I thought I had conquered the Great Firewall with my realization that I could use a VPN to circumvent it, but alas. My hotel is blocking my VPN connection (I’ve been told this is done in North America for security purposes — can anyone confirm?). I figured out a way around it, but it is annoying and time-consuming. But still. I won.
…At least temporarily. I was fooling around and rashly searched “falun” in Google to see what would happen. The answer: exactly nothing. Google didn’t load a page saying “no results” or the like; it simply didn’t load at all. “Page not found.” Since then, I haven’t been able to connect via wireless. I even tried changing my computer’s name in the vain hope the system wouldn’t recognize me. Hopefully it’s just technical difficulties. If not… oops.
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Just to catch you up on the last few days…
Darcie and I were up bright and early Friday morning to visit the Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall. We hiked until our calves were seizing up in protest, and then “tobogganed” down the slope in little plastic go-carts on a shiny metal track, laughing hysterically and tailgating each other (well, I tailgated Darcie). We also snuck into* the “non-tourist” portion of the wall, which was all grown up with trees and was inhabited by lizards and giant (like the size of a little finger!) bees**.
(*”Sneaking into” consisted of walking out the other side of a tower at the end of the tourist portion of the wall, and avoiding the guard who sat atop it, looking the other way.
**The bees were scary. At least to me. But I saw some little butterflies divebombing one of them… what’s that about?)
We ate Peking duck. Twice. Duck skin dipped in sugar is pure heaven.
And then there was more shopping, more delicious food, and a sad goodbye. Darcie went home with a few more pounds in her suitcase, and I moved up to Haidian district to start my class.
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Apparently there was an earthquake in Chengdu*** today. I missed it, though many people in tall buildings here in Beijing at the time were pretty freaked. We received a panicked phone call warning us that another earthquake was projected to hit between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m., so we shouldn’t go to sleep and should have our documents and money ready for a quick escape.
Um, yeah. Last I checked, nobody could predict an earthquake. It’s 10:30 p.m. and I’m going to sleep as soon as I’m done here.
(Chengdu is where the pandas live, about 1000 miles from Beijing.)
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As for class, I’m one of the dumb ones again.
***
I’m online! Yay for ethernet cords. Boo for slow firewall-bypassing connections.
