When I first arrived in Beijing, the only gold-digger stories I'd heard of were about Chinese girls who'd prick condoms with safety pins before they'd bed expats. Now, all that reaches my ears is talk of jin pai (gold medals). At events, Chinese fans only explode into applause when gold-medal...

"Are they all leaving?" I asked my friend at the first session of beach volleyball this morning. "It looks like it," he laughed, also noticing the stream of people leaving the Chaoyang Park stadium area. The Chinese women's pair had just defeated Switzerland in two sets (21-12, 21-18), and it...

Well, maybe not in the stadium. But at All Star, a sports bar at the new Solana shopping mall on the northwest corner of Beijing's Chaoyang Park, American tourists and expats chanted, "U-S-A! U-S-A!" when the team, in Ralph Lauren pony-embroidered blazers and stupid-looking hats, took its lap during the...

It appears that the jubilant cheering surrounding Yao Ming and China's first astronaut Yang Liwei -- though perhaps sincere -- was staged. "They're actors," says the son of a torchbearer, who received this information from his father's handler. "Fifteen hundred people were chosen to cheer on the torch, and then...

"Wel-ah-come to BEI-jing taxi," the automated machine chimes every time I first open the door of a cab. That is the most English wai guo ren (foreigners) should expect to hear in a taxi in Beijing. Despite efforts to teach the drivers Olympic English, many say they couldn't pick it...

"You wanna know a secret?" an International Olympic Committee member from Las Vegas asked me in the lobby of the Shangri-La's Kerry Centre Hotel in Beijing. "The performers are wearing diapers during rehearsals so they don't have to take bathroom breaks."

It's funny that in a city where babies...

Plastered around Beijing are posters advising locals about how to (not) interact with foreigners visiting the capital city for the Games. The "Eight Don't Asks" instructs: Don't ask about income or expenses, don't ask about age, don't ask about love life or marriage, don't ask about health, don't ask about...