Olympics: On Your Marks! Get Set! Go ...

Like an anxious host pacing the living room, Beijing can't wait for the Olympics to start. Stepping off a BA flight from Heathrow in the Chinese capital this morning felt like being the first to arrive at a dinner party to find yourself swamped with solicitous requests to take your coat, offers of a drink and first go at the choicest canapés, arranged and re-arranged just so.

First impressions are of a city as ready as it will ever be for the start of an event that has been seven years in the planning, and of an army of customs officers, volunteers, bus drivers and security guards desperate to start helping the 250,000 visitors expected to descend in the next week or so.

For now however they are having to make do with small advance parties of journalists and team officials, who find themselves outnumbered four or five to one by willing assistants. One colleague who has been here for three days is yet to open a door for himself.

The transformation of the city in the year since I was last here is immediately apparent, even under humid, soupy skies that granted only a glimpse of the sun all day. The arrivals hall of Sir Norman Foster's vast new airport gleams under the spotlights, its scores of baggage conveyors looking still-new, though the handling staff did their best to make recent arrivals from Heathrow Terminal 5 feel at home with a one-hour wait for their bags.

No such hold-ups were apparent at passport control, where "Olympic lanes" operate for anyone with IOC accreditation. It was swift but diligent - the immigration officer was the first person in nine years, me included, to notice that my passport does not contain my middle name - and ranks of volunteers were on hand on the Chinese side of the gate to guide visitors to a shuttle bus.

I was the only passenger on the bus bound for the Guardian's lodgings, and with a volunteer joining the driver on board the staff-guest ratio was a regal 2:1. Unfortunately neither of them appeared familiar with the new road network around the airport. Within a mile we pulled over on the side of the brand new four-lane expressway alongside a taxi driver who was defying the beautification effort by taking a leak against the barrier. For a moment I though he was going to be admonished for letting the side down, but it was soon apparent that my driver was after directions.

Regardless of detours there clearly is less traffic on the roads thanks to the directive banning half the city's cars every day, and superficially at least the city could not look smarter. Meticulously planted beds and borders line the main routes into the city, neatly-trimmed box hedges mark the junctions, and the underpasses are hung with Chinese lanterns and Beijing 2008 banners.

That said, my smiling, solicitous welcome to Beijing will not be everyone's experience of the city - as yesterday's violent clashes between police and demonstrators in Tiananmen Square demonstrated. The key to having teenage volunteers fall over themselves to help is to be wearing one of the orange official accreditation documents issued by the IOC to journalists, officials and athletes, a system that effectively establishes a state-within-a-state in the host city.

The laminated pass that dangles round your neck is more important than a passport, and doubles as a visa for the duration of the Olympics. Crucially for anyone working at the Games, it also grants access inside the security bubble erected by the Chinese. At previous Games, access to the venues has involved laborious bag searches at the gate, but Beijing has acted to speed access by moving some of the searches to the Olympic hotels where hacks and officials are resident.

Anyone boarding an official shuttle at a hotel has to pass through airport-style security first. At our hotel this morning I was apparently the first to try the system, and the 11 Beijing organizing committee volunteers and 12 security personnel standing guard by the machinery twitched with delight when I appeared in the lobby wearing a pass. Never has one man been more diligently searched and screened by so many smiling staff.Like most parties it will not all pan out as the host hopes. Someone will sneer at the furnishings and it won't be long until someone insults his wife, but for now everyone is smiling.