Is Beijing ready?

It would be unnecessarily harsh to say no. China did put up twiggy and bubbly awesomenesses with more than enough time to spare, unlike Athens' exercise in procrastination four years ago. It's impossible to be looking in any one direction on any street in Beijing and not see something about the Olympics, whether it's enormous banners of the half-dozen slogans hung from bridges, sponsor ads plastered on public transportation, or flags strapped to any and all objects that are tall and slim.

That said, the city's not nearly as ready as it would like to be. For one, there's the smog. When I was here in early July, the sky was almost always gray and there were days when we couldn't see one block down. When I got back yesterday, the sky was still gray, and the sun was a post-apocalyptic orange circle. This is after the government closed down hundreds of factories and halved the number of cars on the street.

Then there's the service industry, or lack thereof, which brings me to the subject of traveler's checks. First of all, no one has ever seen them, including the bank tellers and their supervisors. Here's how it goes: I walk into a bank. I hand my traveler's checks and passport to the teller. She studies them for about a minute, flipping them over multiple times and pulling them about two inches to her face to read the English on it. Then, she calls over the teller next to her, and hands her one of the checks. They study them together, and exchange bug-eyed grins of confusion. At this point, the roaming supervisor usually notices. If not, one of the tellers will call for him over the intercom or the PA, which of course catches all the other tellers' attention. Now there are three to four people standing across the glass from me, which creates a snowball effect of more and more rubbernecking staff joining the group. They start shuffling through their notes. One takes out her notebook, probably from that last training on Scenario: Foreigner. One might smile at me and apologize. After five to ten minutes of highlighting notes, frantic discussions and barked instructions, the crowd starts to disperse and the teller starts working. All is well, right? Wrong. Teller summons supervisor again. More examining and conferring. Teller then hands one check back to me. "The angle on the swooping part of the J is different in the bottom signature than in the top. Can you re-sign it?" Yes. "Now the loop is too big." Re-sign two to four more times. More discussions, which now makes me nervous. 30 minutes later, I finally have my money.

Sadly, that's the best-case scenario, for which I have to seek out established branches of the Bank of China. At the Construction Bank of China, one of the other big ones, I decided to abort after the group discussion led the supervisor to take out a printed packet of PowerPoint slides and start reading out loud. It's also not a one-time incident, since it happened all four times I exchanged money.

The same kind of bureaucracy and indifference is everywhere. At an Internet cafe, when I handed my U.S. passport to the clerk, he asked for my Chinese ID, which I obviously don't have if I'm an American citizen. When I tell him that I've been using my passport at other Internet places, he gets annoyed and tells me that the government instructions are that they just need identification in "card form."

It's not surprising in the least that the rest of China is like this, but Beijing '08 was supposed to be better. It isn't. To its credit, the Chinese government has put the channels of propaganda to good use to change that aspect of the culture. But Beijing is still not ready to put on the face of the civilized, cosmopolitan city that it wants to be. If I already have this much trouble, and I look Chinese and speak Chinese, how is a blond-haired, blue-eyed person going to fare?