If it's Monday, it must be....

BEIJING -- It's a long flight from Los Angeles to Beijing -- even longer if you forget about the international date line.

I left LAX just after Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, and got here 12 hours later, which meant Monday in China. It's kind of a jolt at first, when you realize you just lost entire day.

Beijing's beautiful new international airport is breathtaking. And the city clearly has laid out the red carpet. It's a 30-minute drive from the airport to the city center, but the entire route is lined with Olympic banners. There are also newly planted flowerbeds alongside the highway, which appears to have been recently repaved. Or at least repainted.

Bicycles share even the most congested downtown streets peacefully with cars, buses and trucks -- a stark departure from recent events in Los Angeles.

The humidity at 6 a.m. is somewhat surprising; it feels a little like Miami in the winter. And with all that moisture in the air, it was hard to tell whether that was fog or smog we were breathing in.

But it's far too early to be critical. The volunteers are unfailingly polite, enthusiastic and helpful -- if usually deficient in English. (Still, they do much better in my language than I do in theirs.)

And while I've seen several soldiers and police officers in the streets and around Olympic venues, none of them appeared overly intimidating. And I saw no one carrying weapons, as I did at past Pan American Games in the Dominican Republic and Brazil.

Just don't test them: One colleague paused to take a picture of Chairman Mao's portrait as he left the Forbidden City. That's apparently a no-no, and when the guard's terse warning went unheeded, he accented it with a stiff shove.

-- Kevin Baxter

Photo: Paramilitary policemen in front of the portrait of Mao Tse Tung at the gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing on Saturday. Credit: Julian Abram Wainwright/EPA