Some not-so-beautiful sights in Beijing

BEIJING - Now that Beijing has held the Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games that will introduce this emerging city to the world, one question remains for China:

You're really going through with this?

You're really going to subject the world's greatest athletes minus Adrian Peterson to the environmental equivalent of a dirty bomb? You're going to hold a marathon in which each runner carries his own oxygen tent? You're going to hold a Summer Olympics without the sun?

When our flight landed in Beijing, the skies were blue and we bused along thoroughfares lined with landscaped flora and fauna. We could have been in Orlando, or a cleaned-up Miami.

In the past two days, rumor became fact. A dense fog of strange-smelling toxins enveloped the city.

If you didn't know better, you would swear that the Bird's Nest, the architecturally stunning and oddly intimidating National Stadium, escaped from a Spielberg set and began slowly poisoning the earth.

It's not the heat, it's the toxicity. Beijing was once, reputedly, mild; now it's a polluted rotisserie.

It's not just the government that's oppressive. This thick, humid, noxious air makes walking the equivalent of swimming in an overchlorinated pool. You feel like you're the meat on a Weber grill. Smoking here would be redundant.

When the American cyclists landed in Beijing already wearing the surgical masks provided by the U.S. Olympic Committee, the USOC upbraided them for embarrassing the host country.

What's embarrassing is that the International Olympic Committee would choose Beijing to begin with. What city finished second? Toledo? Gary, Indiana?

Did Amanda Beard really pose naked on the PETA poster near the Olympic village, or did the air just erode her clothes?

After three days here, these first impressions have formed:

• This city is thrilled to host the Olympics. I've covered only one other Olympiad, the Winter Games in Turin, and the attitude of the Italians there seemed to be, "Please wipe your feet." Beijingers walk about with nationalistic ribbons and flags.

• Western manners have not taken hold. While I was walking around Beijing, a naked child just missed peeing on my foot. No one blinked.

And if China was serious about its medal count, it would have found a way to make spitting an Olympic sport. These people are good. For them, expectorating is a performance art.

They also don't mind taking their shirts off in public, but I can't blame them for that. If I lived here, I'd spend the day wrapped around a block of ice.

Beijingers move slowly, like folks in America's old South, as if to conserve energy. Or maybe it's to remain anonymous. Everywhere there are grim-looking soldiers, thin as Corey Brewer, only better shooters.

There is a restaurant specializing in animal penises. (PETA is protesting this case of blatant sexism.) There is a sign above one store reading, "Massage by Blind Masseuses," which could be a threat or a promise.

Nearby was a gift shop deifying Mao Zedong as if he were, I don't know, Tiger Woods or something.

This guy is as big as Elvis here! You can buy Mao icons, Mao playing cards, and a Mao key chain, to remind you that the car you're starting is a product of, as ol' Mao always said, "revolutionary mass mobilization."

Of course, if you didn't want a Mao key chain, you could reach in one of the adjacent bins and buy a Teletubbie kaleidoscope, or a Power Ranger, a sign that rising capitalistic influences puts the most important decisions in the hands of the people.

You can say this for these people: They know how to build a building. Next to the Bird's Nest is the wonderfully science-fictional Water Cube, and between them is a broadcast tower that lights up like a Disney ride.

I left the media center and walked through a nearby poor neighborhood. Police tape lined the streets, and the cops were out in force, jostling and scolding crowds massed on every corner.

There wasn't much to see from there, only the occasional firework or spotlight beam, but thousands of the unticketed and unwashed spilled into the streets, sprinting toward every rumor of a light in the night sky.

Near the Olympic complex, an old man sat tiredly on a curb. Two white-gloved cops forcibly, if gently, lifted him by the armpits and pushed him 10 feet back as he quietly protested. Above him, in a tenement window, hung the Chinese flag.