Thanks guys for the feedback! I'm enjoying writing it up.
I'm going to merge the rest of our setup work that we did up til just prior to the opening ceremony as we had some bloody long days getting stuff done. So I've extracted the "highlights"
Firstly I finally found an aerial shot of the MPC/IBC and have marked each bit.
Now the MPC also goes underneath the whole lot as well. The place is bloody huge! This view is looking north east and the watercube and Bird's Nest is basically to the right of the pic.
After the initial rush of people arriving we settled in and went about the usual assisting people setting up and getting used to working remotely.
So over the next 2 weeks the office starting filling up with snappers and journos lobbing in. kept us busy sorting out all their questions!
One thing i have noticed since being here is how the chinese take to their jobs here. There is a real sense of pride among the people and the person sweeping the floor shows the same enthusiam as someone higher up the pecking order. They all small and wave and say hi as you walk past...
Another thing that has every talking here is the fact there is virtually no privcay in the toilets. you can walk past the toilets and see inside! in fact one of the toilets has a shared hand basin and a girl washing there hands can see a guy at the urinal. They are also so eager to keep the place clean.. no sooner have you been, they leap in and clean everything! There have been plenty of jokes flying around they before too long they will be offering to wipe for you!
At the same time we went to set up our main two venues, the water cube and the stadium.
The watercube is an amazing venue. So large and great views. The media tribunes are on the camera side - basically the whole other side is taken up by Broadcast, Media and Olympic family. that's the side that never makes it on TV!!
We were finally allowed in the Birds Nest the Sunday before the opening ceremony. Everything there was under wraps, no cameras allowed etc. I have to say looking at it from outside it is impressive, but inside i wasn't a big fan. I still think the MCG inside is by far the best stadium. It has a cauldron effect when full. However an advatage of the new stadium is the closeness to the Field of Play (FOP). Even the nose bleed seats are still really close.
We got our links set up, but w have to run some cabling down into the moat (it's like a trench that runs around part of the track so photographers can take pics). butr we'll have to come back with a roll and do it manually and crimp it up. There is also a huge platform that looks head onto the 100m straight and during the athletics it will have a couple of hundred photographers on it.
This is where we ended up having a few trips to the Electronic part of Beijing to get some parts. The place is like the biggest swap meet, but on 10 floors! We looked around trying to find some obscure bits we needed, haggled on price and walked away happy!! people are touting and trying to get you into their shops or stalls to buy cameras, USB sticks, the works! We found a couple of good stalls that had what we needed and the price was pretty good (even without haggling too much).
We ventured out to another couple of restaurants.. The first one we had seen before on the way to the Duck one night so we thought we'd give it a shot. It was pretty basic inside, but the tables had cookers built into them so it looked pretty good. the menu pictures looked great too, so we are thinking that this is going to be pretty good... until they tell us the main meat - Donkey! we thought why not we'll give it a bash, let me tell you never again! not exactly the nicest meat.. needless to say we ate more greens that night... The following night we found a decent restaurant around the corner.. cheaper food, but really nice.. It's also the palce where my mate came up with his second classic line.. "Living behind the Banmboo curtain" (he thought of it when he saw one next to where we were sitting).
During this time there was also the great Internet debate. As more media arrived and found the internet was blocked there was a big push and finally a week before the games the Chinese lifted the ban on most sites.. We werwe also very weary of them monitoring traffic (well trying to at least) which would explain our slower speeds. My mate was going around telling people to get used to life behind the bamboo curtain!
So by the 7th August we were all set up and read to kick off.. Although we had been here for nearly 3 weeks and people filing stories and pics, the main game was about to start.