China Stories

The great firewall and camera calamities.

18th May 2008 18:00, Gerald

Just wanted to let you know about a couple of issues we are having over here which will explain any hold ups with this diary.

As you may know Doniel was unable to make it out with us and he was carrying all the camera equipment for our diary filming. That means we had to use our backup camera which is just a wee one like you might have at home. Now this camera isn't compatible with our laptop and so it means we have filmed a load of stuff about the beginnings of our trip which we can't upload and send back home. However, when Alastair joins us on Thursday (hopefully) he is bringing out the camera which Doniel had and so we should be able to use that one to upload the footage onto our laptop, edit it and send it back to base via FTP. Until then we will just keep writing little text entries and peppering them with photos but it means there will be some earlier stuff going up later so you should keep checking back to the beginning of our trip for updates.

This leads me to our second problem. The Chinese firewall. We had read about it but weren't able to work out how "locked down" it might be. It seems pretty random to tell you the truth. Sometimes we can access international sites and sometimes we can't. This gives us problems as we can't access our webmail to send back updates. And when we can access our mail sometimes it won't let us attach images to send back. Especially when you give them names which include sensitive words or phrases - things like a big square beginning with a letter T (I don't think this would get through the firewall if I actually wrote the name). It's tough as it is creating a lot of extra work for us and we end up filming all day and then having to work all night to work around the problems. We did loads of tests and things before we came out but it is difficult to assess a lot of these issues without actually being in China.

This mail may or may not get back to you. Discuss...

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A day off.

18th May 2008, Maria

We had a day off today.

Gerald and I wanted to go and visit a famous Traditional Chinese Medicine store which is in a district called Qianmen. We took the metro for the first time which was really clean, cheap (about 40p), fast and (as it was Sunday) not that crowded.

When we got off at our stop we couldn't find the street we were looking for - which is not that unusual as street names can be a bit confusing at first - but it turned out that our street no longer existed. It had been knocked down and was being re-built (hopefully) in time for the Olympics. It had been part of an area of hutongs. These are traditional houses that are built with grey brick and form lots of twisty alleyways. Some people are annoyed that they are getting destroyed, but we were told that the residents who used to live there have been moved to modern apartment blocks with clean running water, electricity and a lot more space. They're delighted.

We've noticed (and filmed) alot of construction work in Beijing. In fact you can't walk very far without seeing massive cranes swinging over the skyline accompanied by little dots of yellow or red hard hats moving up and down scaffolding.

We decided to have lunch at an area called Nanluogu Xiang where the hutongs have been modernised and turned into cafes, boutiques and trendy clothes shops. We went to a restaurant that had an open air terrace on the roof. It was a lovely sunny day so we really enjoyed our meal.

In the evening we went to the theatre to see an acrobatic show. It was really amazing. It was a mix of gymnastics, juggling and circus acts - a variety show without the Royals or Simon Cowell. Men performed on what looked like two giant hamster wheels, 12 women balanced on one bike and one woman put a iron stand in her mouth and then another three women got onto it and she held them up in the air - a great feat on it's own, but they were all holding spinning plates at the same time - bizarre but brilliant!

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