Everything New is New... Again

Hello all - just a quick post tonight, since we're both pretty tired from a full day at the Imperial Palace (aka Forbidden City) and Tienamen Square.

As has become a common theme from our visit to Beijing, it's hard to describe the enormity of both the buildings and the open space at the Forbidden Palace. This picture of the two of us across the street from the huge picture of Mao at the gate to the Palace does about as fine a job illustrating the point as anything could.

With the Olympics heading to Beijing for the 2008 summer games, the entire city is getting a massive facelift, including some of the major sections of the Palace. In fact, there's a tremendous sense of turn-over in Beijing as a whole - if it's old, it's turning into something new; if it's new, it's being improved into something even newer. Most of this growth looks great, but it comes with more than a healthy portion of construction dust, too.

Only time will tell if everything is in order when the Games come to town, but it seems safe to say that if we come back after the world pays its visit, we'd see a fundamentally altered city.

More tomorrow, when we head to Xi'an for a few days.