Beijing - Part 3

I forgot to post pictures of my last day in Beijing. This was our last day of meetings, and I was quite ready for all the meetings to be over. To celebrate the end of a week-long marathon of meetings, we decided to go to the Beijing Olympic Center. This is an area right in the middle of the city that contains the giant Olympic Stadium (aka The Bird's Nest) and the famous Water Cube. You've seen both of these images on TV, and from my previous visits to China.

Of the group (4 of us), one was from Beijing, one from Shanghai, and two from the U.S. I was the only one that had visited the Olympic Stadium before!

We also walked across the massive complex to see the Water Cube. This was the site of all swimming and diving events for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The building is simple incredible. Here's what it looks like at night:

It even changes color through the evening...

When you get close-up, you find that each of those "sections" are actually "bubbles" of plastic - seriously thick plastic.

I'm actually pushing on one of the bubbles...

Inside the Water Cube, we had a chance to see one of the largest indoor swimming complexes in the world. The competition area was what people saw on TV:

There was an area almost as large, which housed a "public" pool. It was the practice pool during the Olympics. All of this only took up half of the Cube. The other half was shrouded in mystery. You could only see glimpses of the area, behind a giant wall:

I joked that it looked like a water park. Everyone laughed. Guess what...I was right. The park just opened this week:

I'm determined to go back there on my next visit in October! Can you imagine the surprise of all those Chinese people when a blindingly-white American comes sliding down one of those tubes?!? Sounds like fun to me....