Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium

On the way from the Beijing Airport to the Summer Palace (our first stop in Beijing), we drove by all the construction for the 2008 Olympics. The most famous structure is the Bird's Nest, which can hold 91,000 spectators.

Beijing hopes to end construction by December 31, 2007 so that there can be a full 8 months for the air to clear of dust, smog and other pollution. I was surprised to find that Beijing was remarkably more polluted than even Shanghai, which I thought was an extremely dirty city. According to our tour guide, four of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China.