An Olympian Effort part 2 of 2

After spending the better part of the day fighting the crowds at the waterpark, we showered up, exited the Water Cube, and set out on foot in search of some dinner. We had come into the Olympic Plaza from the south so we decided to continued north through the plaza. It was huge. It was a hundred meters wide and a kilometer or more long. It was one broad, empty plaza.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the powers that be bulldozed large swatches of Beijing including dozens of hutongs –or traditional neighborhoods made up of courtyard houses. I’m sure that in order to hold the number of visitors they expected for the Olympics it made sense to create such a massively large plaza, but three years out, that decision was starting to look a little dubious.

A few early evening revelers wandered about, an old man had a string of a sixty miniature kits high in the air, two young men sang and played guitar into a portable amp and had a dozen peopled gathered around them. But for the most part, it was a large paver-lined desert in the middle of the city.

I am sure that Beijing is probably looking at this plaza as a giant blank slate upon which they can continue to recast Beijing according to their vision.

Sadly, former host cities around the world are littered with the decaying, underused carcasses of expensive infrastructure that promised to be a catalyst to future development. Beijing –as successful as her Olympics were- does not seem to be the exception. We wandered until we found signs for a mall on the plaza. It was an subterranean mall consisting of a McDonalds , a movie theater and a lot of empty store fronts.

We made our way back above ground and to the edge of the Olympic plaza where we hailed a taxi. I put my Pictionary skills to use, sketched a picture on the back of a scrap of paper and managed to communicate to our driver that we were interested in eating some of Beijing’s celebrated Peking Duck. Twenty minutes later he pulled up to an excellent Peking Duck restaurant –far from the Olympic Plaza.