Breningstall Zone: A picture-close view of China and the world

Good morning world! Just kidding. I have been up for several hours. On the way to catch boxing at Worker's Gymnasium... an interesting title. If a new stadium was built today, you can guarantee that it would not be named in honor of workers. It might be called... Bird's Nest? (Actually, the formal title of the Bird's Nest is Beijing National Stadium.) The workers who built Olympic Village in Beijing have been in short supply. I have been here for four days now and haven't seen any. A recent story in the New York Times explains why: factory furloughs and an unofficial policy encouraging migrants (and I suspect, poor people generally) to leave Beijing during the Olympics.

Aside from heavy rush hour congestion on Line 1 and on some of the lines headed toward Olympic venues, the subways have been far emptier than I remember them... the last time I came to Beijing, I couldn't even fit on the morning subway! This week, I have been to find a seat on more than half of my rides--believe me, an unusual circumstance. On the subways, they have TVs showing the Olympic games, which makes the rides pass by a lot more quickly, at least when the TVs are not frozen (yesterday, they were frozen throughout the afternoon). I wish Chinese telecasters learned something about editing... showing swimmers wave and spit on the diving board, then cutting to commercial just as they were diving into the water in the 400-meter medley is not good programming! It's damn annoying.

It reminds me of watching HBO last week in Zhejiang province, where I was teaching this summer... they always cut to commercial in mid-sentence. Often, the localized version of HBO would show an hour of a movie (say, "Flight Plan,"), then just as the suspense was building, cut to another movie that you'd already seen a couple days before ("Tenacious D. and whatever about the guitar pick"). Also, they coupled the HBO logo in the upper right corner with a much larger Chinese logo in the upper left corner... often blocking off actors faces. It makes the quality of the dodgy DVD-9's sold on street corners (but not during the Olympics) look good by comparison.

Lets try and catch up a bit... Sunday afternoon, my plans were curtailed a bit because of rain. In the evening, I headed out to the Sanlitun Bar district hoping to catch a crowd seen of watching the U.S.-China men's basketball matchup, which had been advertised in the media as a super-huge must-watch event. First I headed to the Tun Bar, described as a sports bar with large screen TVs and 5 kuai (70-cent) shooters on Sunday nights--a good deal in a city where drink prices start at $4 and go ever upward from there. Finding the bar was tricky... it is buried way back in a back alley behind a hotel and some commercial offices. I stumbled through the rain and got there, only to discover that the place was empty. It had a small theater size TV screen with poor resolution showing weightlifting (Chinese TV, like most countries, tends to focus on sports that its nationals excel in... so we've been getting to see a lot of sharpshooting, weightlifting, ping-pong, badminton and diving)... the basketball game was still an hour or two away. There was only one other customer in the place and more than a dozen employees, so needless to say I felt over-served. I ordered four drinks: a Cowboy, a Raging Bull, a Crazy Dave, and a Red, White and Blue.

*** Boxing time. Will be back later today.