This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

The iconic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium, the main venue for Olympic events, is expected to be completed in May, a Beijing Municipal Construction Committee spokesman said on Saturday.

The stadium would undergo tests of its equipment and performance stage for the opening ceremony. Also, lawn areas would be sodded during March. The whole project would be completed in May, said the spokesman.

    The Olympic National Park, China National Convention Center, Olympic village and Olympic media village would also be completed in March and April.

    These projects are part of Beijing’s overall construction plan, which includes 127 projects, 53 to be completed this year, the spokesman said. He didn’t give a schedule for the other projects.

    All key projects on the list relate to the Olympics or to transportation, environmental protection, residents’ livelihood, modern industries and energy resources.

    The “Bird’s Nest” has the world’s most advanced screening and omni-directional systems and mobile seating. It will be used for large sports events, conventional competitions and non-competitive events as well as to provide wide-ranging entertainment and sporting facilities to residents after the Games. The Games are to run from Aug. 8-24.

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The Olympic (Paralympic) Village, whose basic construction work is complete, is to begin receiving residents on July 27. Through a balanced union of humanism, architecture and environment, the village incorporates characteristics of the three major Beijing Olympic concepts of “Green Olympics,” “Hi-Tech Olympics” and “People’s Olympics.”

Below are some photos of the village

Several skilled craftsmen examine a nearly finished bamboo model of the “Bird’s Nest,” also known as the National Stadium, at a Hangzhou tourism site, in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province, on Sunday, February 24, 2008. This one-twentieth scale model of the “Bird’s Nest” required nearly one thousand bamboo branches and about two weeks to make

The National Aquatic Center has a beautiful nickname — the “Water Cube.” This is an architectural building that literally embodies the water theme. The blue “bubbles” made by the ETFE membrane fully showcase the grace and sensitivity of water.The design feature of the “Water Cube” is the “bubbles.” The membrane structure of the “Water Cube,” which is composed of more than 3000 pneumatic die cushion with a coverage area of 110, 000 square meters, is the largest in the world. The “Water Cube” is also the only public building that is fully made of a membrane structure.

The advantages of the ETFE membrane are numerous:

Each of the 3000 bubbles can resist the weight of a car.

The outer wall of the “Water Cube” is composed of 3000 irregular “bubbles,” which make up the ETFE membrane structure. The ETFE membrane has good ductility and crushing resistance. After aeration, every piece of membrane can resist the weight of a car. It also has good resistance against fire and intense heat.

The “Water Cube” can breath

Eight fans which discharge the air naturally are set on the roof and the body of the “Water Cube.” After fresh air enters the building, it can be discharged through the cavum in the roof. This is how the heating within the building is released.

The “Water Cube” can “wash its face” by itself

The ETFE membrane is self-cleaning in nature. Since the friction coefficient of the material is small, dust does not easily attach onto the structure. Even if dust does collect on it, as long as it rains, the surface is washed by rain water.

LONDON, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) — U.S. President George W. Bush said on Thursday that he would attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics as scheduled.

    ”I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event,” Bush told the BBC in an interview aired on the day.

    As for Hollywood movie director Steven Spielberg’s withdrawal from Beijing Olympics as an artistic adviser over alleged concerns over the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, Bush said he had no reason to use the Olympics as a way to highlight such issues.

    ”I have a little different platform than Steven Spielberg, so I get to talk to President Hu Jintao,” the president said.

    Spielberg Wednesday announced his decision to quit the upcoming Olympics as an artistic adviser, citing concerns over the violence in Darfur, which he linked to the Chinese government.

    Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular press conference Thursday that China has exerted positive efforts to resolve the Darfur issue, and that linking the issue to the Olympic Games will not help and is against the Olympic Spirit that separates sports from politics.

With more than five months to go until the Olympics, Beijing residents are making progress with their etiquette, as indicated by a “city index.”    A survey released by Renmin University found that in 2007, 2.54percent of people still spat in public, down by 2.36 percentage points from 2006.

    Over the past three years, the poll surveyed more than 10,000 local residents and 1,000 foreigners who had lived in Beijing for more than two years. It also gathered 3,000-hour observations from300,000 people at 320 public venues and 200,000 automobiles.

    The survey found that the occurrence of littering in public had dropped from 5.3 percent in 2006 to 2.86 percent in 2007 and queue-jumping dropped from 6 percent to 1.5 percent.

    The “civic index” of Beijingers, calculated using several parameters, was 73.38 in 2007, up from 65.21 and 69.06 in 2005 and2006, respectively. The index reflects compliance with rules involving public health and public order, attitudes towards strangers, etiquette at sports events and a willingness to contribute to the Olympic Games.

    However, the “civic index” still fell short of the standard required for the 2008 Olympics, according to Sha Lianxiang, a sociology professor at Renmin University. The standard is said to be 80 points.

    Beijing expects to receive 550,000 foreign tourists during the Olympics and an estimated 2 million domestic tourists will also visit.

Now there is a book called” Olympic Adventures of Fuwa” is very popular .More than four million copies of the book series  have sold out in the past four months, the Beijing Daily reported.

The book was adapted from a TV cartoon series with the same title, which was jointly produced by Beijing Television Station and the Kaku Cartoon Company.

The series tells of the adventures of Dayou, who received a set of the Olympic mascots ¨C Fuwa – for his birthday ahead of the Games of the 29th Olympiad. From that day on, many interesting things happened between Fuwa and Dayou’s former Kaku toys, dating back to the origin and development of the Olympic sports and the rules of the Olympic competitions as well as the typical episodes of the Olympic Games.