Matts blog

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of photos from Shanghai and Guilin on the holiday last week, you can find them here. Theres rather a lot from the Li River trip, and theres also some from my Dads Digital camera too.

We are now in Guilin, one of the main stops of the tourist trail in China, so on arriving I was expecting things to be a little busy and ‘Badalinged’ but not to the level of my experiences today… But first, Guilin is very easy to get around, we easily transferred to the hotel, and after a little confusion Managed to get rooms that were clean and unoccupied. We spent a very pleasant afternoon drinking green tea in the Ronghu Lake watching and participating in some dancing which was very pleasant. today we cruised down the river and I’ve never seen so much chaos in my live. The 4 hour journey turned out to be 9 hours thanks too a comedy of Chinese disorganisation and lack of water in the river. It all started about 10 minutes into the journey with the boat in front of us running aground in the Middle of the channel. This was eventually rectified by a mix of a tow from one boat and ours pushing. Around 30 minutes later there was a significant build-up of vessels on the river and with maybe 50 large boats all coming to a stand still at once, chaos ensued again, as we moored to a nearby boat we assumed This was a pause for lunch but it transpired that the river was so shallow we were waiting for a JCB to increase the river depth to allow the boats to continue. We eventually made it past this hurdle with a little push from the JCB and a lot of poling by the crew to guide the boat backwards down the river. The rest of the journey continued through fantastic scenery, and with the constant risk of running aground - we had to stop to replace a broken propeller. After 10 hours on the boat, we reached our destination, in the dark but welcomed by a fantastic atmosphere of Yangshuo. Even with the chaos and incredibly large number of other vessels on the river it was a wonderfully interesting day.

Its funny being a tourist somewhere you have lived, like going to visit London Bridge, something I’ve driven over hundreds of times, it just feels odd. So showing my parents around shanghai was equally strange. Though it was very enjoyable to enjoy the city and revist the sights in Pudong and show off the parts of shanghai no tour guide would take you, as my parents second trip to China I think it was a new experience to be taken to see how real shanghainese live.Hopefully todays trip to Guilin will result in as interesting sights.

Unfortunately I’ve not got to see very much of Taipei at all, and the bits I did see where either from car windows or during dark after work The city is beautiful, mainly low rise offices and apartments, sourounded by hills covered in dense bush and bamboo, and in the center Taipei 101 (worlds tallest building) sticking straight up in the air. Its much more westernised than anywhere in China, with a mix of Japenese, Euopean and American cars, and a tendancy towards lowered suspension and big exhausts. The use of push bikes seems almost none existant, the ones I have seen have been very nice modern designs from the likes of ‘Giant’ which I think are made here, there are, however, mopeds EVERYWHERE! The biggest difference has to be the quality of english, every meeting, every hotel staff, even the staff at the local printing shop all speak and understand english fantasticly, even with me speaking at my normal speed, the training I’ve been here providing took about 65% of the time I’d allocated, as there was no communication barrier. The only slightly confusing thing is that some places still use wade-giles romanisation rather than pinyin (like taipei vs taibei), but thats a very minor niggle, and I understand the government are in the process of changing this anyway After this week as a taster, I’ll definately be back, and wouldn’t be offended by living here… Photos, as usual, here.

I’m writing this from gate 36 of Hong Kong airport, which I must say is one of the nicest airports I’ve been to anywhere, its busy, but not crowded, its big, but easy to get around, and BEST OF ALL it has WH Smith and its filled with british import magazines and books, I’m going to have to get a very big bag to cart home all the books I’m going to buy!!!!! The good news is that I do have have been very controlled so far and only bought a guide book and a magazine for the plane Next stop Taipei!!!!!!

Yesterday we took a day trip to the Great Wall at Jingshanling and proceded to walk the 10Km to Simatai, not far, you may think, but when you are walking up and down steps its a killer!!! It was a mazing to be out on unrestored sections of wall, with no one around and enjoying the amazing views being on a wall on top of mountain ridges is, interestingly at times the wall itself was only 1-2M high, as the route taken by this section is almost unreachable from either side! Theres photos here

We finally managed to pay our bill, and I just have to write about the system. Firstly you don’t get a bill, the only way the company informs you that you owe money is a recorded message on the phone, all in chinese. You are then meant to know that you can pay at any bank apart from BoC, by filling in a form in chinese - nice and easy. So with the help of our agent we went to the local CCB and waited an hour to get served then finally paid the bill. I think I prefer Shanghai’s system.

FCC to Yahoo: No Excuse For Being an Accomplice - HK.COM blog central
Not sure what is going on in Yahoo HK, I can’t help wondering if the recent joining of Yahoo and Alibaba is something to do with this. After visiting Yahoo in Beijing, I get the feeling that was for political reasons, not business. Maybe my trip to Hong Kong Taiwan next week will through up some interesting inormation.

So today is the 56th aniversary of the formation of the Peoples Republic of China, so is a very big celebration here in China. We spent the day hanging around Tiananmen Square taking photos, the results of which can be found here. The tag line for this years celebrations is ‘One World One Dream’ the slogan of the 2008 Olympics, and the as you can see from some of the photos, the flower displays had a big sport theme. The square and sourounding area was packed with everyone from Beijing families complete with the spoilt child, through the old country couple that had spent life savings to make it here for the celebrations, a very interesting time. Below are some pictures of the decorations around our apartment.