The corridors of the Secret Lawn Genting Grand in Zhangjiakui look like every other resort in a ski hotel — however in fact, the hotel website hosting the Beijing 2022 mountain sports activities isn’t just every other resort.
Being throughout the “closed loop” that separates Olympic athletes and individuals from the Chinese language public manner there are a couple of quirks to deal with.
You’re joined within the corridors by way of dozens of hazmat-suited personnel, considered one of whom is spraying a “disinfectant answer” that smells so much like bleach from a hose connected to his Ghostbuster-style backpack. They go via with their sprays a minimum of 3 times an afternoon, masking basically the carpet of their mist.
Relentless disinfectant appears to be a theme around the Video games, with white spray marks decorating the whole thing from the airport knowledge cubicles on arrival, the PVC display screen setting apart us from our closed loop drivers, to stains on black sneakers from a freshly sprayed carpet.
Breaking the language barrier for lunch: Within the mountain hotel of Zhangjiakou, the resorts have eating places starting from Chinese language meals and Western-style diners to chain manufacturers like KFC and Pizza Hut.
However something all of them have in commonplace is the language barrier between the essentially English-speaking clientele and our Mandarin-speaking hosts. In an (virtually) Google-less China, there could be an app for that, however a few of these eating places are opting to make use of different {hardware}.
The tech that to start with look resembles a cellular phone from the early 2000s is actually the iFLYTEK Jarvisen – an AI sensible translator advanced in China. Our enjoy with the tech has been a nice one, undoubtedly making mealtimes much less demanding.
