BBC Sport: Olympics blog

We went out for a meal on Wednesday evening and had to get back to the Broadcast Centre on Olympic Green afterwards - a 25-minute walk, according to those in the know.

But they hadn't reckoned on my legendary sense of direction, or indeed that of my esteemed colleague Vassos Alexander, about whom it is said, could get lost on his way back from the canteen to his desk at Television Centre.

Full of duck, and needing the exercise, we set off, with the distant lights from the TV tower by the main stadium to guide us. Snag is, there's a fence of Olympic proportions. Its purpose is to thwart unwelcome visitors and, boy, were we thwarted.

After fully an hour of detours, false starts, dead ends and bum steers, we finally found the one way in through the perimeter, which we would have discovered almost immediately had we ignored my instincts in the first place.

Why am I telling you this? Well, en route, I learned something of the two faces of China. At regular intervals along said fence there are guard posts. Standing on those post are (I don't think I'm giving too much away here) guards.

At 11pm they perch, inscrutable, erect, to attention, motionless in the darkness like the Household Cavalry on Horse Guards Parade, without the shiny breast-plates - or horses, come to think of it.

In common with Her Majesty's finest, they decline to respond to my cheery "ni hao" and request for directions. They do what they're told - say nowt.

I was ruminating on this after finally making it back through the security cordon and onto the spectacular boulevard between the pile of steel spaghetti that is the, Birds Nest stadium and eerily luminescent Water Cube.

The place was deserted, apart from the bats flying round the designer streetlights, and the occasional solemn-faced passer by.

But then, distant movement, camera flashes, laughter floating towards us. Twenty or 30 young blokes (Vassos says 50, but then he thinks left is right) are mucking about with their rubbish collection trolleys.

They're racing each other, pushing these carts flat-out along the broad pavement, surfing them at speed, shrieking, snapping away with their cameras, having a whale of a time, oblivious to us watching.

Unfettered joy, boisterous horseplay took place just a few metres from disciplined obligation and unsmiling authority. China, I'm discovering, is full of these contradictions.