This weekend, Beijing inaugurated the new Bird’s Nest Stadium with the “Good Luck Beijing” track and field event. I attended less than 24 hours after covering the earthquake in Sichuan, and the contrast between sports and rubble was a little hard to digest.

The Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics, can seat 91,000 fans. The air flows through well, keeping it cool in the muggy Beijing summer. The seats are well-positioned, so the contestants can be seen easily. The screens are visible, the sound-system clear, the lighting strong but not harsh.

The Mianyang stadium, in Sichuan, is currently housing nearly 20,000 refugees. Every railing is covered in clothing, the floors covered in cardboard and quilts. The glassed-in second story helps shield old people and children from the rain. The screens are tuned to television coverage of the disaster and the PA system booms out the radio news.

Lucky Beijing, Unlucky Sichuan.

But the two stadiums have some things in common.

A small army of young volunteers works in each. Fresh faced volunteers in Beijing answered the call to help China’s Olympics make a shining impression on the world. Masked volunteers in Mianyang answered the call to serve fellow Chinese in an hour of need.

Lines for snack food in Beijing’s stadium are polite and orderly, in line with campaigns for “cultured queuing.”

Lines for food in Mianyang are also polite and orderly, but a lot longer, as refugees show enormous patience despite hunger and grief.

Taxis pull over on the road outside the Bird’s Nest, so that people can take photos of themselves in front of the Olympic icon.

Cars pull over on the road outside the Mianyang station, to drop off donations of clothing and water.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the applause of the Beijing crowd got a little warmer when the blue-suited Sichuan contestants won.

Pictures of scenes from Mianyang Stadium by Jianan Yu, Bird’s Nest by David Gray

The tenor of China’s Olympic year changed dramatically over the past two weeks.

What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.

Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.

And though the declared three-day period of national mourning has ended, China will carry its grief into the Olympics.

But if there were any questions about whether Beijing would, bit by bit, shift itself back into gear for the Games, these were put to rest for me the other night on the subway.

As I walked into Fuxingmen station, on the edge of downtown, I came upon a scene of the feverish yet meticulous work that has characterised Beijing’s Olympic preparations.

Two dozen high-school boys were running round and round in tight circles through the turnstiles. They were testing the resilience of a new ticketing system. With magnetic swipe cards in hand, they ran, one after the other, through the automatic turnstiles non-stop for nearly half an hour.

The system performed perfectly - and so did the students. Apart from some laughter and joking on the sidelines, the turnstile runners took to their task with determination and earnestness. It was a striking juxtaposition with the thousands of Chinese who have gone to Sichuan to lend a hand to the earthquake relief efforts.

I asked one of the students in the subway station if he was getting paid. “Of course not! We’re volunteers,” he said. “Everybody has to do their part for the Olympics and for China.”

Picture of Olympic countdown board in Beichuan by REUTERS/Bo Bor, Beijing subway map by REUTERS/Jason Lee  

I was one of the first foreign reporters on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on May 12.

It all seemed so normal when I arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu, some 12 hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit, that I thought maybe the area had got off lightly. But heading in the hard hit town of Dujiangyan, just north of Chengdu, two hours after arriving in Sichuan, I realised how bad the situation was.

Dujiangyan looked like a war zone. There wasn’t a building that had not been damaged. Some had lost just a wall, or had a few cracks. Others had crumpled into the ground, as though a giant foot had descended from out of the sky and stamped on them.

Survivors, for the main part, either stood around in a state of total shock, or huddled together in tents, buses and cars, trying to avoid the drizzle that made what was already a depressing scene a thoroughly miserable and distressing one.

We had heard that a school in the town had collapsed. Finding it was not a problem — everyone could point the way there.

Having seen bodies lying in the streets I thought I would be emotionally and mentally prepared for what I would see next. I was wrong.

Soldiers and police had formed a cordon around the school to prevent overwrought relatives from rushing onto the rubble and look for their children themselves. In none of my stories from Dujiangyan did I quote one of these relatives directly.

I couldn’t talk to them; it upset me too much. I tried, but when I thought I might burst into tears myself, I had to look away, almost ashamed that I was unable to perform the job that I had been sent there to do — report.

In the days that followed what impressed me most was the huge outpouring of kindness from people in cities like Chengdu which had not been as badly affected by the quake.

At one refugee centre at a stadium in the city of Mianyang, where thousands had sought shelter, I saw an endless stream of voulunteers coming in bringing whatever they thought would help.

One lady from a village next to the stadium had cooked up a huge vat of rice porridge and brought it over on the back of her tricycle, and was busy handing it out to anyone who wanted it. “I just had to help,” she told me.

Others brought in bags of clothes, bottles of water and packs of instant noodles. One volunteer tried to give me some water, saying she thought I looked like a “hard-pressed reporter”. I was touched by the sentiment, but could only decline and insist she give the bottles to survivors, who needed it a lot more than me.

In the last few months a swirl of bad publicity has surrounded China in the run-up to this summer’s Beijing Olympics — notably with the problems in Tibet and the violence that accompanied parts of the international leg of the Olympic torch relay. It will be interesting to see how global public opinion, if you can call it that, will be affected by this earthquake, and if the almost incessant criticism of China now ends, or at least abates for a while.

Pictures of relatives trying to enter a collapsed school building and resident walking past a row of destroyed houses, both in Dujiangyan, by Claro Cortes IV/Reuters

Preparations for the Beijing Olympics have understandably taken a back seat to the tragedy in Sichuan.

On Sunday, it was announced that the torch relay would be suspended from Monday to Wednesday to mark three days of national mourning.

The question officials at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) returned to wrestling with after observing the three-minute silence at 2.28pm today is what should happen when it restarts?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the torch was scheduled to visit Shanghai. Can a torch relay that is supposed to visit all of China’s provinces really skip the country’s financial capital (and venue for several Olympic soccer matches)? Will Sichuan, and most particularly the city of Mianyang, really be ready to host the flame in mid-June?     

Some in China have said that it should not resume at all, despite the fund-raising for the victims that has taken place along the route since the earthquake. 

A former deputy editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily suggested last week in Caijing Magazine that when the worst of the destruction was cleared, the torch should be taken to the epicentre of the 7.9 magnitude quake and relayed from there to Beijing.

“Continuing the high profile torch relay must take a large quantity of resources and attention of people, which does not match 
either the need of concentrating on disaster relief, or the deep grief at losing our compatriots,” wrote Huangpu Ping.

However, the opening seven words of Sunday’s BOCOG statement announcing the three-day suspension – ”after consulting with the International Olympic Committee” – are instructive when considering how much change will be possible.     

One constantly heard complaint when the IOC met in Beijing as protests were disrupting the torch relay in Europe was that the torch belonged to the Olympic movement, not to China.

I, for one, will be expecting the route to be kept pretty much intact with the schedule shifted back by three days and the only serious change coming in Sichuan itself.

Picture by David Gray 

After laying out our spread of spicy Sichuan food, the waitress returned with four slightly stale slices of white bread, each on their own glistening plates.      

I wondered briefly if DIY chili chicken and peanut sandwiches were a new fad in Chinese restaurants, but when I asked her how I was supposed to eat mine, she looked at me as if I was mad.     

Silently she fished a sliver of our fish from its oily sauce and showed me what would perhaps have been obvious to someone not brought up on a diet of toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, more toast for tea and sometimes bread and soup for dinner.  

The bread was just a sponge, for draining the oil from carp cooked in a traditional and much-loved way that left it a little too greasy for some modern eaters. No one in the “Spicey Seduction” restaurant would dream of eating it.

Which is not to say that there isn’t a lot of bread consumed in China, where bakeries dot most towns and an advisor to parliament admonished athletes last year that they needed to follow Westerners in consuming more milk and beef if they wanted sporting success.      

But two weeks enjoying what I think is one of the world’s great culinary traditions may bring a few surprises for Olympic tourists who have not been to China before.      

I don’t mean the strange translations which this blog has explored before, or the more exotic animals and birds favoured by some Chinese diners, just small differences in eating and cooking habits that can be a little disconcerting for first timers.      

Soup is served at the end of the meal, as are rice, noodles and other staples (beware of filling up because you think that an order for sour and spicy soup has been forgotten).      

Then there is vegetarian meat, which looks like meat and when done well tastes pretty like meat — but is made out of tofu.      

The squeamish may prefer not to be shown the fish they are about to eat flapping around in a net as proof of its freshness,  or have chickens and ducks served with their heads and claws still attached.      

And I learnt years ago not to expect too many sandwiches outside of Western restaurants.      

In one of the first Chinese textbooks that I studied a mother warned her children not to be naughty. Otherwise, she threatened,
they would face …. sandwiches for lunch.

Picture of Chinese breads by China Daily. Beijing restaurant by David Gray  

Forget Beijing and Shanghai. If you want to see real China, go to some of the country’s third tier cities.

They’re fascinating, and I’ve been trying to go to as many as possible before leaving China for my next post. Places like Chifeng, Ulanhot, Ankang and Golmud.

Never heard of them? Not surprising.

The Lonely Planet and other guides for foreigners either give them a passing mention or ignore them totally.

Why I like going to these cities is still a bit of a mystery, even to me. I suppose it’s for two reasons, and my friends think I’m crazy for it.

The first is I love going to places where foreigners are few and far between. It gives you a chance to talk to people who are not jaded at the thought of seeing yet another “lao wai” (the Chinese slang term for us) on the street, and sometimes the answers to the questions I pose surprise me with their honesty.

“Why on earth are you here? There’s nothing to see in Chifeng,” a taxi driver told me as she drove around the Inner Mongolian city, which has been picked as an Olympic tourism city for this summer’s Beijing Games, though nobody in Chifeng quite understands why.

The second reason is the architecture. Lots of people think the building style that marked a 30-or-so year period starting in the 1950s in China is very ugly.  Lots of sharp angles, big windows and pale colour schemes.

Not me. I think they are startlingly beautiful. And less and less are being preserved in the big cities in the rush to develop. But in the third tier cities they are still going strong. Chifeng has quite a few left, including the train station and tiny airport.

Chifeng airport is perhaps my favourite building in all of China. For a long time a photo I took of it was the wallpaper on my mobile phone.

Yet it’s not always much fun in the third tiers. 

Upon arriving in Ankang, a 40 minute flight south of Xian into yet another beautiful airport, it had just finished sleeting. The air was crisp and fresh in a way you almost never experience in Beijing, but the streets downtown had turned into black sludge.

“I’ve surpassed myself this time. Ankang is truely horrible,” I texted to a friend in Beijing, promptly getting back an “I told you so” reply.

Ankang did have its highlights. The food was great, especially the flat rice noodles they fry in a sharp chili past with lamb and bean sprouts, and the air was at least clean (local people joke it’s because Ankang has no industry).

There are lots of other cities on my list I want to visit. Chaoyang and Jinzhou in the rust-belt northeastern province of Liaoning, Dazhou in Sichuan and Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi.

I just hope that the buildings I’m so passionate about don’t get demolished before I get there.

Pictures of Chifeng (top) and Ankang (below) by staff photographers