China LOVES the Paralympics

There were bigger crowds around the Olympic venues yesterday afternoon than I've ever seen before. The Chinese do seem to be getting rather excited about these Paralympics. The bits and pieces I've seen on TV seem to be very well-attended. I know the TV cameras and the organisers are very canny about arranging the rent-a-crowds to fill up sections of the stadiums covered by the most common camera-angles.... and I wouldn't even put it past them to try to paste in some CGI of happy, applauding onlookers (didn't everyone in that block of foreigners look suspiciously like Da Shan??), but the Bird's Nest on TV today looked far closer to capacity than I ever saw it during the 'main event' last month.

Of course, the tickets are much more readily available for the Paralympics, and much, much cheaper. And many people may perhaps - like me - have thought that this will be their opportunity to see inside the famous stadiums.

Moreover, yesterday was a national holiday; and the weather was gorgeous.

As far as I could see - stalking around the perimeter fence, reconnoitring some camera angles for touristy shots of the Nest and the Water Cube - the open areas of the Green were fairly deserted, but there must have been lots of people bound for the late-afternoon sessions in the various stadiums. There was a big ruck of people milling around outside the main entrance, and the security lines inside seemed to be moving very slowly. (The only time I'd been there to see an event during the Olympics proper - an evening Finals session near the climax of the Games - the crowds had been far smaller, and it had only taken a couple of minutes to clear the ticket and security checks.)

There were plenty of tickets available from touts/scalpers, but we decided we really couldn't be bothered with all that queueing.

(In fact, I wasn't sure if tickets were required for admission to the Green alone; and the crowds were such that it might have taken quite a few minutes to progress even as far as the preliminary ticket check. Were there any signs outside specifying if tickets were required, or where they could be obtained from? NO. [Advance tickets for the Green had been required during the first week or so of the Olympics, but that had meant that attendance was mostly very sparse indeed; and I heard that the sponsors had eventually lobbied BOCOG into allowing open admission..... or at least into selling cheap tickets at the gate. I never got around to checking if this were so or not, since I'd been lucky enough to score some free tickets in the first week. And I wasn't convinced that this change of policy would be quite so necessary in the second week, when the Bird's Nest was in daily use.]

I found a couple of young Olympic volunteers and tried asking them.

Did we need tickets just to enter the Olympic Green?

We didn't want to go to one of the events?? No, we just wanted to look around the Green a bit, go to the souvenir store, take pictures of the Nest.

Er, they thought so - but they weren't sure.

Did they have any idea how much such tickets might cost? No.

Or where we might buy them? No.

They then suggested we buy some tickets from a scalper - although we were stood only a few yards away from a large notice [in English] warning that scalping was strictly illegal.

Ah, god bless 'em! The Olympic volunteers have been commendably friendly and enthusiastic, but most of them know absolutely fuck-all. Their training has been lamentable.