Driving up north, I drove past Ditan part, to which I had never been, and saw huge crowds going in and out of it.
So I stopped to check it out.
After paying the 5 RMB to get in, I saw this sign for a tourism promotion. Tourism festival?
Selling books, puzzles, pencils, notebooks, and dictionaries?
Well, and recipe books too.
Turns out this is the fifth annual "Youth Studies Holiday" or some such thing, where they sell lots of books and supplies and the like for school kids.
It was a madhouse and pretty hard to get anywhere.
The food stalls were doing brisk business on this chilly winter day!
Here is the main temple platform area of Ditan park.
It all Olympic'd out!
I dont' even know what half this stuff means.
That's the platform there, now a stage of some sort.
Mini bird's nest stadium. Should I just stop here and say "I've seen it" ?
"I'm the winner yayz!!!"
Being a security guard in China is pretty dull work, and only slighly more glamorous than street cleaner...
Back to the mad crush of students and their parents.
I found a nice little corner of the park where there weren't many people. It was very calm.
And had garbage cans.
And girls on their cell phones.
Here they weren't selling school supplies so much as Buddhist supplies. Incense, Buddhas, etc.
These look cool.
Okay, that's enough of that, back on the bike, heading north to the Olympic Parks.
I stopped by the Ba River on the way up just past the third ring road. Looks like a nice park for a walk around.
It's been freezing here of late, so everything's icing up nicely.
Still pretty Urban around here though.
This is just going up the last little road (maybe a mile or so) towaords the Olympic park
This is one of the Olympic Auditoriums, although not the main one.
There's a long promenade area at the south end of the park where I left my bike and continued on foot.
And there's the first shot of the Bird's Nest stadium.
And the water cube.
And the zillion people trying to get you to buy kites or hats.
This is some swanky new hotel and apartment complex.
I think Bill Gates bought a place in there.
These kite guys wouldn't leave me alone but it might be because I always walk around with a pretty touristy little shoulder bag... d'oh!
The 4th ring road goes right underneath here and is kind of a parking lot most of the time it seems.
Important Chinese past time #120: take a zillion photos of yourself, and then put them all as screensavers and desktop backgrounds on your computers and cell phones.
These are the cleanest and most high tech toilets I have ever seen in China.
Like everything else around here, this is slowly falling apart.
I kinda goofed here, and didn't notice that the entrance to the stadium was just to my right, and took a nice 330° stroll the long way around.
That's the tower for foreign press agencies during the Olympics. Doesn't seem to get much use now.
High security entrance area!!!
Hey, they still have all their concession stands open. There is a KFC in here somewhere too.
The entire stadium uses the same little plastic seats that are pretty comfortable to sit in.
For 50 RMB, you want to spend a lot of time milling around feeling like you got your money's worth, but really, there's not much to do, so everybody just stands in the centre for a while.
The kids all love the giant inflatable Fu-Was.
Camera cables.
They did a presentation with some guys dressed in Fu-Wa suits over here on the side.
They were doing some sort of weird slam-dancing thing, which was bizarre. I suppose the range of movements in a giant inflatable suit a pretty limited... 
For you engineering-types out there.
I was trying to read this, but a bunch of the characters have already fallen off!!
Since it was another 50 RMB, I decided to leave going into the water cube for another day.
Grab a snack?
Or take photos of people in the sculpture park here.
Each piece of art has its own security guard guy.
Heading back down home, I passed the China Ethnic Minority Group park. I'll hafta check it out one day for a lark.
Nice trip. I wonder what's next?