KEY POINTS:
You know you're in a big city when it has six ring roads.
You know the people are desperate to please when you see them cleaning the travellators. You know, those moving footpath things at airports where some people, who have been pretty much clamped in a chair for 13 hours, celebrate by standing still on travellators, expressing the utter joy of immobility and getting in the way of other people who want to walk to immigration control. What is it with that?
Anyway, the travellators (if you've never noticed) have little raised steel strips running the length of the surface on which you walk. Urban detritus can escape into the small cracks between the steel strips.
And there she was, an airport authority woman in her 40s, travelling the travellators like a New York subway cop. I counted two tiny bits of clag in the otherwise immaculate 40-metre gleam of the travellator and she triumphantly fell on both of them like a Zulu warrior - even if armed only with a toothbrush and a tissue.
So fear not, those of you coming to Beijing for the Olympics. You will be riding the cleanest travellators in the world and most of you will do it without any sense of irony at Beijing's serious air pollution and soiled human rights record on the one hand and the Shiniest Travellators In The Universe on the other.
Beijing just wants to be loved, you see. It's a feeling you get once outside the massive airport - so big you have to take a train to get to your baggage claim area and the ride takes so long you start to worry if that's actually Shanghai you can see out the window.
From the air, there seems to be a sheet of smog sitting over this vast city. But once down on the ground, it's a beautiful sunny day and the only reminder of Beijing's curse of air quality is the high rise block some kilometres away from the media village. The far-off apartments have a hazy quality, like a photograph shot out of focus.
Not good but certainly no worse yesterday than the celebrated Los Angeles smog of the 1984 Olympics. It's apparently the sixth day in a row where the sun has broken through the smog and it's officially unpolluted enough to hold an Olympics. Let's see what other days bring.
And what do you do with six ring roads? Well, you fill 'em up with cars, that's what. Normally, anyway. But the Chinese have got many of the cars off the road (read it and weep, Auckland) and replaced them with little flower boxes hung on the side of the expressways to help us ponder serenity and the hardiness of violets.
Yes, it's all been managed. Yes, it's more than a bit artificial with cars banned, construction sites silent and the pollution controlled to an extent - and which, presumably, will revert to full-on duck soup when the Olympics are over and the world's eyes are elsewhere.
But you can't help but admire people and a city trying so hard to be loved.
Paul Lewis
Pictured above: The symbol of the Olympic rings adorn a special lane intended to carry vehicles designated to Olympic traffic. Photo / Getty Images
