Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics are coming up in only a couple of months, we decided to take a look at the ancient Chinese city through the magical powers of Google Earth. What we found was much like a Chinese Dragon, both beautiful and terrible. The preponderance of Geographic Web content on the digital globe has us thinking a trip there would be most awesome, but the traffic and interchanges would make a New Englander cringe.






Though the Goog hasn't managed to lay out all the road maps there yet, we took some snaps of six of the most confounding or amazingly complex interchanges around the Forbidden City. As you can see, there is some very impressive spaghetti action over there. We found exactly zero traditional cloverleaf interchanges on major freeways and at least one traffic jam stretching almost 3 miles — without an accident, and this is just one snapshot by a passing satellite. We just hope all the drivers plopped into various cross-branded VW New Beetles have Olympic-level skills. [Source: Google Earth]