Upon our arrival at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing, just a few hours after landing in the Chinese capital for the start of our honeymoon, we’d been taken into a small conference room to sign a few things, pay for an additional evening trip to a local theatre with a meal included, and receive details of when and where we had to meet for the excursions included as part of the pre-cruise land tour organised through Princess Cruises.
Our first trip to see some of Beijing’s highlights took place surprisingly soon after with a bus turning up to take us all to the main site of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Those games had taken place in August 2008 and our visit was in early November.
The first stop for us was the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, known colloquially as the Water Cube. Our bus parked up and we walked towards the building where there was a short wait while our guide went ahead to pick up the pre-booked tickets to allow us inside. Looking around we could see signs of the recent Olympics everywhere and two buildings other than the Water Cube dominated the local landscape: the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium where we’d be heading next, of course, and a rather odd-looking building called the Pangu Plaza office complex which was described as representing both an olympic torch and a dragon but which to us seemed to resemble a rabbit more than anything else. We’d get more photos of this building following our next visit in the city.
We weren’t the only tourist group in the vicinity but we were the only non-Chinese tourist group around which made us as much a point of interest for the other visitors as the sights we’d all come to see but that was okay with me as I found them equally interesting too.
Our guide returned and we headed inside. It’s nice to say that we’ve stood in the venue of an Olympic Games but to be fair there wasn’t much else to do other than peer at the pool and the seating and other tourists. The 2022 Winter Olympics will also take place in Beijing and the Water Cube will be repurposed as the Ice Cube to host the curling event so we’ll be keen to see how it all looks although it has already undergone an internal redesign since we visited in 2008.
Our guide had given us all ten minutes to look around but we were done in less than half that so headed back outside the aquatics centre to the designated meeting point. This did at least give us the chance to look more at the building itself and its very distinctive bubble patterning. The building had been designed by a consortium of Chinese and Australian firms with the idea for the bubbles coming from the Australian architects; the base design of a cube shape was a traditional Chinese style choice and represented the Earth while the nearby circular shape of the Olympic Stadium represented Heaven. The bubble covering is a fluorine-based plastic with high resistance to corrosion and better efficiency at allowing in light and heat than glass, part of the Beijing’s attempt to create an ecologically-friendly event.
It wasn’t long until everyone had come out to join us and once the headcount was confirmed we walked the short distance to the next venue, the Beijing Olympic Stadium.
