Between Moments

Anyone wondering why I went extremely quiet over the last week or so? It’s because I was visiting Beijing, China. I stayed at the Friendship Hotel there and, yes, we did have internet access. Unfortunately, China’s great firewall blocks all access to blogging platforms including Tumblr. It doesn’t stop there tho’, as the ban extends to any website creator/social media platform you can think off that originates outside China including Facebook, Twitter etc.

That being said,you can get around it by creating a VPN that mirrors your IP address to a non-Chinese one. However this is painfully slow. The amusing thing is that local Chinese have got round some of the restrictions by creating Chinese language mirror function sites, so there are Chinese Facebook and Twitter clones. However, I’ve heard some are “harmonised” by the communist party.

Visited some nice famous places including the Birds Nest Olympic stadium and did a 12km trek across the Great Wall, so will have photos up soon! Been back since Sunday night but am snowed under preparing for my next business trip to the US on the 2nd of June.

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