They don't call me "Map-Boy" for nothing. This is a huge scale model of the Olympic Park as it will look when everything is finished and the world watches somebody light the flame for the games. By the way, doesn't it have to be Yao Ming? Anyway, this is one great model, to be topped only, as maps and models always are, by the real thing.

There are lots of foreign journalists here, getting a look at what's going on. Last year the Games Organizing Committee brought in 3,600 specifically for pre-Olympic visits. They expect 5,000 or so this year.These folks are from Japan. We met on a viewing platform near the "Bird's Nest" and the "Water Cube". Note that they are all wearing heavy parkas and gloves and the like. Note also that I am wearing my KING5 short-sleeve polo. It's extremely cold. Maybe 20 degrees with a nice brisk breeze blowing. I'm freezing! But we're shooting stand-ups and promotional pieces for the SUMMER Olympics and we figure it might look odd next June if all our Beijing material featured me in a standard double-layer, yellow, Snoqualmie Pass bumblebee jacket, gloves, scarf and hat, which is absolutely what I should have been wearing.

Another Beijing first for me. We saw some Beijing Opera tonight at the Big Gate restaurant. These two characters duked it out in a tremendous dance-fight. They were just part of the show which featured song, dance, magic and acrobatics.

Did I mention magic? Yes, somehow I was the one picked out of the room full of patrons to come up on stage and help the magician with his act. Photographer Ken Jones wasn't far behind me of course. I was a bit out of my element I think. Where is Curley when we need him? But what the heck, I made a woman disappear, got a few laughs from the crowd, made the magician reappear, and walked away clean from the whole episode with videotape in hand that might someday make the public airways.
Cheers.
206 days to go.

The following was sent Monday, 2:14 p.m. Seattle Time (Tuesday 6:14 a.m. Beijing Time).

Photographer Ken Jones is always up to a challenge. He went lens-to-nose with a sewer pipe-crawling remote controlled inspection device. This and other very cool sewer inspection and repair devices were used in more than 700 miles worth of sewer lines in and around Olympic Park. Just checking. We're told there were no major problems found.
We learned more today about sewage treatment and water reclamation than I ever knew there was to learn. Beijing and our tour organizers continue to amaze.
Tomorrow, we visit the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube and some of the other competition venues. I am too tired and getting very loopy. Believe it or not, touring, smiling, asking questions about sewage treatment and food inspection practices, taking bus-ride after bus-ride. It adds up and beats a guy down.
Cheers.
==========================
It's too late at night after too long a day to be blogging but here I am anyway.
I had a fascinating trip to the Chinese Academy of Inspection and Quarantine. Absolutely fascinating. And the place had nothing to do with the Olympic Games. Well, maybe if you really stretch the point. It's a Government supported scientific research center dedicated to food quality, testing and inspection, so you might be able to make an argument that at some point in the future, some of the methods and products they have developed might well be used by some other agency in a way that is somehow connected with the Beijing Olympics or perhaps future Olympics. Men and women hovering over test-tubes, people in surgical masks doing unknown things very delicately, many earnest young doctors just researching to beat the food-borne illness band.
No, they're not testing the food headed for the Athletes Village. No, they're not developing methods of testing that will be applied to the food going to the Athletes Village. No, they really have nothing to do right now today in any direct way with the upcoming Olympics.
And no, we still haven't figured out exactly why we were there today as part of our pre-Olympic tour. Our cheerful and efficient tour-guides told us somebody told them it would be a great place for the next group of foreign journalists to take a look at and we were lucky enough to be the next grout in the pipeline.
==========================
The new Terminal 3 at Beijing's airport is really an amazing building, or set of three buildings. It is designed to represent a dragon chasing a pearl, which may sound odd for an airport as you're reading my description in black on white words, but it is a design that really seems to work. You can't see the dragon from inside the romantically named "Terminal 3" of course but you can feel it. It is all rounded space, enormous sweeps of windows, jagged edges that compliment the soft contours, oblique lighting from huge triangular skylights above the linear drop-ceiling and wonderful curving lines of towering red columns. Quite a place, inside and out. It will more than double the airport's jet landing capacity. They'll start landing and taking off for real at the end of February.