is time enough to make friends with all your "neighbors" in the stands...
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Is BOCOG publishing a spectator guide, like other Games?
Our official ticket agent said BOCOG has not published it, but I am not sure, because it's very strange I think.
Yes, BOCOG has published one, which I got (free) when I picked up my tickets here in Beijing. It is Chinese-language only and has good graphics of all the venue areas, individual venues, transportation routes, etc. Even if you can't read Chinese, the graphical part is pretty self-explanatory and useful. Hopefully they will at least do an online, downloadable English version. There will be some kind of spectator reception/information counter at the Beijing airport, which perhaps will have some of the guides available.
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Update
I just picked up my Phase 1 (Chinese) tickets from BOCOG yesterday, and with them came a lovely little Official Spectator Guide booklet that has every venue, transport, all kinds of good stuff. Unfortunately, it's only in Chinese (!) but the key stuff is graphical and easy to read. I didn't look for a downloadable English version on the official website, but maybe there is one there. I'm also not sure if with the international agents, these little booklets in English will be given out with those tickets.
The Spectator Guide shows the Olympic bus routes and shuttles being put on, looks good for transport along with the new subway lines. With an event ticket for that day, your ride on these buses is supposed to be free of charge. These are in addition to the regular city buses. Subway Line 10 is supposed to be opening up this week. The subway magnetic card (stored value and single trip) system is now operational--no more of those flimsy paper tickets (sob!
) And the distance-based fare system is going to be postponed for a number of months, so at least for the summer, all subway rides regardless of distance should remain at RMB 2 per trip. You can't beat that deal anywhere!But, bring good walking shoes or sandals, as for most venues, there is usually a goodly distance between the closest transportation dropoff point and your seat.
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Thank you Jiejie, this is very useful.
I think in the Aquatics centre I have a place something too high for the event.
I've been to multiple events in the Water Cube, and tried out the seating in different areas. Tell me the event--swimming, sync swimming, springboard diving or platform diving, also the Section, Row and Seat, and I'll give you my opinion. You can email or PM me if you prefer.
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National Stadium: The diagram shown above is correct as to section but not very detailed. Section A is the "VIP" premier seating and is centered in front of the sprint straightaway. Section G is directly opposite on the "backstretch." Section D is the south end center, and Section K the north end center. Cross-check the diagram above against the official category map for athletics (football final and ceremonies are somewhat different), look at Birds Nest.
Each Section slices all the way up from field to top of stadium. Each section is big enough to have multiple vertical aisles. Your ticket for this venue should first show the section, then the tier (1 is the lower level, 2 the middle, 3 the upper). The aisle is the next number...and my notes aren't handy...but as I recall they start at aisle 101 (at VIP Section A) and are consecutively numbered up to about aisle 156 in Section M. On the second tier, aisles are numbered 201-256, etc. etc. Using the first tier as an example, Section A is approximately between aisles 101 and 105, Section D (center/end zone) approximately aisles 114-120, Section G (center opposite side) aisles 129-133, Section K (opposite end zone) aisles 142-147. Other sections/aisles in between. The Sections sometimes split BETWEEN aisles and are divided by vertical railings.
In the lower Tier 1, rows start at #1 closest to the field, and go back to 30-something, as I recall. Back row is primarily companion seating for wheelchair spots which are on the concourse. In middle Tier 2, rows start at #1 on the railing, and go back up to row 24. I do not know the 3rd tier, as test events did not use or permit access to that area. The section/aisles up there will be similar, but rows highly variable (more in the center, fewer at the ends), which you can see from the official layout. Number of seats varies a bit per row depending on tier and section, but using Tier 1 as an example, typically an aisle will split the sequence so seats 1-10 are on one side of the aisle, while seats 11-20 are on the other side of the aisle. All consecutively numbered, starting over per section.
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I don't have a scanner handy to pass along my sketch, but I'll give you information to make your own for the Water Cube. First, go to the official website and look at the chart, which is quite accurate as to what's really there. Aquatics Center. Print it out and note as follows:
Above the pool is the north stands, below the pool is the south stands. Start at the top of the NORTH stands--the orange and yellow sections--and label left to right as follows with the aisles dividing the sections: 216-215-214-213-212-211-210-209. 216 and 209 are the skinny half-sections. Then starting with the blue sections under that: 116-115-114-113-112-111-110-109. The 1XX sections are divided into upper (the T shaped part) and the lower, smaller rectangle part. Ignore the very narrow sections on the pool deck--those are not for public sale or access. Now go to the SOUTH stands below the pools. Beginning with the leftmost blue section and going right: 101-102-103-104-105-106-107-108, with 101 and 108 being the skinnies. And then below that: 201-202-203-204-205-206-207-208.
At the Good Luck Beijing events, the public was only in the south stands, so my row/seat numbering is from there, but the north stands are fairly symmetrical so should be the same. Again ignoring the very narrow sections on the pool deck, the rows closest to the pool start at #1 and go to #7. Then a horizontal cross aisle with wheelchair and companion seating. Then the next T-shaped section, rows 10-24. Then another major cross aisle, then the upper section rows 27-50. In the full sections (not the end ones), seating per row is 27 seats across. In the south stands, seat #1 is on the west (left) on the aisle, and seat #27 is on the east end, next to the following aisle. The skinny end sections taper a bit, but have between 7 and 12 seats across depending on how far back you are. Safety railing could be an annoyance in rows 1-2, 10-11, 24-25.
The section/row/seats will of course stay the same across all events. What will change is which sections are A vs. B vs. C, depending on which pool is in use. I made a detailed report on this, with my opinion on sightlines/desireability, a few months back. You may find it helpful. Water Cube Report
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These are the new special taxis that can accommodate the wheelchair disabled. Long time we've needed in Beijing, just took the Olympics and Paralympics to give the City a kick in the pants to get them on line. I think most of them will need to be specially-called and will not be cruising around like regular taxis. Also, I think they will have special access to drop off/pick up passengers closer to the venues than the regular taxis and other public transport. I'm pretty certain they are Chinese-made.
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I received my first tickets. But I don't know where in the venues my seats will be. I'd like to know it.
I know where the different categories are in the venues, but not the sections, aisles etc. Does someone have detailed seating charts?
Maybe if people find pictures from other venues, for example when the look of the Games has been applied in the coming weeks, also post it here.
I have never seen the really detailed seating charts on the internet. I've attended Good Luck Beijing events in some of the venues and while there, made up my own sketches showing sections/aisles/rows/etc. (OK weird but I'm an architect and we do things like this...) Which venues are you curious about?
What Are Your Key Events To Watch?
in Beijing 2008 Summer Games
Posted
Faster, I'm from the USA. I've gotta believe that in that big team we are sending and all those sports I'm watching, there's got to be a medal or two somewhere in there! However, I love to watch a good competition in most anything--I'm even keen to give handball a try, and the USA didn't even qualify teams for that--it just looks like a sport that I would have enjoyed playing (well, in my younger days at least). The only things I probably wouldn't be up for watching are dressage, sync swimming, wrestling, and weightlifting, and I'm not big on judo either (but taekwondo is OK).