The following photos were taken in and around the Olympic Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) and the Water Cube aquatic centre in Beijing in November, 2008. With the weather turning colder (though we found it pleasant) and the Olympic Games having only been a few months earlier the pollution levels were relatively low for Beijing but the smog in the atmosphere was enough to help produce some lovely shots, especially as the sun started dipping behind the building we were told was supposed to represent a dragon (but which we thought looked more like a rabbit).
As with elsewhere we visited in Beijing we found ourselves often the centre of attention from groups of Chinese visitors to their own capital too. Our tour guide explained that a lot of the people we saw would have come in from outlying areas of China and would probably never have seen non-Chinese people before. We found it quite amusing to see groups of people – often elderly – all dressed in matching caps to identify themselves paying scant attention to whatever their own tour guide was trying to say and slinking across to hang around near us, apparently to hear English being spoken.
