Forbidden City

Wow!!! Some countries build an Imperial Castle. China builds an entire Imperial City!!! Today my Crytek associates and I had a chance to visit the Forbidden City here in Beijing. This place is absolutely GINORMOUS!!! We walked around inside it for three hours, and I'm sure we didn't even see one-third of it. At some points while walking through it, you're up sort of high, and you look over buildings, only to see more buildings beyond it, still within the Forbidden City. You've got to take different paths to get everywhere, and it's just crazy big.

Around the mid-1800s, the Chinese government started imported mechanical clocks (as opposed to the sun dials and other ancient time-telling instruments that they had been using) from Europe, and they even had a "Hall of Clocks" in one of the many temples on the grounds. I immediately thought of Nancy, my dear sweet mother-in-law, whom loves collecting clocks (I even brought a clock home from New Zealand for her on one business trip). Check out some of the photos of the, quite frankly, HIDEOUS clocks!!! One of the photos is of a room; can you tell how many clocks are in that room?

All the walking made my knee really hurt, and I've taken a really heavy pain killer. I've been sitting here with my leg propped up and my knee on ice while going through photos and creating this posting, so if some of this isn't clear, I'm blaming it on the drugs!

Check out the photos I've posted online, including this one here of my associates and I, from left to right Mark Atkinson, Christopher Raine, Sascha Gundlach, Areil Cai, and Barbara Bernad. I've posted more than 70 photos, available here on Flickr, or on Facebook (in two galleries, here and here).