In case you missed it this week, the International Olympic Committee banned Iraq’s Olympic team from next month’s games in Beijing because of the Iraqi government’s “political interference in the Olympic movement.” This “interference” was the naming of a new national Olympic committee that was not recognized by the IOC. According to the Iraqi government, a new committee was necessary because of corruption on the old one along with the fact that four committee members, including its chairman, had been kidnapped and their whereabouts were unknown. Of course, eight years ago, when Saddam Hussein’s brutal son Uday was in charge of the team—raping, torturing, and murdering athletes who fell short of his expectations—the IOC looked the other way.

An editorial from yesterday’s Washington Post describes the hypocrisy of the current situation:

“That [the IOC] has chosen to crack down on the democratically elected government that replaced the Hussein regime—while welcoming to Beijing Zimbabwe, Burma, Cuba, North Korea and Sudan, all of which it must consider innocent of any ‘political interference’ in sport—says a good deal more about the values of the international Olympic bureaucracy than it does about Iraq.”

Negotiations are underway to get the team reinstated. “We still have the hope the Iraqi flag will fly at the opening ceremony in Beijing,” said Jazair al-Sahlani, a spokesman for the disputed Iraqi Olympic committee.

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in track and field has cast a shadow over the sport, and American sprinter Allyson Felix would like to help clean up that image. As Mark Bergin reports in the latest edition of WORLD, this 22-year-old daughter of a seminary professor and a contender to win multiple gold medals in Beijing this summer is “participating in Project Believe, a voluntary blood and urine testing program meant to establish baseline body chemistry figures against which the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency can compare other athletes.” Felix is also featured in an Athletes in Action DVD of Olympic competitors who share how they draw strength from their Christian faith.

China’s National Day dawned uncharacteristically clear, a sight I mistook for good fortune. I was later to discover it was a result of the silver iodine released into the atmosphere for the occasion, thereby providing a “harmonious holiday” for the crowds thronging to Tian’anmen Square.

My heart, like those of the harmonious Chinese gongren, was also singing with joy, but for a slightly more selfish reason. It was pay day! I was officially a responsible, salary-earning adult! My roommate and I promptly treated ourselves to a foot massage.

At the 24-hour massage center, I smugly informed the receptionist that my friend and I would like the 60-minute foot massage, a steal at 88 renminbi, or roughly 12 U.S. dollars. We were ushered into a humid, dimly lit room and offered mooncakes, a local delicacy, and tepid tea. Fifteen minutes into our rather vigorous massages, curiosity got the better of my masseuse, a 25-year-old Sichuan man named Xiao Bo, worker number 006. Between his broken English and my still worse Chinese, we were able to get some semblance of dialogue flowing, and before long, he asked us to sing him an American song. My friend and I immediately launched into a Sound of Music revue. Our masseuses paused their work to clap along with us, Xiao Bo turned his mobile phone-come-radio to Chinese pop music at top volume, and soon our treatment had evolved into a bilingual sing-along. When our time was up, he accompanied us to the waiting taxi, bowing and grinning the whole way. We waved until he was out of sight.

I stopped to purchase some fireworks from a street vendor outside the Yonghe Gong, home to the Guinness Book of World Records’ largest sandalwood Buddha statue. We could celebrate the holiday in our own small way, with the sparklers and a bottle of Kekou Kele (Coca-Cola). We headed downstairs to light our fireworks in the crisp October air. I touched the tip of the match to the end of the stick and was rewarded not with sparks, but a cloud of … incense.

Part One — As the plane touched down at Beijing’s airport, I let out an exhausted mental cheer. The Dramamine I had taken prior to my departure from San Francisco 14 hours earlier had done nothing to spur a nap, so I had spent the journey over the North Pole intermittently checking our progress on the overhead monitor and listlessly flipping through magazines. My eyes had taken on a dull glaze, and the ice in the cooler containing my oral typhoid vaccine had long since melted into a puddle precariously close to the bag containing my laptop. I prayed someone would be there to meet me.

As luck would have it, a young woman named Candy was waiting at the gate with a miniature car. Three hours of traffic later, she deposited me at the Rui Cheng Hotel, where I proceeded to arise at 3 a.m. for the next three days. On the fourth day, three new strangers materialized to take me to my new home. I excitedly hauled my bags up six flights of stairs, anxious to unpack them, only to find utter squalor. To mask my dismay I overemphasized the positive, stressing to my three handlers an immediate desire to surf the Internet for hours. After an hour of diminishingly subtle hints, they left.

Two hours later I was on the road to a new apartment, clean if unauthentic, overlooking the Xishan (See-shahn) Mountains in the university district. With 3 sets of would-be tenants lurking in the background, I negotiated rent with my Chinese landlord and his semi-English-speaking son and plunked down a stack of 100-RMB notes, the largest denomination available through the Bank of China — a full three months rent, plus deposit. That’s how it’s done. I had wiped out my savings after only 4 days in China. I had arrived.