Travel plan idea blog

Beijing getting ready for 2008 Summer Olympics

Beijing has been in a frenzy of activity trying to prepare for the 2008 Olympics, which begin in just under a year from now. New buildings have been built, old ones have been renovated and the main airport has been given a much needed facelift.

Perhaps more importantly, the Chinese have declared next year’s games to be the “Green Olympics” and large parts of the Olympic venue will supposedly run on wind and solar power.

The Chinese have also started to train thousands of volunteers to help deal with the athletes, workers, press and other visitors expected. And many Chinese employees have even been given lessons in how to be more polite to foreigners! Taxi drivers in Beijing are also being taught some English so they can better assist foreigners and immigration officers are also being taught some “people skills.”

The immigration officers may need their people skills, as the 2008 Olympics are expected to attract around 550,000 foreign visitors to Beijing alone. In fact, by the end of 2007, China is expected to have overtaken the United States as the 3rd most popular tourist destination in the world.

If you are visiting China, it’s now also a little bit easier to visit Tibet, thanks to the recent railway line that links Beijing and Lhasa. The railway line – a masterpiece of engineering – stretches around 2,500 miles between Lhasa and China’s capital city Beijing and the journey time is around 48 hours.

If you can’t make it to China, but you find yourself in London during the next few months, one of China’s most famous attractions can be found there. Several of China’s famous terracotta warriors, dating from around 200 BC, are on loan to the British Museum until April 2008. London is also the host city for the Olympic Games in 2012, in case you are planning four years ahead.

Guest entry by Mancunian

By the way (it's me James Trotta again) - I just wanted to add a few notes from my own trip to China. Firstly, the immigration officers did need to work on their people skills. One guy was giving someone in our group a hard time (over nothing) and when the person who speaks Chinese approached to translate the immigration officer got pretty mad. Not that all US immigration officers are pleasant to deal with either...

And of course it brought back some memories of a young Chinese woman stripping my pajamas off of me in front of my wife.

Posted by James Trotta at September 25, 2007 11:39 AM | TrackBack