More than Five Friendlies

We’ve been in Beijing for 24 hours now and one thing’s for certain; if anything goes wrong with the Olympics it won’t be caused by lack of man power.

From arriving at the airport to getting into the hotel to finding your way around, there’s always someone – in many cases quite a few people – to help you. There are 70 thousand Olympic volunteers and another 400 thousand city volunteers. I wouldn’t say we’ve met all of them but it feels like it.

This morning there were three people to greet me as I came out of the lift, several more to guide me to the breakfast room and even a volunteer to put my toast in the machine. My colleague James wondered if, for the lady who was doing my toast, this represented the “Olympic Dream”.

When you head into the city there are community volunteers staioned at street corners, sheltering from the sun in little tents and, it has to be said at this early stage, a little under worked. They are all- to a man and a woman as far as we can tell- friendly, smiley, courteous and smart.

They are determined to give a positive and friendly image and fair play to them, it seems to be working. I remember England football fans emerging from a stadium in Saitama after a match during the 2002 World Cup to hundreds of Japanese locals applauding them; not the team, the fans. They were neutered with kindness and courtesy. There’s a similar charm offensive going on here.

The mascots, “the Five Friendlies”, (their names make up the Chinese for “Beijing welcomes you”) are being more than backed up on the streets of Beijing. But it has to be said, that James and I – as the accredited members of the team (and therefore members of the “Olympic Family”), may be getting a different flavour to Rebecca, who is one of the great unwashed, or unaccredited journalists as they are known.

The stadium, “the Bird’s Nest “, is, as millions of bloggers have already said, spectacular. Our media hotel is right next to it, and I can see the end of it from my room. We’re staying in what was the athletes’ village for the Asian Games in 1990.

It is of course a good place to stay but we came up against the issue of Internet access. Bearing in mind we are staying at a media hotel, i.e full of people wanting to file, it came as a surprise that they wanted one thousand pounds for us to be able to access it in our rooms.

We declined, so I’m writing this from one of our broadcast venues, Book Worm, which has wireless. That said, we have been unable to access WordPress for this blog, the World Service site, or James Reynolds’s (our Beijing correspondent) dispatches on the BBC site. At our media village news stand we can get copies of western papers, but they won’t be available on the streets.

Which is a shame. The smog isn’t that bad, the massive building work seems to have stopped, the traffic is heavy but not gridlocked, and everyone is smiling – not a bad story for people here to be able to read in the foreign press or on foreign sites.

Finally, thanks for your response to my last post- we’re pretty confident we’ll be able to do a WHYS from our other venue, Fish Nation, on Thursday. So what do you want to ask our guests?