Thinking of travelling to Beijing for the Olympics?
A report in The Age says that one of the city’s hotels, the Huafu International, has lifted its standard room rate for July 25 to September 15 (a fortnight either side of the Games) from $83 per night to $1151 a night. That’s a mark-up of almost 1400 per cent.
Beijing and big numbers go hand-in-hand, like with Games volunteers.
So far, 870 of those who served at 14 sports events held in Beijing in the past two months are assured of a gig next August.
In all, 100,000 volunteers will be chosen for the Olympics and Paralympics.
Organisers won’t have any trouble finding them — more than 560,000 people from both home and abroad have applied.
Already, Beijing is sprucing itself up for the Olympics.
Taxi drivers, in particular, face a lifestyle makeover that includes “regular baths”, a ban on spitting, smoking, weird hairstyles and dangly earrings and a rule that says cabbies whose cars are smelly will cop a two-day suspension.
Beijing’s taxi drivers, who typically earn about $250 a month, often eat and even sleep in their vehicles.
The best way to travel during next year’s Olympics will not be by cab, though, but by train, with at the weekend, Beijing opening its first underground line in 40 years, a 27.5-kilometre complex that cost $1800 million and took five years to build.
And early next year, three more lines will open that will expand the city’s mass transit system to about 200 kilometres, all planned to relieve pressure on the city for the Olympics.
A huge new airport, bigger even than the massive Heathrow Terminal Five, also will be opened next June.
The new facilities are for the use of locals, too, of course. Well, some of them are, with the new toilet facilities built in the Beijing stadiums longer to be used by regular Chinese citizens living or working in the area amid hygiene concerns that would affect the Beijing Olympic image. The penalty for any Chinese locals caught using the bathrooms is $100.
There are concerns too, that visitors to Beijing next August will struggle to decipher bizarre English mis-translations, particularly on restaurant menus.
For that reason, the Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list of thousands of proposed names for dishes and drinks.
Foreigners often are stumped by dish names such as virgin chicken (a young chicken dish) or burnt lion’s head (Chinese-style pork meatballs).
Steamed carp was another to test locals’ translation skills. One restaurant called it steamed crap.
Flies too loom as a threat to the Beijing Games.
Which is why Chinese farmers Guo Zhanqi and Ji Guijun have been staking out parks and public washrooms to target the flies’ breeding grounds, the pair’s goal being to eradicate 80 per cent of Beijing’s insects before next August.
Ji has also submitted designs for an “ecological toilet” to replace the public latrines where insects breed.
The city’s reaction was “thanks but no thanks”, one official quoted as saying Beijing has its own plans in place to bring the insect population under control.
Report by The Mole and The Age
John Alwyn-Jones
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