I woke up early and biked it down to Tiananmen Square. I had it in my mind that I would just park my bike somewhere and wander over to Tiananmen Square to watch the ceremony. There was no chance of this happening, unless I was willing to get arrested. The security within 200 meters of Tiananmen Square was tighter than Chairman Mao’s puffy cheeks.

I could ride my bike though up and down Chan’an Dajie which runs between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. So I did that about 10 times, before the police blocked the road completely. I wasn’t getting any friendly looks by the police. Huge groups of Chinese gathered to the south of Tiananmen Square but they wouldn’t have been able to see anything except for perhaps some balloons going up.

A foreign photo journalist hoping to get a photo of a sniper on top of the Great Hall, said he hadn’t seen security as tight since the funeral of Deng Xiaoping in 1997.

I finally gave up trying to find a vantage point and watched a bit of the ceremony on a television in a small shop, not far from the Forbidden City.

I can’t help feeling that the are Olympics are going to be one big staged event, with little chance for the general public to have any contact with the games other than watching them on television.

There were a couple of other foreigners riding their bikes around trying to get a view of Tiananmen Square, but I think I was the only one trying to video.