Beijing diary

YESTERDAY was a shopping day for the Beijing Bureau which meant a visit to Beijing’s famous Silk Market.

However expectations of narrow streets filled with authentic Chinese merchants in traditional dress proved to be an aircraft carrier wide of the mark.

Instead the market is a hulking six story monolith filled with hundreds of stalls packed together like battery hens selling everything from branded clothes, jewellery, lots of underpants, cameras, golf clubs and of course silk in every conceivable shape and size.

It is an assault on the senses on the soul. Wandering through its labyrinth of walkways is like facing into a challenging obstacle course, or trying to poke holes in Tyrone’s swarm defence, with shouting, blocking and grabbing in an effort to displace a few notes from your wallet.

Life here is all about negotiation. Our first example arrived within metres of the front door when looking at a sweatshirt. The owner barrelled over promoting the colour schemes available. We asked about price and then, as is customary, he tapped the figure into a calculator and shoved it under our noses. His opening gambit was 880 yuan, (roughly the equivalent of Euro 88). We laughed. He frowned – we weren’t gullible Americans. Even though we had by now moved onto the next stall, he hadn’t given up and when last we heard he was down to offering the same shirt for 88 yuan (8 Euro approximately), and could have gone lower. But the fun was only just beginning, there were five more floors ahead. Join us tomorrow for the Beijing Bureau’s guide to handbag shopping in Beijing.

THERE was a real sense of Ireland in and around the silk market yesterday.

Boxer Paddy Barnes was wandering around and stocking up on gifts for the trip home while downstairs there was a taste of home with an O’Brien’s Sandwich Bar.

The Beijing Bureau weren’t the only non locals feeling peckish as OCI Chef de Mission Dermot Henihan, athletics coach, Anne Keenan Buckley and one of the national physiotherapists, Neasa Smyth were amongst those tucking into the fare which was remarkably close to that available back home – but a little cheaper.

TOP table tennis players have long used “speed glue” to boost the power and spin of their shots, but the sport’s rulers fear they could be risking their health by inhaling toxic fumes. Just outside the Olympic table tennis stadium stands a white tent that players venture into before matches to prepare their bats, gluing a fresh rubber covering onto the wooden blade. “You breathe it too much and you begin to lose your balance. It is a bit like a table tennis drug,” said Peter Gardos, an Austrian coach. A professional player in Japan collapsed while gluing his bat last year, falling into a coma for six days. Though there is no hard proof that glue was the cause, the case set alarm bells ringing for the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). It banned glues containing volatile organic compounds, known colloquially as speed glue, mandating a switch to water-based alternatives. The Beijing Games are the last time players will be exposed to the potentially harmful chemicals. “If you glue once a week, or maybe even once a day, it would not have been so important. But they are gluing 10 times a day and then it could be a problem,” said Claude Bergeret, ITTF vice president.

Behind this arcane rule change, seemingly with only players’ health in mind, a debate has raged in the table tennis world. Gas produced by the soon-to-be-outlawed chemicals seeps into the bat’s rubber covering and helps to catapult balls struck by players—hence the term speed glue. Critics charge that the glue ban is a veiled attempt to slow the rapid-fire sport.