By Gil LeBreton | Fort Worth Star-Telegram

BEIJING — The Great Wall of China, as it turns out, isn't all bricks and stone.

It's the language.

Invaded by the Mongols, occupied by the conquering British, and socialized by Chairman Mao, China didn't exactly unfurl the welcome mat for, oh, about six hundred years.

The result is a homogenized society that only now is trading in its bicycle for a Cadillac Escalade.

The most common foreign language taught in China schools is reported to be English. But you could have fooled me.

Venture beyond the modern Beijing airport's doors or try to engage with the common shopkeeper, and you'll find that to the everyday Beijinger, English is as hard as . . . well . . . Chinese arithmetic.

The books and language CDs were worthless. A native Chinese, speaking in Mandarin, with its winding "X" sounds, tends to sound like a man trying to tune a violin with a cat.

The so-called official languages of the Olympics are French and English. But forget the French. The Chinese aren't even trying.

Many, however, are intrepid enough to at least attempt to speak some English. And I salute them.

But some things remain lost in the translation.

My hotel shower, for example. A bilingual decal on the shower glass warns bathers with, "Caution! Wet floor." No problem there.

A simple Chinese and English warning, however, about not tripping when leaving the shower bears the translation, "Pays attention to the stair, before the use, invites the shop well turban, thanks!"

I think Genghis Khan would have just used the bathtub.

THE OLYMPICS IN GRAY

Add another couple of whoppers to the Hall of Olympic Misinformation.

The best/worst Olympic lie of all time has to be the one told by bidders for the 1996 Olympics that Atlanta's average summer high temperature was only "76 degrees.""

The 1936 Games, dubbed later the "Nazi Olympics,"" promised two weeks dedicated to "peace and harmony." And we all saw how that came out.

Here in Beijing, the big lie was the one that promised "clean air"" for the Games' two-plus-weeks.

A soup-thick gray haze has enveloped the Olympic city since last weekend. An unhealthy blend of auto emissions and surrounding mountains paint the street-level atmosphere as a seemingly perpetual cloud.

It's depressing. But it's been an expanding part of the Beijing landscape since cars began replacing bicycles 20 or so years ago.

From the street, for example, you can only see the foggy eastern facade of the National Stadium, the Bird's Nest. A tower next to the stadium bears the Olympic rings, shrouded in a gray soup.

"The environment is much better than seven years ago,"" Pal Schmitt, chairman of the IOC's environmental committee, said at a news conference this week. "They (the Chinese hosts) have kept their promises.""

Clearly, here is an Olympic commiteeman who hasn't ventured outside of his limo.

Not far from my hotel, a tall smokestack, rendered dormant during the Games, sits as a once-belching reminder of what might have been.

The four U.S. track cyclists who arrived at the Beijing airport this week wearing black masks over their mouths and noses had the right idea. But somebody should have looked in the mirror before landing and noticed that they looked like they had just flown in from the SciFi Channel.

The Chinese were outraged. Apologies were extracted from the cyclists. And we all got into our shuttle buses and moved along.

Promises, promises.

CHECKED BAGGAGE, OLD PROBLEM

Unlike in the cliches and old movies, you don't get to China by drilling straight through the bedrock earth.

Instead, you fly to Alaska and hang a left. Fourteen hours later, you're in Japan, changing planes for yet-another four-hour connecting flight to Beijing.

You're tired. You don't know what day it is.

But as my new friend, Adnaan Mohamed, informed me, it could be worse.

Mohamed is a senior sports correspondent for Die Burger, an Afrikaans language newspaper based in Capetown, South Africa.

Leaving the airport, he carried only a thin backpack. His real luggage, Adnaan explained, accidentally was sent to Maputo, Mozambique.

"He'll never see it again,"" a photographer from South Africa informed me Thursday. "They probably divvied up his belongings before his plane here ever hit the ground.""

To ease the misery, Mohamed was given $400 to buy some new clothes.

"At least now I have something to write in my newspaper dairy," he said.