Heading Home

Have left Bejing, and am now sitting in the Qantas lounge at Hong Kong international airport waiting for my connecting flight to Brisbane in a few hours.

Had a ball in China, with gigs of photos and videos to wade thru. Will post things online when I can.

Not looking forward to the 8 hour flight home. :(

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The Great Wall of China

Climbed the Great Wall of China today, amongst other things. Dropped my camera on the wall, broke it. :( Snapped a pic or two from the top with my cellphone though, sorry about the quality.

Was a bloody hard walk up that mountain, that's for sure. :(

Click for larger pics.



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Fog in Hangzhou

This is the view from my hotel right now. Looking out over the resort lake lost in fog. Hangzhou really is very pretty. Click for a larger picture.



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Some Pictures from Hangzhou

Went into the city today to do the tourist thing. Did not really get to see much because no one spoke English. I had a translation application on my PDA that helped a few times, but it was all just too hard. Spent some time walking along the mall when we eventually found it, and also went to take a look at the lake.

Here are a few pics. I assume you know how a slide show works. If it is broken, or you would like to see the full sized pics, click here to see the album online.



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Exceptional Service?

I was at a loss. There was no iron in my room. My business shirts were all crushed from being in my bag, and I had no way to fix that. What the hell! Don't they iron their clothes over here? :(

The phone beside my bed has Chinese all over it, but a few words of English. One of them is "Laundry". I press it, intending to call for an iron. A young female voice answers in Chinese, I try to say in English "I need to iron my clothes, can I have an iron?" and she is silent for a moment, and says what sounds like "please wait" and hangs up.

A few minutes later my doorbell rings (I have a doorbell?). An attractive young Chinese lady is at the door dressed in a maids outfit (no, not that kind of maids outfit!). She bows deeply and smiles at me. I invite her in, indicate the creased shirts on my bed, and mime that I wish to iron them. She bows, smiles, opens the closet door and takes out a sheet of paper from a draw there.

On the paper is lots of Chinese, and a few words of English (seems to be the theme here). She points at the word "press" and says something. I get all excited, tell her yes yes, she smiles, bows, takes my shirts, turns, walks out, bows again, smiles again, and hurries off down the hall.

I hope my shirts come back. :(

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Damn

97 channels, 1 in English. :(

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你好来自中国

If your computer is a little confused with the extended character set for simplified Chinese, "你好来自中国" translates to "Hello From China". :)

I am in Hangzhou, which I cannot tell you much about because it seems that wikipedia is firewalled here in China. I can get to most websites from my hotel Internet connection, but wikipedia does not seem to be one of them. You can read about the history of Hangzhou at hangzhou.gov.cn if you really want to know, or exercise your freedom and go look it up at wikipedia.org. :P

Anyhow, it is almost 1am local time, which means it is almost 3am by my biological clock, so I really must get to bed. I am quite happy now that I know that I can access blogger from here, and even access my blog, so expect to see some posts up over the next few days. :)

Email or SMS me if you need anything. And no, I cannot bring you back alcohol! :P

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Off To China

Flying to China today. Am going over there for a work related conference. Brisbane - Hong Kong - Hangzhou - Beijing - Hong Kong - Brisbane. Back home next Sunday.

Will try to blog when I can, not sure what Internet connectivity will be like from behind the great firewall of china, but we'll see what can be done. Worst case scenario, I'll blog it all when I get back.

Must rush now. As always, I have left everything until the last minute, and have to rush off to get my flight.

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