After intermittent rain the previous day and night, Beijing residents awoke yesterday to a spectacular blue sky, an unusually refreshing departure from the muggy, smoggy weather since the beginning of this month.
On the second anniversary of the much-praised Beijing Summer Olympics, the smog has long returned, and so has the snarled traffic. Municipal officials riding happily on post-Olympic glory and envisaging the city becoming a world-class metropolis are most likely to take all this in stride.
Indeed, they have good reason to take pride in their achievements to confound the previous fears that the Beijing Games, arguably the most expensive in Olympic history, would leave a cluster of white elephants.
The 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium, and the 'Water Cube' National Aquatics Centre on the Olympic Green have become the city's hottest tourist attractions. Between October 2008 and July, the Bird's Nest received 13 million visitors and the Water Cube 4.5 million. During summer peak seasons, the daily number of visitors for the two venues was once even higher than those for the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. In less than two years, the two sites alone brought in 700 million yuan (HK$802 million) in revenue, of which the Bird's Nest raked in 550 million, mostly from ticket sales.
The fact that the two landmarks are profitable is a tremendous achievement considering all the glum stories about how the huge venues in other Olympic host cities, such as Athens, have stood empty.
However, there are also rising concerns that the Beijing municipal government - particularly the operator of those venues, the Beijing State-owned Assets Management Company - has focused too much on using the two venues as cash cows than how to use them for the public good.
In particular, the operation of the Water Cube has been leased to a Sichuan -based private company that rumours say will use its fame and revenue to boost its chance of a successful stock market flotation down the road.