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Wherever you are in the world this week, everybody’s attention is heading for Beijing - especially today with the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games taking place. The latest travel news out of Beijing includes these stories:
Plenty of hotels have rooms available - and a lot of news reports mentioned that checking up on availability at hotels found that even for tonight, rooms were still available; and many hotels were now offering big discounts on the previously inflated prices for the Olympic Games period. Travelers who got organized early and booked ahead will probably be pretty annoyed now to see that the people in the next hotel room paid half the amount that they did.
Security has been tightened - especially after terrorist attacks in another part of China - and all the Olympic venues are now protected by police, tall fences, cameras and, apparently, even anti-aircraft missile batteries. The airport was shut down for the opening ceremony and high risk spots for demonstrations like Tiananmen Square were also completely closed off. Many people without tickets had also gathered outside the Olympic Stadium in the hours leading up to the opening ceremony but despite the peaceful nature of the gathering, police dispersed it. There are said to be 110,000 security personnel at work in Beijing right now.
The famous Beijing smog is there - despite desperate measures by the Chinese government to limit pollution from cars and factories in recent months, there have been plenty of reports of Beijing’s smog and complaints by many about the poor air quality and the risks and difficulties this will pose to athletes; strangely enough few tourists are protesting about it, but they probably should be!
Pro-Tibet protesters are also in Beijing - but some of them have already been rounded up and sent home. A British pair, for example, who climbed the Bird’s Nest stadium on Wednesday, unfurling Tibetan flags and two large banners, had their visas revoked and were sent back to Britain. In other parts of the world, such as in San Francisco at the Chinese Embassy, pro-Tibet protests are also taking place - here two protesters climbed on top of the consulate as part of a protest from their group “Students for a Free Tibet”.
Non-Olympic tourism has not been forgotten - for example, just in time for the influx of Olympic tourists, Beijing reopened Qianmen Street, a long strip of restaurants, markets and historical buildings. It had been undergoing extensive renovations and has now been remodeled to look as it did in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.
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