Hey, look who we found. Ken Jones and I snap a team photo with NBC Beijing bureau chief Mark Mullen. You may remember him as a KING 5 Morning News anchor from five years ago or so. The shot is taken in an area just north of the bureau. It's a mostly Russian neighborhood with signs in Cyrillic, street vendors, and salesmen wandering around with pelts of some kind, animal furs, slung over their shoulders, trying to hustle a deal. Mark has been here nearly two years and is scheduled to come back to the U.S. after the Olympics. Mark and a couple of co-workers took us out for a traditional lunch at Pete's Tex-Mex.

The long table. This is how you do business here. We have been in a seemingly endless string of rooms like this one, although this was the most dramatic of them. The home-team sits on one side, the visitors sit on the other, and information is exchanged and deals are hammered out.
Seating is an important sign of rank. The middle seat is the seat of power. This is the Traffic Control Center, which will give our friends at the DOT some serious monitoring-screen envy.

More new friends. Cops on a beat in the Hohai Park "Hutong" area, a neighborhood of narrow alleys and one-story homes. The living spaces are walled off from the street, arranged around inner courtyards. This is the way Chinese families have lived for centuries, but it's also a way of life that is fading. Thousands of these structures have been demolished in recent years, the residents moved out and in some cases paid off for their troubles, resettled in new apartments and homes outside the city core.

Another team photo. This time with young Tae Kwon Do students at the Shichahai Sports College. Future Olympians of America, I hope you aren't taking too much time off. These guys aren't. They study in the morning and train in the afternoon. Then they do it again. They were very patient with us as our group trooped through sessions of gymnastics, table tennis and tae-kwon-do.