BEIJING — As workers rush to complete Olympic venues in time to host test events leading up to the 2008 Games, I considered a recent six-day stay in China's capital as my personal "test event" before returning this summer to cover the Olympics for the Deseret Morning News.

And the results of my test event?

It was a fascinating albeit brief introduction, just barely scratching the surface of the city, the country, the culture and the cuisine, especially since more than half my daytime hours were spent in hotel rooms and conference centers.

Admittedly, I found myself lacking. My Mandarin vocabulary starts with "ni hao" ("hello") and ends with "xie xie" ("thanks") — with nothing else in between — and my clumsy efforts with chopsticks exposed a decade of nonuse since the 1998 Nagano Winter Games in Japan.

Please pass a fork.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I was invited by the Shanghai-based Chinese Financial Journalists Union to participate in a several-day seminar late last month on how to cover the Olympics in one's hometown or home country.

Co-sponsored by the CFJU, international engineering conglomerate Siemens AG and Chinese Internet-service provider Sohu.com — was the latest of several previous seminars conducted in China over the past several years.

Formerly the Deseret News' sports editor during the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games, I joined the Chicago Tribune's David Greising in providing lectures and PowerPoint presentations to Chinese journalists on Olympics news and sports reporting and design and layout.

Another disclosure: I entered China on a business visa — not a journalist's visa — and the CFJU's letter of invitation required for the visa stipulated I not "engage in any activities related to news reporting, writing and producing in China during this period of time."

As such, I didn't conduct formal interviews or news-gathering efforts during my stay. Rather, the basis of my writings comes from observations and casual conversations with seminar participants and others — between sessions, at meals, in buses or cars and elsewhere throughout Beijing. All was written after I returned to Utah.

Our group was invited one afternoon to the Olympic Green, home to a number of Beijing Games venues. We toured the National Aquatics Center — commonly referred to as "the Water Cube" — with other sites such as the National Stadium ("the Bird's Nest") and National Indoor Stadium ("the Fan") in full view from a distance. Like the others in the group, I took personal snapshots with my small point-and-shoot digital camera.

With Olympic Green venues and amenities still under construction, a tall, metal fence obstructs the public's ground-level view. As we bypassed barriers and guards, I watched citizens clustering at construction-access entrances, atop nearby pedestrian overpasses and even atop dirt piles and stacks of construction materials, trying to get a glimpse — or better yet, a photograph — of the rising Olympic edifices.

Beijing's clamoring to get early peeks at the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube and the Fan more than four months before the start of the Olympics and last week's massive draw to Tiananmen Square to welcome the Olympic torch reinforced to me the city's and country's excitement to welcome the world later this year.

I'm equally anxious to return — to not only observe and experience more, but also to report as a journalist.

And after my trial run last month, I anticipate being more conversant in Chinese and better skilled with chopsticks.

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E-mail: taylor@desnews.com