From the New York Times, a pre-Olympics travel piece on Beijing:
Beijing can feel chaotic and sprawling, especially as it races to finish Olympic construction before the Games begin on Aug. 8. But there’s an ancient order to the place, a cosmology, and you can follow it. The palaces and temples line up like stars on the city’s south-north axis. The government chose to build the Olympic Stadium on the axis, too. All over town there are digital billboards with a countdown to the Games. Down to the second. But wait. Besides the cranes and compact cars and floating particulate matter, everything essential about the city — its tall vermilion walls, its septuagenarians flying kites on bridges, its pigeons — has been there all along. [Full text]
[Image: Cocktails at the jazz lounge Centro, from the New York Times]
