Queens is the largest and most ethnically diverse of New York City's five boroughs, and almost certainly the most diverse urban area on earth — somewhere around 2.4 million people speaking over 150 languages across Astoria, Flushing, Long Island City, Jackson Heights, Jamaica, Forest Hills, and dozens of other neighbourhoods. It is where most of the city's immigrants land and where most of its food comes from. If Manhattan is New York's stage and Brooklyn its self-image, Queens is the city's actual life.
Unlike the other boroughs, Queens has no single centre — it is a stitch-up of old villages, each with its own character. Astoria is traditionally Greek and now increasingly Egyptian, Brazilian and Bangladeshi; it has the best baklava and the Museum of the Moving Image. Long Island City, across the East River from midtown, is the borough's contemporary art hub, home to MoMA PS1, the Noguchi Museum, and the open-air Socrates Sculpture Park. Jackson Heights is New York's great South Asian neighbourhood — the best Indian, Nepali, Tibetan and Bangladeshi food in the city, plus a growing Colombian and Mexican scene along Roosevelt Avenue. Flushing, at the end of the 7 train, is now the city's largest Chinatown, denser and more authentically regional than the one in Manhattan: Sichuan, Dongbei, Taiwanese, Uyghur, Korean, all in a few crowded blocks.
The main sights are scattered. Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, holds the instantly recognisable Unisphere, the Queens Museum (with its extraordinary Panorama of the City of New York), and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center where the US Open is played each August. Citi Field, home of the Mets, sits next door. On the south side of the borough, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is one of the best urban birdwatching spots in North America, with over 300 species recorded. For most visitors, though, the real point of Queens is to ride the 7 train out from Times Square, get off somewhere you cannot pronounce, and eat.