米高樂 mikkol.com

Seriously I didn’t plan to come here. I didn’t plan to have a trip per month. But after two emails, I was being informed to come here for a 2-day meeting, plus a day that I can spend here. Great.

Besides the 630-wakeup, 830-to-430 meeting with a tie and an always-awake attitude, 12pm-lunch with McDonald’s, 6pm-dinner, for 2 days it’s a really hard time there. I won’t say it’s a waste as I only had 1 hr to really do my part, but the time would’ve been better spent with Internet but not there, and there’s only 1 thing to do - listen and have a drink.

And besides all that, Beijing did give most of the people a better feeling. The streets were less crowded and messy. They are cleaner definitely. The city is well-built. Subways are world-class. High-rises are everywhere. The sky is sky-blue. Let alone the beautifully-designed Olympic stadiums and its surrounding. Does that mean they are world city now?

It depends on how you consider one as world city. It’s definitely large. I can barely sense the “娘” (outdated) feeling anymore. People are tended to be more educated. Still… Even in hospitals the washing basin lacks soap - not even solid ones. In a so-called 3-star hotel, the room floor looked unclean. The hotel restaurant didn’t look clean - I found a fork w/ egg-like stain on it. Many times I found front-line employees only care/respond on up to its position - it won’t care/answer anything else. People still don’t do much line-ups to take bus. Let alone the poor logistics in Olympics - no taxi station (took us 1/2 hr to walk out of the area to find a taxi. Seriously), no easy-to-find ticket booth near subway, lack of food choices inside the Olympics area (I could only find a rice box w/ beef for dinner… yes and do they care for ones who don’t eat beef or no meat at all?). Security is run by volunteers - yes volunteers!

I mean, I’m not really complaining. I do expect it to be like that. But don’t they think they already upgraded themselves because they could get an Olympics game setup. They did try very hard to dress up themselves, too hard that you started to think - is that called faking? I read a line on subway saying - 禮讓是中華民族的優良傳統 basically means “Giving (seats) is a virtue of Chinese culture.” Come on! Let’s be realistic. Let’s make things more sensible. Instead of claiming that “we are Chinese, we gotta do better to show the world,” just say “as a World citizen, be gentle and responsible.” I really don’t know whether these rigid hard-sell ways of educating its citizen would work or not. Actually yes I don’t really see it working esp. in such short time.

I think everyone has to understand that this is China - a unique low-confidence high-expectation culture group trying to live up in 21st century w/ a huge burden from its unhappy history. It’ll be powerful obviously because, just now w/ a small group of elite atheletes they already beat US in # of gold medals - and first time being the leader in Olympics history. Yes they suck in some sports still. I heard a news in Singapore saying China is buidlings at least 10,000 basketball court these few years and more to come. Can they find an elite team of basketball players to challenge US Dream team 4 years later? I’m sure they can, if not 8 or 12 years. But to talk about raising the standard of 1.3 billion people? It’s still a long way to go, but everyone’s expecting it to happen.