Olympics

Calling all junior Olympians! Show your stuff this Friday at AmCham’s annual Kid Olympics at the International School of Beijing–complete with hula-hooping, dunking, contests and games for prizes. Enjoy the barbecue, cool off with cold drinks, and catch the firework show in the evening.

What: Kid Olympics

When: Friday, July 4, 3pm to 9pm

Where: International School of Beijing

Why: It’s fun!

Couples in Beijing who are hoping to get hitched on August 8, considered the luckiest day of the year by many Chinese people, can now go to local affair bureaus in their district to book the day for their marriage registration, according to an article on CRI Online.  

The reservation period is June 20- August 5, during which all the marriage registration bureaus in Beijing have a special service for booking to dengji (register) for marriage certificates on August 8, 2008. Brides and grooms-to-be can go to the bureaus during this time and submit photocopies of requested documents and photos, then return on August 8 and sign the marriage certificates. This way, the procedure only takes 1-2 minutes for each couple to get their marriage certificates. The local affair bureaus are expecting to process 50-100 pairs of newly weds per hour on August 8. 

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A great way to get into the Olympic spirit (as if the past six years of buildup wasn’t enough) is to go and check out some of the Good Luck Beijing events going on around town.

Last week at the diving competition, 13-year-old Tom Daley finished seventh in Beijing's diving World Cup. This means he’ll become the youngest-ever diver to represent the UK at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Check out The Guardian's video of Tom in action.

Spring Festival wouldn’t be Spring Festival without fireworks any less than positing Christmas without presents, or Halloween without candy. But come the Lunar New Year, our fair city descends into cacophonous chaos when the fireworks start flying.

Of course I’m all for free-wheeling festivities, but the older I get, the thinner my threshold becomes for things that go bang in the night (and that especially applies to our amorous upstairs neighbors).

This is why I fully support this piece of news concerning the ban of fireworks around Olympic venues. The city, it would seem, is smarting from the fire that flared up in the Olympic ping pong venue at the Peking University Gymnasium this past July, and have banned fireworks sellers from setting up shop within 100 meters of Beijing’s 31 Olympic venues. 

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With less than a year to go, anticipation for the Olympics seems to be growing by the day – on billboards and television commercials, passing street vendors selling memorabilia or simply passing through a tunnel while riding on the subway.

It seems that some parents couldn't hold their excitement in, as almost 3,500 children have been named "Aoyun" (Chinese for "Olympics") since as early as 2000, when China first made the bid for the upcoming Games. According to a Beijing Daily report cited by the Associated Press, only six of these kids live in Beijing and a majority of them male.

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