Tiananmen quiet by comparison

In the end, I did what I would have thought unthinkable when imagining this night in my dreams: I left the square early.

I wandered down side streets, found a television inside a muggy little restaurant tuned to the ceremony, and watched part of the athletes' parade with a gaggle of locals. That, too, was a memory of '01, when I used such opportunities to practice my nascent Mandarin.

Eventually I moved on, running into yet another shadow of my past life here: A family had moved their television set out in front of their house so that all the neighbors could gather around the set to watch the ceremony. In '01, as I wheeled my bike out the gate of Beijing Normal University towards Tiananmen, I passed a group of people on the street, doing the very same thing. Only then, they were watching the coverage of the IOC vote in Moscow awarding the Olympics to Beijing

The '08 version of my Tiananmen story doesn't end at dawn on a bike, but inside the Main Press Center before midnight. I made it back there in enough time to watch a big-screen Chinese-language broadcast of the tail end of the Opening Ceremony, from the point where Liu Qi said "Welcome to Beijing" in English, to the close of the torch relay and Li Ning's triumphant, ethereal floating journey to the Olympic flame.

The cheers from the 200 or so Chinese volunteers gathered around the television captured the energy I had so been hoping to find at Tiananmen. When the fireworks began, we all raced outside to watch them being launched from the sky north of National Stadium and the media center. They were spectacular, gorgeous, Olympic. I'm told the fireworks in Tiananmen were pretty good too, for anyone who hung around its deserted edges until midnight to watch them.

I miss the Tiananmen Square of '01, when the world felt simpler. Luckily the party thrown inside National Stadium tonight was almost enough to make up for it.