Elements of Chinese culture are expected to thrill a global audience at the opening ceremony of the Olympics but some have met with a much cooler response.
Hundreds of squat toilets at Olympic venues will be replaced to conform to international standards for the convenience of athletes, officials and reporters, venue managers said last week.
"We are working on 154 toilets inside this stadium," said Li Aijiao, media director of the National Indoor Stadium. The 18,000-seat Olympic venue will host four events this summer: Gymnastics, trampolines, handball and wheelchair basketball. It was completed on schedule last year.
Public lavatories became a sticking point after Beijing hosted a series of pre-Olympic test events and some foreign visitors complained about the lack of flushing toilets.
Squat toilets are widely used in Chinese cities and rural areas, as well as swathes of Southeast Asia and southern Europe.
Li told China Daily all the new toilets will be in place by the end of this month.
"This is a cultural difference between the Chinese and the western world," Yao Hui, deputy director of the venue management department of Games organizers BOCOG, told reporters last week.
Toilets inside the National Stadium and National Aquatics Center will also be replaced, with the other venues following suit later.
Some of the athletes who came to Beijing saw going to the bathroom as a cultural experience.
"It's all part of the experience," said Natalie Golda of the world champion US water polo team last week."We have no problem. It's an adventure for us at times," she added. Golda was attending a pre-Olympic test event at Beijing's Ying Tung Natatorium.
Beijing has 10 times as many public lavatories as Paris and 200 times more than Hong Kong. City officials have put the number in excess of 5,500. Many are buried inside office buildings and government institutions.
