What passed for modern in China was a little odd: 200 Chinese drummers in gold bicycle helmets, riders on "wheels of light" circling the stadium and "bouncing and flying men" wearing silver body suits and special shoes that propelled them high into the air. Young women in sports clothes played the erhu, (a traditional stringed instrument) to accompany a pop song.

After athletes entered stadium, I noticed Lauren Jackson and Yao Ming exchanged a big hug on the field. The atmosphere was all youthful energy, with athletes mingling around in center of the stadium.

The Games that set 38 world records and 85 Olympic records were then handed off to London when a bright red double-decker bus drove into the stadium, peeling away to expose a garden.

Singer Leona Lewis emerged on a platform through the middle of the bus, and then the guitar chords of Led Zeppelin began. Jimmy Page appeared and played a rousing duet of "Whole Lotta Love" with Lewis. Too bad no one in the crowd seemed to recognize him. David Beckham emerged next to them and kicked a soccer ball into crowd. Placido Domingo and Jackie Chan both sang on stage later.

This time the ceremony was mercifully short, not as impressive or sweeping as the opening, but fitting in its own way. As the stadium screens were transformed into airport departure signs, and an airplane ladder rose into the night sky, I realized this time I would be more than happy to board.

One Chinese observer, Xiong Lei, is disgusted with medal counts and doesn't think much of Liu Xiang, either. She's a retired senior writer and editor of Xinhua News Agency. It was fascinating and refreshing for me to hear her very international view of the games.

Liu Xiang, the Chinese sports icon who dropped out of the Olympics just before his first race, lost the moment Dayron Robles walked into the Olympic Village, Xiong said. Robles "was eating what he wanted to eat. He was playing what he wanted to play... just a normal man," she said. In contrast, Liu was a special athlete surrounded by coaches and boosted to star status, all the while avoiding the public and hiding an injury. Liu was no hero.

When she thinks back on the highlights of the Beijing Olympics, Xiong will think of these people:

--British marathon runner Paula Radcliff, who finished the race in pain without any hope of getting a medal.
--Oksana Chusovitina, the 33-year-old German gymnast driven to compete and use her prize money to cover medical bills for her son, who has leukemia.
--Iraqi athletes like Dina Hussein, who risked her life to train for the games and crossed a battlefield just to buy shoes.
--Asenate Manoa, a runner from the Pacific island of Tuvalu who never used a starting block before participating in these games -- Tuvalu's first Olympics.
--Swedish Table Tennis veteran Jan-Ove Waldner, who played several generations of Chinese players and kept the sport alive in an unlikely place.

Here is a link to Xiong Lei's column.

And just for fun, another alternative view of medals, suggested by Australians as a per capita resorting of the ranks:

Gold medals by population:
1) Jamaica
2) Bahrain
3) Estonia
4) New Zealand
5) Slovakia
6) Australia

Total medals by population:
1) Jamaica
2) Slovenia
3) New Zealand
4) Australia.

Lorig, 34, was chosen yesterday by fellow athletes -- the U.S. captains of each sports team. She was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and immigrated to the United States in 1995, but did not get her citizenship in time to compete for the U.S. in 2000 or 2004. She lives in California, where she works at Home Depot when she's not training.

Lorig's parents still live in Georgia, where Russian forces have been battling Georgian troops in the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

In the first week of the Games, she was shocked to turn on the television and see the conflict erupting there, Lorig told Reuters last week. "My parents are over there, very close to that area where the situation is happening. But I got to talk to my mom on the telephone this morning and she's fine. She was happy to hear from me and just told me to get my mind back into the Olympics."

Lorig didn't advance past the quarterfinals this time, but she said having a chance to carry the flag is "almost like winning a gold medal, maybe even better."

Most of the farmland in Beijing has been turned into buildings. But there's one place where a prime piece of farmland has been preserved, a refuge for people looking to escape the city. A couple turned it into an organic fruit orchard, botanical garden and lake, with a restaurant that serves food from the garden.

I visited The Orchard, opened in 2002 by West Virginia native Lisa Minder and her husband Wu Yintao. They manage to do something good for the environment, sustain a healthy business and find room for charitable projects. Such are the pockets of green among an ocean of gray.

At a Starbucks cafe nearby, students from Beijing Forestry University were surveying customers about Beijing's so-called Green Olympics. Starbucks was sponsoring their work, along with an earlier event called the "Green Long March," where student volunteers walked along the Yangtze River to raise environmental awareness. They asked people what they thought about the ban on free plastic bags in Beijing, the odd-even days traffic system to reduce driving, and the state of the environment in Beijing.

My response: no medal yet. "Jia You!"

"I'm on cloud nine," she said. "I was floating out there. It didn't seem real. I didn't shed a tear. I didn't cry. I can't really believe it. I put my phone by the goal post. As soon as that last whistle blew, I called my brother. It was amazing. He was in tears. He was here for the World Cup, for my dad... I just was screaming in the phone. I was running around the field screaming."

Solo said she was "going through hell" for the last 10 months following the death of her father, and then being sidelined and getting the cold shoulder from teammates after her World Cup remark. In the end, she and the defense shut down the world's best player, Brazilian forward Marta. Later on the medal stand, Solo kissed her gold medal.

"Many people dream of this all their lives," she said. "It's significant for my family, for my friends, to how far I've come over many years. I think this medal it, I don't know... it represents my family."

Indeed, the U.S. team must have felt like the underdog in Beijing. The mostly Chinese crowd booed when the U.S. took corner kicks and screamed for "Ba-xi," the name for Brazil in Mandarin. It was a rainy night, so the hosts just happened to have bright yellow rain tarps to hand out, making the stadium awash in Brazil's color. Not many people were counting on them to win.

"I think we thrive when there's so much doubt," Solo said. "When we're the underdogs. We heard betting for the Japan game was four to one against us. We know a lot of people doubted us against Brazil... I think our defense really won this game."

As for whether Solo felt vindicated, she said: "I don't even think about whatever I said last year. I said everything under emotions. I'm just enjoying the moment right now. I feel great. I just won a damn gold medal."

Yesterday Steve Kelley and I got lost in a hutong, one of Beijing's famously narrow alleys winding through a warren of ancient single-story houses. Turned out to be one of the best moments of the trip, as Steve writes in his column today. We were adopted by a couple in their 80s, invited inside family homes and shown wedding pictures, and introduced to one of Zhou Enlai's security guards.

It started when the hutong we were following dead-ended at the Qianjin Guesthouse. Zhang Guangrong, the 20-year-old son of the proprietor, offered to help us find our destination, but we decided it was more interesting to explore the hutongs with him. This is one of last remaining parts of the original city that hasn't been demolished and replaced by skyscrapers. I had written about the pre-Olympics construction boom displacing old neighborhoods and their cultural heritage. Residents said this neighborhood isn't entirely safe from destruction, either. Meanwhile it's an oasis of calm and quiet, with pomegranate trees, red peppers drying in the sun, ancient doorways protected by stone lions, and elderly people out for a stroll.

One of them was Song Zhilin, who saw us and piped up "welcome," in English. I started chatting with her and she offered to let us take a look at traditional "siheyuan" or four-sided courtyards in the area. I heard her tell Zhang that her husband, Li Tieniu, 87, had worked for Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. She led us through her neighbors' courtyards, one beautifully preserved for more than a century that housed four generations of the Ren family.

At last we stopped at her own house, just two small and dark rooms. Above the bed were various framed black and white photographs, and Li proudly took down one of himself in the military in the 1940s, and another of Zhou Enlai. Though the couple's house was modest, Li was happy to have Americans in it. After all, the man he so admired helped make such an exchange possible. Far from the fanfare of the Olympics, here was the real heart of China we were lucky enough not to miss.

China promised the International Olympic Committee that three public parks would be designated for protests. People would be allowed to demonstrate there during the Games after applying for permission through Beijing's Public Security Bureau. It turns out that none of the 77 applications were approved, Chinese state media reported. But that doesn't mean no action has been taken on the applicants. As I suspected last week, now it seems that the application process itself was nothing more than bait.

Among the applicants were two women, Wu Dianyuan, 79 and Wang Xiuying, 77 who wanted to demonstrate in the park against being forcibly evicted from their homes in 2001. When they returned to check the status of their application, they were arrested, interrogated for 10 hours and then sentenced without trial to a year of re-education through labor, according to Human Rights in China (HRIC).

This follows the case of Ji Sizun, who was arrested and detained after he applied to demonstrate in one of the parks. Ji, 58, went to a police station in Beijing Aug. 8 for a permit to hold a protest, stating he would call for greater participation of Chinese citizens in the political process, and denounce official corruption and abuses of power. He was arrested three days later when he returned to check on the status of his application.

Wang Wei, the Beijing Olympic Committee spokesman who headed Beijing's bid in 2001, said at the time that he was confident hosting the Games would enhance human rights in China.

In a news conference yesterday, Wang was asked why none of the applications were approved and why some of the applicants had been arrested. All but three of the applications were withdrawn by the would-be demonstrators after being dissuaded by the authorities or discouraged by the process itself.

He said the process was meant to address problems, and was not merely "for the sake of demonstration." He compared filing for a protest to filing for a divorce, as if it was inherently a bad thing that should be intercepted and prevented if possible.

The issues behind the protests were resolved "through dialogue," Wang said. "This is the way we like to deal with things in Chinese culture."

But I suspect that some people in Hong Kong, Taiwan or other Chinese communities around the world might disagree. People here in Beijing might disagree, too, if they had a chance.

Their joy is apparent, especially for those who remember the time when they were forbidden to listen to any music from the West.

During the Cultural Revolution, even classical music was considered "a bad influence of the Western world," said Chen Li, a Beijing arts critic who lectures at the center. So Chen listened in secret.

Now he's inside one of the premier arts venues in China, if not the world, transfixed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing a special concert with the Scorpions on DVD. "This is globalization," he said.

These are a few of the 600 members of a music club launched in the new performing arts center in Beijing. Just west of Tiananmen Square, the colossal ultra-modern dome known as "The Egg" is to the arts what China's Bird's Nest stadium is to sports. The music club is hosted by the arts center and meets here every weekend.

The aim is to give people the space and the means for learning how to appreciate music.

"People have their material lifestyle satisfied, so they need more, something spiritual," Chen said. "China is opening up. and it's opening everyone's eyes. A country's strength doesn't mean just military, it's also economic, it's cultural."

When he was young, Chen listened to classical music by himself behind closed doors and gradually developed a love of opera, especially for the soprano Maria Callas.

"She was singing with her life," he said. "She could bare her soul and shine a light on others with her voice."

Now he can share his love of music openly with others, in the grandest of places.

Liu was the center of an elaborate show where his success was used for larger purposes, mainly overcoming deep national insecurity, and of course making money. China is different from both the former Eastern bloc's authoritarian control and U.S.-style commercialization. It's both of them and more.

Even while plagued with injuries, which his coach blamed on training too much due to the pressure, the event was so over-hyped that Liu had no choice but to enter the field and make his pain public. Today a full page spread in the China Daily turns his tragedy into an ad for Nike: "Love sport even when it breaks your heart," it says.

Liu's Website makes the point that he is "the first Chinese man to win a gold medal in Olympic track and field, first Asian man to win an Olympic sprint competition, and first athlete not from North America or Europe to win an Olympic medal" in the hurdles. His success was meant to prove the strength of Chinese bodies, the individual as a metaphor for the national.

After winning a gold medal four years ago in Athens, Liu himself seemed surprised "Given the Asian physiology, few expected that a Chinese would ever be able to run under 13 seconds," he said. "I believe this is like a sort of miracle."

Following his departure from the race yesterday, as Liu sat depressed and avoiding the public eye, Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping conveyed official wishes to him through China's sports ministry. "We hope that after he recovers, he will continue to train hard and struggle harder for national glory," Xi said.

A TV commentator suggested Phelps' mother Debbie should stay in China so people here can study how she produced such a great son. "She should be checked to find out how she's different from other people," a local friend of mine said, welcoming the idea. "How can she make Michael Phelps?"

"Big Fish," as Phelps is called here, "isn't from the Earth, he must be from another planet," a Beijing newspaper quipped.

Since Phelps won eight medals in eight different swimming events, another idea was proposed in a joke circulating on the Internet. Chinese could win more medals if only they had different versions of ping-pong (Table Tennis as it's known officially). There could be ping-pong with a vertical paddle, ping-pong with a horizontal paddle, etc.

If the number "8" signifies good luck in China, "it's a lucky number for me now, too," Phelps said in a press conference. "Seeing 8-8-08 and opening ceremonies starting at 8:08, I guess it was maybe meant to be. For this to happen, everything had to fall into perfect place. If we had to do this again, I don't know if it would happen the way we wanted to, to the T."

Speaking of gold, Phelps also shared a good lesson for life: practice is like putting money in the bank. When he was tired and didn't want to keep training that day, his coach prodded him, saying it was "like making a deposit," Phelps said. So he kept socking money away each day until the Olympics, and then withdrew "just about every penny."

Everything that goes on in any hip city around the world is going on here, only pumped up on EPO.

Club Suzie Wong is designed to look like an old opium den, but somehow it also hosts "Riviera Pool Parties." GT Banana, a megaclub that holds 2,000 people, boasts a decor of "Hollywood meets luxury space shuttle" (no economy class space shuttles, please).

Factory 798 took an old East German and Chinese factory compound and transformed it into an artist mecca with more than 100 galleries and performance spaces. Beijing also has hundreds of spas, massage parlors and tattoo shops, but many of them have been shut down around the Olympics for the intolerable crime of appearing seedy.

I started one evening's entertainment at a Xinjiang restaurant. That's the province in the far northwest of China home to the Uyghur ethnic group. The sprawling place had two floors of seating and a stage. When the band came on play "Xinjiang music," they turned out to be very well versed in the Gypsy Kings.

Next stop was the grand opening of a nightclub inside a huge new shopping mall (actually there are no shopping malls in Beijing that are not huge and new). The club put on a "high heels contest" and local would-be models and actresses turned out in droves. I met a guy who was getting rich as a middleman in oil sales, who said he met a table full of people in the same business.

A woman sitting next to me kept flashing her Mercedes car keys, and a guy with low-slung pants kindly bent down right in front of me without my having to ask. Are those Spiderman boxers? But come on, if you don't need an extra hand to hold the jeans up, they don't even count.

The teams had something in common: "Jenny" Lang Ping, China's star player turned U.S. coach who is beloved by both sides. She guided the U.S. team to victory, but the Chinese crowd roared when she entered the gym and again when she left it.

After the match, Lang said she treated the game like any other. She said she was an excitable player in China, but now she has to bring balance to a U.S. team that is "more emotional, very passionate, -- but sometimes too much."

"I think she's torn when we play China," said Heather Bown. "She has loyalties to her home country, but she believes in us. I'd rather have her on my side."

After the game I met a group of Chinese volleyball cheerleaders called the China Dolls. I saw President Hu and his entourage being whisked away in a fleet of black Audis.

Outside, practically everyone I ran into remarked about the results. "Congratulations," one man in his 20s said while waiting for a taxi outside the gym. He offered us the cab he'd been trying to hail. "Our China lost. America played so well," a taxi driver said. "The Americans were great," the hotel doorman said when I mentioned I had been at the game. No matter how loud the shouts of "Go China!" in the stands, they were nothing to match the power of humility and good sportsmanship in those words.

The match came down to the final set, which the Americans dominated, 23-25, 25-22, 23-25, 25-20, 15-11. The United States improved to 3-2 in pool play while China, the defending gold medalists, fell to 2-2.

It was called the Hundred Flowers Campaign, begun in 1956 with a poem "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."

The movement went along for about a year until Mao felt his power threatened. Then, with their identities and opinions exposed, many of the critics were rounded up and jailed, and the chilling effect on dissent was felt for years to come. Some say that was the intention all along.

That piece of history is interesting to think about in the context of events over the last week.

A grassroots legal activist, Ji Sizun, is being detained after he applied to demonstrate legally in one of the designated "protest zones" established for the Beijing Olympics, according to Human Rights Watch. Ji, 58, went to a police station in Beijing for a permit to hold a protest, stating he would call for greater participation of Chinese citizens in the political process, and denounce official corruption and abuses of power. He was arrested on Monday when he returned to check on the status of his application.

There were other incidents, including the arrest of two Christian activists on their way to church and the manhandling of a British TV reporter by police. Ji's case conflicts directly with promises Beijing made to the International Olympic Committee to allow protests in public parks with prior approval.

The topic came up in a heated news conference this morning, when several reporters grilled IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies and Beijing Olympic Committee executive vice president Wang Wei about the issue. One reporter repeatedly asked Davies whether the IOC was embarrassed about the failure of those pledges.

Wang, who was secretary general of the committee that bid for the games, responded with an impassioned speech.

China enjoys greater freedom today than it has in the last 30 years, he said. "Everybody is happy. People are optimistic about their own future," he said. "Of course there are exceptions like in any other country," he added. "Some people are not satisfied. That's true."

Wang said that while "we welcome suggestions, constructive advice from all the people, a few people come here to be critical, to dig into small details to find fault. That does not mean we are not fulfilling our promise."

The media should pay more attention to the prevailing sentiment of ordinary people, he said. "You cannot underestimate the wisdom of the Chinese people."

If that's true, then it would make even more sense for all of them to be heard.