Beijing Olympics news

At 8.30 we walk out of our hotel into a hot, clammy Beijing morning. Yesterday the city enjoyed what its 17 million inhabitants call a “blue sky day”, but today the Great Pall of China has returned. A thick haze of dust and fumes smothers the capital, leaching all colour from the sky and erasing distant tower blocks. Undaunted, we stride towards the main road past communal toilets, old men in vests walking tiny dogs and a youth expectorating noisily.

We have a mission. Armed with just two words of Chinese - ni hao (hello) and xiexie (thank you) - and the most rudimentary knowledge of Beijing, Jack Hill, the Times photographer, and I intend to test the waters before 500,000 foreigners arrive for the Olympic Games.

Will they be able to navigate a vast and bewildering city whose language, written and spoken, most find utterly incomprehensible? Have the taxi drivers really learnt enough English to cope with foreign customers? Are the authorities really cracking down on counterfeit clothes and pirated DVDs? Have the Chinese stopped hawking and spitting?

We find a bus stop where a man and a woman dressed in orange shirts, each clutching little red flags, make sure that a dozen members of the public form an orderly queue. “Do you speak English?” I ask the man. He and the passengers burst into nonplussed laughter. I try again. “Which bus for Tiananmen Square?”. More laughter, but I'm in luck. A young man steps forward. “Sixty,” he says, just as a number 60 arrives.

We pay one yuan (8p) each. There is standing room only, but the bus is spotless and has television screens showing Chinese advertisements for McDonald's and Head & Shoulders. We inch along clogged streets where the once ubiquitous cyclists are now an endangered species. The electronic sign announcing the stops is in Chinese. Happily our young friend helpfully writes down our destination - Nan He Yan - before he alights, so that other passengers can tell us when to get off.

We find ourselves in a broad, tree-lined boulevard where straw-hatted workers are already sweeping the gutters and tending roadside flowerbeds. One is even wiping down a litter bin. Beijing's streets are as clean as its air is filthy.

We say “Tiananmen Square” loudly and in various tones to a policeman until finally he points us through one of the immaculate little parks that have sprouted across the city as part of its £20 billion makeover. Beside a large fishpond, signs read “Refuse to Step On” and “Refuse to Feed”. A man with a red flag and a whistle shepherds us across another boulevard - and there in front of us is the vast, Soviet-style square where tanks crushed China's young democracy movement in 1989.

A fearsome road as wide and busy as the M1 divides us from the iconic square. We take the underpass. As we emerge, police are searching all Chinese tourists but wave us through.

The square illustrates one of the contradictions of these Games. The huge expanse of paving is being prettified with small gardens and ornamental ponds. Stands are being erected. This suggests fun, festivities, an impending party. But the authorities are terrified of mass gatherings. There are security cameras on every lamppost, and scores of soldiers and policemen, each standing ramrod stiff, scattered across the square. I pose beside one for a photograph and he waves me away angrily. Later a policeman demands my identification.

We head towards Mao Zedong's tomb, past groups of Chinese tourists led by guides waving coloured flags on sticks. A man who knows English numbers, if nothing else, offers us Chairman Mao watches for 180 yuan (£15) each. We beat him down to 50 yuan (£4) for two - still a rip-off, but he had only one arm. When we point to where the other one was, he makes shooting noises.

Alas, Mao's tomb is closed. Perhaps Mondays are set aside for touching up his waxen corpse. As we leave, a young man approaches. “Excuse me I have word with you,” he says. “Welcome to China. I enjoy speak perfect English. English open door to great future. You have good travel.”

At Tiananmen's southern end, an escalator takes us down into Qianmen subway station. Tickets cost two yuan (16p). The maps are indecipherable, so I ask a lady with a red armband and white gloves how to reach the Olympic Stadium. Two of her colleagues join us.

Using their fingers and occasional words of English, they indicate that we go one stop, change trains, then 11 stops north on Line 5. They write down our destination - Huaxinxijie Beikou. The platforms are shiny, the trains spotless and cool. Where we change, uniformed officials marshal those trying to board behind white lines until those alighting have done so.

Again, there is standing room only. Television screens show films explaining the rules of tennis and other Olympic events. A young woman training to become a tourist guide befriends us (clearly nobody older than their mid-twenties speaks any English). Her Western name is Rebecca. She gives me a Chinese name - Yao Ming (China's most famous basketball player). She has a programme on her mobile phone that translates English words into Chinese and vice versa. We defeat it by entering “Bird's Nest”, nickname of the Olympic stadium.

At Huaxinxijie Beikou we emerge into a world of dismal grey apartment blocks beside another roaring highway. The only colour is that of the cars' red brake lights in the gloom. There is no stadium in sight. Rebecca rescues us. She takes us across an overpass to a bus stop and, from a board chock-full of Chinese characters, works out that we need route 660. There is no way in which we could have discovered this ourselves. It starts raining, so she empties a plastic bag of her cosmetics to protect my notebook.

We approach the 91,000-seat stadium along an avenue of newly planted trees and bushes, and gay Olympic banners. The Bird's Nest is visually stunning but ringed by guards and a high metal fence. We take pictures of ourselves with the stadium as a distant backdrop. Then Chinese families start asking me to pose with them - probably because I am 6ft3in tall and Western. I am rescued by the arrival of a greater distraction: an American cyclist with a long grey beard, a moustache tapering into two fine needles, and tattoos all over his legs.

Jesse, 62, tells us in a southern drawl that he manages the Goose and Duck pub in Beijing. He got his first tattoos when he competed in boomerang competitions. He pulls up his Lycra to reveal thighs tattooed with pictures of himself above the words “Live to Boom, Boom to Live”.

We are wandering towards the nearby Aquatics Centre, debating whether Chinese collectivism could produce such eccentrics, when we bump into Jesse's Chinese counterpart: Shi Changlin, 56, who has cycled thousands of kilometres across China on a rickshaw bedecked with flags, loudspeakers and flashing lights “to celebrate the Olympic spirit”.

Of the futuristic Aquatics Centre, aka the Water Cube and venue for the swimming events, we can see only a dark, rectangular outline through the murk.

At 12.30pm we hail a green-and-yellow taxi and tell the driver: “Zoo”. No response. I draw a panda in a cage. His face lights up. “Tsooo!” he exclaims. He starts the meter, a recorded voice says “Welcome to Beijing taxi” and off we go. Beijing's cabbies are all supposed to have had pre-Olympic lessons in basic English, but this one can say only “Sank you” and “Welly good”. He compensates with non-stop laughter.

I have no idea where we are going. Beijing has gridiron streets with few landmarks. Without sun you have no sense of direction. But 20 minutes and 26 yuan (£2.08) later we reach the tsooo. I give the driver 30 yuan. He pockets the change.

There is a mobile blood donation unit outside. I offer mine. This causes consternation. The foreigner's offer is eventually rejected on the pretext that I cannot complete a registration form written entirely in Chinese.

Jack and I head for lunch instead. Four smiley young girls in yellow stand beneath a sun umbrella outside a restaurant. One leads us inside. We spurn “Pig hoof gruel”,“The old vinegar jelly fish” and “Fried goose intestines”. Dog meat has been removed from Beijing menus for the Olympics. We choose “Know taste pork meat pie” and “The noodle of hyancinth bean” washed down with chrysanthemum tea - though we were tempted by “Little confused immortal liquor”.

Zoo tickets cost 20 yuan (£1.60) each, less if you are shorter than 1.2m. Jack crouches, but to no avail. We decide against renting an automatic guide which promises “you needn't any work when you get the every place”. To see the pandas - eight of them recently airlifted from the earthquake zone - you need only follow the crowds.

By 2.45pm it is time for a sterner test. We decide to take a taxi to one of the more obscure Olympic venues - the basketball stadium. The driver does not understand “basketball” or “stadium”. I draw the Olympic rings and a stick man throwing a ball through a hoop. He studies the drawing, picks up his mobile phone and chatters away for a couple of minutes. “OK,” he says with a smile, and sets off. His only English is “Welcome to China Beijing”.

We drive along wide roads fringed with new trees and bedecked with Olympic bunting. We hit traffic jams where any semblance of lanes breaks down, and wonder how much longer Beijing can absorb 1,300 new cars a day. Finally we arrive at a huge arena.

We approach the nearest guard. I do my basketball imitation. To my dismay he shakes his head and swings an imaginary baseball bat. Then he points to another stadium nearby. “Basketball!”, he says. Success!

In the empty car park we watch an old man manipulating a two-headed kite with a dexterity that would surely win gold if his was an Olympic sport. Then we confidently hail another taxi to take us to the Silk Market, epicentre of China's trade in counterfeit goods - but no matter how many times we say “Silk Market” the driver does not understand. After a couple of minutes he ejects us brusquely from his vehicle and drives off.

Another taxi picks us up. An hour later, even I realise that it is going the wrong way. I cheat and give him the name of the nearest subway station. He gets out at a red traffic light to consult another cabbie. The lights change and we are stranded amid a cacophony of hooting. Eventually, at 5pm, we reach the station. Unprompted, our driver reduces the fare for going wrong.

He drops us beside a bright blue tent manned by five of the 70,000 Beijingers who have volunteered to help visitors to the Games. They wear matching blue shirts and delightful smiles. Two even speak halting English. “Where is the Silk Market?” I ask. They point to a six-storey building across the road. “Where can I buy pirated DVDs?” Their smiles freeze. “We can only answer questions about Olympics,” they say.

The authorities have promised to crack down on fake products ahead of the Games, but in our 90 minutes in the bustling Silk Market, communicating on calculators, we buy two “Ralph Lauren” sports shirts, a “Columbia” ski jacket with fleece, and a pair of “Timberland” sports sandals for less than we would pay in London for one genuine Nike baseball cap.

Jack wants a “Louis Vuitton” handbag for his girlfriend, but can find only “Dolce & Gabbana” or “Ralph Lauren” bags. No problem, says a young stall-owner who does speak English. She produces a Louis Vuitton catalogue from beneath the counter. Jack chooses a bag. It arrives a few minutes later in a black binliner, and we knock her down from 2,700 to 200 yuan.

Why the secrecy? The girl explains that the police regularly search for Chanel, Burberry and Louis Vuitton bags, and issue fines, but don't care about Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana rip-offs because those companies have not protested.

The Government's crackdown on pirated DVDs is allegedly even harsher, so I set out to buy the latest Indiana Jones. They are no longer on public display, but it takes five minutes and one furtive conversation before a bootlegged copy appears from another black binliner. It costs 10 yuan (80p).

It is now 7pm. We are tired and hungry. We head for the Wangfujing food market. Our taxi driver exhausts his entire English vocabulary as we get out. “Bubbye,” he says.

The market is extraordinary. From the colourful, brightly lit stalls you can buy kebabbed scorpions, sea horses, silkworms, snakes or dragonflies. There are boiled sea urchins, bowls of cows' tripe and mounds of lambs' testicles. Jack and I opt for staid meat dumplings, but my phone rings before we can eat.

I wander up a side street so that I can hear. A woman approaches me. “You want massage?,” she asks. “You want sex and massage?” That's another thing on which the authorities are supposed to be cracking down - prostitution.

Jack and I discuss our day. We have more or less mastered a public transport system that is cheap, clean and efficient. Except for a single taxi driver and a few officials, everyone has been charming. We have not been hassled, and only mildly cheated. In no other city have we felt as safe, even from pickpockets. We saw no drunks, no louts, and hardly anyone spitting.

But neither, of course, could we see the countless shops and shacks that have been demolished, or the thousands of street vendors and migrant workers who have been driven out so that Beijing can present its prettiest face to the world.

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