Did I mention I was going to the Olympics? Perhaps not.

Anyway, here I am, in the main workroom of the Main Press Center here in the Olympic Green in the northern part of the city.

This is my 13th Olympics. But my first as a freelancer. If you happen to be a sports editor or some other news executive and need help chasing down a local athlete … I’m your guy.

Impressions so far?

–Organizers are bending over backward to be accommodating. They are so helpful as to be almost smothering. I think half the college kids of China are here, working as volunteers, and several thousand of them already have smiled at me today and said, “Good morning!” in English.

This may be a totalitarian state, at its core, but you wouldn’t know it from the solicitous treatment of credentialed journalists. So far, anyway, we can’t ask any question too stupid or be too lost or too annoying. Most Olympic cities are like that … but these guys are over the top.

–Excitement is at a fever pitch. Again, that isn’t odd for a host city, but this is a host city in a country that has a lot to prove. Basically, that it is a serious, competent member in the leading ranks of world powers. “Coming out party” is used too often, but it applies here. You can feel the energy.

–The smog is as bad as we’ve heard. This morning, at 9 a.m., the sun was a dull glowing orange making almost no impression through the smoky soup that is Beijing’s atmosphere.

It is scary. It is grotesque. It may be like London was, way back when, when people died from respiratory issues during “pea soup fog” — before Londoners stopped burning coal. But it’s never been this bad in SoCal. I grew up there, and I’ve never seen even one day as smoggy as this one is.

The rumor/hope is that a weather front will move through in the next few days and clear things out. I’m not sure it ever gets really better, though. China has 16 of the 20 smoggiest cities in the world, by the way.

Way things are now, I wouldn’t want to run 100 yards in this air. A mile? No way. A marathon? You’d have to be crazy.

This seems like one of the last places on earth where you would want to exert yourself. Unless you were in a hermetically sealed room with an air purifier.

–I have a sense, and I may write more about this, that China will do even better than expected in the medals competition, and the U.S. will do worse. This is a strange place, a difficult place … it seems to me.

It’s on the other side of the globe. It’s a nation of 1.3 billion people, and non-Chinese will have to compete in the middle of them. The weather is wretched. (I didn’t even mention the oppressively humid and uncomfortably warm part.)

Athletes competing at home always do much better than they would in a neutral environment. Look for China to win more gold than anyone … and more medals, too.

We’ve got a whole slate of press conferences coming up. The more intersting ones include the U.S. swim team (Michael Phelps) and the U.S. Olympic Committee’s leadership crew, which will be grilled about the usual stuff and pressed to predict how many medals Americans will win. (Aim low, guys.)

Most of this morning has been given over to matters logistical. That’s how Olympics work. You have to find the bus that gets you to the Main Press Center, where you scope out the work room and figure out a way to get online, and change some money and locate the meeting rooms. All that. Maybe we can do some journalism here later in the day.

Anyway, three weeks of this coming up.