China

Well here I am in mainland China after a couple of weeks of spoiling myself on Western food in Hong Kong. There's certainly a difference; I'm yet to explore Guangzhou so thoroughly but it seems like a busy and rapidly expanding city with construction going on all over the place. The square outside the main station adjecent to my hotel is a constant throng of people the likes of which I've seldom seen outside the likes of a big music festival. Yesterday I had a wander around a pleasant enough former colonial area of the city which still retains a number of period buildings. Generally there seem to be a lot of people sat about all over the place; I don't know what they're doing, perhaps they have nothing to do, maybe that's why they're there. I tried braised pigeon for dinner in the hotel/hostel's restaurant which turned out to be the greasiest of finger food which didn't suit me, but given it was either that or potentially go hungry and I made my best attempt.

I'm using the internet in the office of an airline where I bought a flight ticket to Shanghai for tomorrow. So far I've had very little luck getting onto any of the websites I'm wanting to. As you can see blogger is fine but almost every other website seems to bring up a page not found error. I can get to the front page of hotmail but when logging in I get the same error page. I'll try the internet elsewhere but if you want to contact me you might be best off sticking to SMSs for the time being. Most annoying is being unable to access youth hostel websites to browse what is available in Shanghai. I have been able to get onto one website - not one I've heard of before but it was listed under one of google's sponsored websites and that at least does work and is in English so I'm not completely without information. However it's a pretty annoying situation. We'll see how we go.

As I said, Shanghai tomorrow. Although I'm staying in a youth hostel here in Guangzhou it doesn't seem to have any other Westerners staying there. I should have better luck in Shanghai all being well.

PS - I've just been able to access my hotmail emails on 4th attempt, so maybe a bit of persistence can pay off. Also I've noticed I can write to my blog but not view it, lol!