"It's not just the buildings, it is the emotional change in the city that is so profound," said Jeff Ruffolo, an Olympic veteran from Los Angeles who is serving as an advisor to the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee.
Since 2001, when the Chinese capital won the rights to this year's Games, Beijingers have been honing their English skills.
At least according to the official website of the Olympic Games, 90,000 Beijing taxi drivers have gone through a special training program. The city has cleaned up its English-language signage, removing some of the more notorious clunkers -- for example, those near the Olympic stadium that directed visitors to "Racist Park," now properly referred to as the Ethnic Minorities Culture Park.
Etiquette training has been all the rage. More than 17 million people participated in an online program that offered advice on such fine points as what color socks to wear with a business suit (dark ones). During a competition televised this month on state-owned CCTV, contestants had to demonstrate how to greet visitors of various nationalities as judges held up cards grading their performance.
"May I kiss your hand?" the winning contestant asked someone playing a married Italian woman before kneeling to do so. An American male was received with a hearty clasping of the hands and a "Hey, man, what's up?"
Not all the measures are popular. The Geneva-based Center for Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million people have been moved to make way for Olympics-related projects.
Critics see parallels to the 1980 Olympics, when anybody who could remotely be considered a dissident was banished from Moscow.
One Beijing family attracted much publicity in recent weeks by bedecking its house with Olympic and Chinese flags, along with portraits of leaders dating back to Mao Tse-tung, in a colorful protest against the government's plans to demolish the property.
The house was demolished anyway Friday.
But public protest has been relatively minimal, in part because of the Chinese government's intolerance of dissent, but also because of genuine pride in the Olympics.
"We are patriotic. We want China to make a good impression on visitors," said Yan Dajie, 42, whose DVD shop now displays mainly boxed sets of opera and black-and-white classics on its shelves. (Customers in search of "Kung Fu Panda" can get it from a carton hidden behind a sliding bookcase in the backroom.)
