These tours are really interesting with my favourite being 'Feng Shui in the Forbidden City' - be sure to check it out if you visit the place.Īpart from exploring you can also watch 'Scenes' depicting everyday activities of Qing dynasty and join 'Activities' which teach you further aspects of Imperial family customs. You can explore the city on your own or follow one of the numerous tour guides, who will show you the highlights of the Forbidden City. Once the technical difficulties are resolved, the place gets more interesting. Nonetheless, this is failing to fulfill a part of project's mission statement ( 'for a world-wide audience'). This might be the first case where a user of a virtual world can do more as a guest than as a registered avatar. I'm not sure why the menus work fine when you're a guest. The solution to transparent menus is quite hilarious: you need to change decimal separator in your OS regional settings to decimal point (we use decimal comma in Poland, and most of Europe actually).
Once the music is turned off, The Virtual Forbidden City becomes a very peaceful place, full of balance and harmony, and continuous sound of Chinese wooden shoes against the cobblestone (which later becomes irritating too and I'm sure sooner or later you'll turn down the volume of sounds as well).
We've been on Skype conference together and the music effectively prevented us from communicating with each other. The music would probably blend in well if it was RL, but the place I'm refering to is the Virtual Forbidden City, which I visited together with Uzi and Sql (the originator of the trip). Nice eh? Well, it would be, if not for the loud Chinese zither music that you can't turn down or off. The sky is perfectly clear and the rays of sunlight cast your shadow on the clean cobblestone square. Behind it a magnificent complex of characteristic traditional Chinese imperial buildings spreads out. You're standing in front of The Meridian Gate - the largest gate of The Forbidden City, built around XV century. Imagine yourself in the middle of Beijing, China.