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August 24, 2005

The Forbidden City & Tiananmen Square

Our trip to China was wonderfully balanced between business and culture. Here is our group in Tiananmen Square with our backs to the Forbidden City. (Note: Still working on photoshopping the files to cut the file size down and get rid of the pesky distorition...)

The size of the square is gigantic. It is said that 1 million Chinese could easily fit in the square. Other estimates say that you could have every event of the olympics going on in the square at the same time. I'm not so sure about that (I guess the marathon could run laps around it), but it is certainly enormous. Here is a picture from roughly the half-way point in front of Mao Tse-Dong's memorial.

Speaking of Mao - he's embalmed and lying in state inside of this building. Word is that if you want to go in for a viewing, expect to stand in line for half of a day. Wow. Maybe on my 5th or 6th trip to Beijing, but there is just so many other things to see and do that 1/2 day ain't happening! The queue line wraps all the way around the building and then wraps back and forth several times at the entrance. This picture of the line and building was taken around 9:30am and you see how many people are already there!

Posted by Mike on August 24, 2005 6:45 PM