Part The First

So, at the very least, this should be interesting.

I leave tomorrow for Beijing and the first week of the Olympics, traveling on behalf of my employer, the Travel Channel. While I'll be experiencing the city and the games as a tourist, with no media credentials or special access to the events, I will be reporting, in a fashion, on my travels via this blog. Provided, of course, that I have access to a reliable internet connection. That isn't censored.

Anyhow, this event blog is intended for co-workers, friends and family, and I'll kick things off with a confession: I know next to nothing about China in particular or Eastern culture in general. Europe, I know: I was a classical history major in college, spending summers and semesters in Greece, Italy and England. From Aristophanes to James Joyce, I can hang with Sting and all his fancy Blue Turtle lyrics. But Ghengis Khan? Various Ming and Qing dynasties? My cultural knowledge of China begins with Bruce Lee and end with kung pao chicken, sadly enough.

Yet at the same time, most of you know, as do I, of China's growing role on the world stage and the absolute need for the West to understand not only what China represents for our collective future but also who the Chinese are - what is the perspective of these people, and what exactly is "China" at this moment in world history?

A broad perspective for a week-long trip, for sure, and I don't pretend to think that the sanitized version of Beijing being presented to the world this month is in any way a true and full representation of the city under normal conditions. But China certainly intends for the Olympic games to showcase its role as a growing world power, and I'm going to start with that original intent in my discussion of what I see and hear this week. In 1936, the Berlin games served as a clarion call to the rest of the world of Germany's political and military intentions in the years to follow; similarly, the 1980 Moscow and Lake Placid games and the 1984 Los Angeles games were proxy battles in the final rounds of the Cold War. While the Olympic games strive to be apolitical, and in fact are historically rooted in a Greek tradition of laying down arms to honor the purity of athletic competition (there's that classics degree rearing its sleepy head!), the setting of the Games can never be removed from the politics and culture of the moment in which they occur. So it's this petri dish of conflict and harmony, demolition and construction, tradition and change that is Beijing today that we'll be exploring in the next few days, and I hope it's worth your while to come along.