Zhongguoist

Taobao in the UK?

Administrator — 2009-10-13T19:04:43+00:00

Is Taobao planning to open up their service to the UK? And possibly have translations of their website? It seems that it is a very likely possibility given that Alibaba Group Holdings(based in the Cayman Islands) has applied for both UK and German trademarks for 'Taobao' and 'Alipay.' I can see that for them, this was the natural extension as they have already a huge amount of consumers in China and hopefully soon lots more outside of China.

I hope that this will mean that it will be easier for those of us outside of China to both buy and pay on Taobao. At the moment, if you are outside China, you could do as I did and topup your Alipay account before you leave China then negotiate with sellers to send things to your own country, obviously if it were possible to topup my Alipay account from England it would be even better.

The problem remains that a lot of the items on Taobao are unreliable, you have to message the seller/chat with them on the little programme to find out whether they have the item in stock, whether it's the same colour as the picture, what the condition is etc. For Taobao, the biggest hinderance to overseas non-Chinese speakers buying from them is in implementing systems so that people who can't read Chinese can communicate with the sellers on Taobao.

Perhaps there could be some way for Taobao sellers to 'opt-in' to receiving foreign buyers but in exchange they would have to either provide English descriptions or guarantee that the product is exactly the same as the picture.

Either way, I think that this will be a long and time-consuming process and perhaps the name 'Taobao' will be used in some other way in places outside of China.Not that I am a financial journalist, but I'd suggest if you could now is probably a good time to invest in Alibaba Group.

World's Local bank?

Administrator — 2009-06-08T20:54:46+00:00

Apologies for lack of updates, I kept meaning to write stuff but it's only when things annoy me that this happens. In the UK there's an advert for HSBC calling it the world's local bank and they have some Chinese cormorant fishers and the idea that HSBC adapts to each market that they're in. My problems with this is that HSBC is from Asia anyway so this idea of using cormorant fishers isn't a particularly "strange" concept. Also, the voice-over mispronounces Guilin, he say gweelin(if I were to try and write it) which is obviously wrong. You'd have thought that someone would have checked that out.�

Lack of Posting

Administrator — 2008-08-09T04:39:32+00:00

Was due to being blocked in China. In the past month or so I've had an absolutely amazing time and will shortly be updating on all the places that I've been.

Places visited, ordered by province

Administrator — 2008-06-27T03:11:08+00:00

Fujian

�� Xiamen(Gulangyu) photo album

�� Longyan

YongDing (Hakka Roundhouses)�� photo album

Gansu

�� Lanzhou

Guangdong

�� Guangzhou

Kaiping Diaolou photo album

Guizhou

�� CongJiang

�� Guiyang

�� LongJiang Photos

Heilongjiang

�� Haerbin

Hebei

�� Bazhou

�� Baoding

�� Chengde

�� Hengshui photo album

Henan

�� Luoyang photo album

�� Shaolin Temple

�� Zhengzhou

Hubei

�� ShiYan

�� Baokang

�� EnShi photo album

�� Xuanen

�� Laifeng

Hunan

�� Yueyang

�� ZhangGuYing

�� Miluo

�� Liuyang

��

Inner Mongolia

�� Hailaer

�� Dongqi (during Naadam festival)

Jilin

Jiangsu

�� Suzhou

Jiangxi

�� Nanchang

�� Ganzhou

�� Shangrao

Liaoning

Ningxia

�� Yinchuan photo album

�� Zhongwei(Shapatou)

Shanxi

�� Pingyao

Taiyuan

Shaanxi

�� Hua Shan photo album

�� Xi�an

Shandong

�� LinQu

�� Qingdao photo album

�� Qufu

Weifang

Sichuan

�� Chengdu photo album

�� Leshan ��

�� Litang

�� Kangding

�� Zigong

�� Ziyang photo album

��

Xinjiang

�� Kashgar(Kashi)

�� Kuqa(Kizil caves) photo album

�� Turpan(Tulufan)

�� Urumqi(Wulumuqi)

Yunnan

�� Dali

�� Hekou

�� Huanguayuan

�� Jianshui

�� Jinghong

�� Kunming photo album

�� Lijiang

�� Nansha

�� QingKou

�� Yuanmo(wumao tulin)

�� Yuanyang photo album

Zhejiang

�� Hangzhou photo album

�� Ningbo

Also:�

Beijing

Chongqing

Hong Kong

Shanghai

Tianjin

Guess the fruit's name (again)

Administrator — 2008-06-14T10:42:13+00:00

Using my change tin(over 15RMB in 1mao pieces) I went to buy some fruit on the street. I ended up buying this fruit below, but I've never seen one before. I know how to eat it but does anyone know its name? Inside it looks a bit like a melon apparently but the outside looks a lot like a small marrow.

Duan Wu Day

Administrator — 2008-06-13T00:01:04+00:00

Last weekend was Duan Wu Day so we got Monday off from university, this is the first year that people have been given days off for the festival. DuanWu Day came about through the death of the poet QuYuan who committed suicide in Miluo River. The people loved him so they threw Dumplings(Zongzi) in the river to stop the fish eating his body. For the festival, people eat Zongzi which are glutinous rice dumplings and red dates wrapped up in a vine leaf. In the South I've had meat inside them before, which is a lot nicer than red dates especially as they still have stones inside!

A friend invited me to visit her hometown in Shandong. On Saturday we got the train to Weifang(the nearest city to where she is - the world's Kite Capital) and then from there a 2 hour bus to get to the nearest town, before eventually getting to her village. Her village was very small but it was really cool and everyone seemed a bit surprised to see a foreigner there. Her family live in a SiHeYuan(one of the old courtyard-style houses) and were absolutely amazing. Her parents were so welcoming to me, kept making me eat really delicious food and seemed very happy that I was there.

After having a massive lunch, we went with my friend's cousin for a ride in his car. We first went to this garden which has a lot of bonsai trees in it(as well as huge massive dogs) and was quite pleasant. After that we went to this very old temple. It was interesting that on all the roads around there that we were driving down, people were threshing wheat on the road even though cars were driving right by it. After that we went to this amazing place which is in the process of developing for tourism by a friend my friend's cousin. It's by the river and there's a large area of land joined to it that juts in a sort of peninsular. This area of land at the moment has almost nothing on it apart from people herding goats and a house or two. As the person developing it explained, it will be more of the sort that you can go and spend a day in a farmer's house and have home-made food and sleep there(Nong Jia Yuan) rather than anything hugely mass market. It was amazingly peaceful sitting there watching the people herd the goats up the hill. My friends were a bit surprised by how quiet I was, they weren't used to it!

Decision to Make in China

Administrator — 2008-06-05T00:35:29+00:00

I've been thinking about this for some time and Jonny's post about recycling reminded me about writing about this. In China people get paid for recycling things. Where I live there are bins and these people (almost always women) with little bicycle carts empty the communal bins where we put all our rubbish. They then sort through this rubbish for things that can be re-used and sold on for a little bit of money. To give an example if they find a plastic bottle(600ml) they make 1mao(less than 1p) selling it back to a company, 700ml glass beer bottles is more (about 5mao/bottle) (still only about 3p/bottle). As you'd expect they have to collect an awful lot of bottles to make a living.

If I wanted to, I could always return the bottles myself for money to the recycling company. Since I've lived in China I've never done this as I figure that towards the woman with the cart who is collecting all my rubbish,including everything smelly everything dirty, it's going to make much more of a difference than it is to me. Obviously I'm not saying that people who choose to take the bottles back themselves are wrong, I just think it's one of those things that you have to decide for yourself. I think it's great that in China(as in some other countries) people get paid for recycling things and protecting the environment.

Death in China

Administrator — 2008-05-13T15:53:40+00:00

It's not something I like to think about really, but somehow in class we got to a discussion of death and organ donation. If you die in China and have an organ donation card you'd think that your organs will be able to help someone else?

Even if before you have died you have said that you want this (and bear in mind how quickly doctors will need to remove the organs in order to help other people) your organs could not actually get donated if your close relatives do not agree. So if your wife/parents/children do not agree then the doctors wouldn't be able to give your organs to someone else, which just seems a bit unfair as surely your wish is the most important in this sort of case.

I'm not necessarily sure when I die I will donate my organs to other people(I haven't thought about it really)but obviously there's a possibility.

May Holiday: Hong Kong

Administrator — 2008-05-13T05:31:53+00:00

When I got to Hong Kong the ferry took me to the immigration place which actually didn't take that long. I walked out of the ferry station which was in Kowloon to get to an MTR to get to the hotel. Kowloon was a huge culture shock coming from China, everywhere was luxury goods, Indian and Bangladeshi people selling fake watches and English street signs. The street signs I found a bit bemusing as for something like GuangDong Road it wouldn't say 'Guangdong Road' as it would in China but it'd say 'Canton Road.' People were also quite grabby-grabby around Kowloon something that I haven't had for ages in China to that degree. Got an Octopus card in the MTR station(Octopus is the same as Oyster in London except you can pay for a lot of things in shops with it). Hong Kong in some ways is a lot like the UK, it has a lot of the brands that you see in the UK(Marks and Spencer, Lush, Pret a manger...) and it doesn't feel the same as China at all.

During my time in Hong Kong I went to a few of the islands(Lama and Cheung Chau which are quite touristy and Peng Chau which was tiny and hardly touristy at all. Ace!). I also went to see the massive Buddha on Lantau which has a cable car to get to it. The cable car was really impressive(even if I don't like that sort of thing) and gives you a really nice view of Lantau and the airport. The Buddha I wasn't as impressed with as it's fairly recent and it's not as tall as I thought it would be. There were millions of little shops around there selling the same tourist rubbish, but to be fair the cable car and the entrance price of the Buddha wasn't that much. The Polin Monastery didn't feel very religious, with big banners everywhere trying to advertise things that you pay for. Something which annoyed me was a huge building at the entrance which was trying to get money to build a huge new monastery there. It said on the poster how if you donated money(1,000 HKD for your name written on a brick and 40,000 HKD for a small goddess statue) you would 'get it back later.' I thought that that sort of spiritual blackmail was something that was used years and years ago but apparently it's still in practise.....

I also went to the Peak, Hong Kong's most famous attraction. There is also a cable car that goes there but the first time we tried to go we were told that it was a waste of money by the man selling tickets as it was a cloudy day. The next time, we went on the Star Ferry and from the Star Ferry stop there is a bus (number 15) that goes all the way up to the Peak for about 8HKD(compared with 88HKD return on the cable car). The Peak was ace, really cool view of the city and they provide free telescopes to use up there. There are also a few nice restaurants and bars there. The night we went, we got there just before the light left which meant that the view was perfect.

From Hong Kong I got back to Tianjin via Shenzhen Airport. There is a bus(100HKD) from Kowloon MTR station direct to Shenzhen Airport. I took the bus from the 1st floor of the Elements Shopping Arcade above the MTR station and opposite the Starbucks. The bus seems to go very regularly, maybe every 15 mins and took less than 2 hours to get to the airport. We stopped at the immigration bit just before you enter China and got off the bus, taking all our things(including from the hold) with us into the building. Immigration didn't take that long really and then as soon as we were finished we walked out into the open air where there was a woman directing us to another bus to take us to the airport(as we had pink stickers on). It was a very painless process and I'm guessing from the 4 other buses that I saw from the same company after the immigration place that the buses run very frequently.

I got back to Tianjin Airport at 12:15pm but luckily there was still a bus that goes from the airport to the city centre(Nanjing Road).

All my photos from the DiaoLou and Hong Kong are now uploaded so check the gallery.

May Holiday: Kaiping DiaoLou

Administrator — 2008-05-09T07:05:26+00:00

As we got the May holiday this year(I know the Beijing lot didn't), I decided to go to Guangdong then meet a friend in Hong Kong. I got a heavily reduced(60% off) flight from Tianjin to GuangZhou returning from Shenzhen.

Tianjin's new airport only opened the day before I flew but it's very impressive. A lot further from my house than the old airport but it's very swish and modern and unusually for an airport, inside the security barrier actually has a reasonable priced place to eat! I flew with Air China and the flight was quite good, the crew were very friendly but the meal was a bit lacking. All cold and nothing nice at all, while the crew meal I saw seemed to be like what you would normally get in a flight on economy. GuanZhou was absolutely boiling when I got there, much more humid than Tianjin.

From the airport I took one bus to the TianHou Bus Station. The bus station was ridiculously crowded, apparently it normally is like this not just because of the holiday, and we had to queue for ages to get inside. From there I got a bus to KaiPing. Kaiping was quite different from the other bits of China that I have been, there aren't that many foreigners there but apparently there are a huge amount of people born in Kaiping who live abroad(near Kaiping there's a village which has had so many people emigrate it's called Canada Village). I walked around Kaiping, found a place to stay(opposite this new development with this ace coffee shop) and went to the harbour. I'd heard that from the harbour(SanBu) that there were boats to Hong Kong, there aren't boats direct to Hong Kong from there but every day they have 2 buses that go from SanBu in Kaiping to ZhongShan where you can catch the ferry but it's direct so you just need to get one ticket from the ferry station and it's very easy. Later that day, with some new acquaintances I went to one of Kaiping's outdoor bars. It was on the roof of a building and it was really special, dead cheap 3 bottles of beer 11RMB and we were sitting on the roof drinking beer at a table and then eating snails. Snails are a bit tricky to eat and we were slurping them out of their shells. It was really packed on the roof, there were loads and loads of tables of people. I'd only been in Kaiping for a few hours and going somewhere like that where all the locals go is quite cool.

The next day I went to see the DiaoLou. I had planned to hire a car for half a day in order to see lots of them, but I couldn't seem to find a taxi driver or motorbike driver who wanted to do it.....so I ended up getting first a motorbike to ZiLi Village or so I was told.... I ended up being dropped in front of the Li Gardens(on the same road as Zili Village but abouit 4 km away) and then deciding I may as well go to the Li Gardens, something I had been thinking about doing as well. Li Gardens I ended up quite disappointed with. It has a nice lake, but the rest of it is fairly average and I really didn't like the way that they chose to preserve the old buildings(ie a lot of them they rebuilt the outside or had metal support posts everywhere). I talked afterwards with someone whose parents were born in Kaiping then he moved to the US about it and obviously he has a different perspective. He thought that it was impressive how it was quite hard to build the garden at the time(19th century), but I have seen so many sights that are much more impressive and have taken more time and energy to come up with an even better finished product.

A belated Update - Qufu, Chengde, Great Wall(again)

Administrator — 2008-04-29T18:56:56+00:00

I haven't updated for ages but there has been a lot of things happening.

About 3 weeks ago now I went to Baoding in Hebei province for the weekend. It was a nice trip but due to the weather being a bit rubbish, I only stayed for a day. Baoding is the place that Baoding Balls come from(they are the little balls with bells inside them that Chinese people play about in their hands) but I didn't actually see many of them. I saw a nice church which was interesting for my Chinese as it had a lot of writing on a blackboard outside, things like 'what is Easter.' I had the local speciality of donkey meat which was quite nice, but very salty. That night I went to a music gig which one of my friends said would be great. It turned out to be very headbangy and made my friend scared as all the people had 'undead' makeup and looked like Kiss.

The weekend after that I went with some of my classmates to Qufu the hometown of Confucius. Qufu is in Shandong and it should have just taken 4 hours to get there but it ended up taking close to 8 hours as the expressway wasn't working. Qufu was ace, they have the Shandong JianBing which are amazing like a type of crisp breads, nothing like the normal JianBing that you get in Tianjin and Beijing. There were a lot of people in Qufu as it was just after the Chinese ancestral holiday of QingMing so a lot of people went to pay respect to Confucius. We went to three main sites: Confucian Temple, Mansion and the Cemetery. I thought that for the price 3 sites was pretty good, we spent almost a whole day around them. My favourite site was the Confucius Cemetery which was like a really nice English woods with flowers that almost looked like bluebells. A lot of the tourists chose to take these buses that take you around but we walked ourselves and it was a really nice day so it was lovely. The Confucian Temple and Mansion had some really old trees that were being propped up so that they didn't fall down.

Last week was my birthday so for the weekend I went up to Beijing. On the Saturday went with some friends to BaZhou Hot Springs. I love my hot springs, in China I've been to loads of them! The BaZhou hot springs was really good, we went at a time that wasn't busy at all and we almost had the place to ourselves. They have a lot of pools, a sandy beach and 3 swimming pools. From Beijing it was really easy to get there, we just took one bus which went straight there. I've been told that from Tianjin you can get either a bus or train to Bazhou and then from there get one to the MingTang Hot Springs. At the hot springs the people were really friendly, sometimes a bit too OTT with their service always rearranging our shoes and refolding our towels. We also had the fish pool thing but as we were the only people in a huge pool it meant that there were loads and loads of fish on each person. The hot springs also boasted a room you could sit on sofas and watch tv as well as free fizzy drinks and fruit in the bar upstairs. Monday was spent in Tianjin in a lot of Korean places and I ended up eating loads. It was an ace day.

An unusual occurrence

Administrator — 2008-03-27T02:36:42+00:00

On a public phone in the middle of my university I saw a guy who had something on the table. I moved closer as it looked like a cuddly toy but it was actually a dead dog. I don't think I've ever seen an actual dead dog before. He then finished his phonecall and walked with his friend out of the uni. He explained to me that his dog had died(he doesn't even study at my uni) and he was finding a place to bury it. After we got out of the uni main gate he and his friend went under BaLiTai bridge this huge road bridge and looked for a place to bury the dog.

Finally

Administrator — 2008-03-21T04:43:45+00:00

I've just finished uploading all my photos from my Winter Holidays travelling through the 5 Provinces(plus Chongqing). Today for some reason my Internet was not its usual slow slow speed which helped a lot.

BBC News Unblocked

Administrator — 2008-03-20T14:45:07+00:00

I'm absolutely stumped what with all the recent happenings in the West of China BBC News website has finally been unblocked. I only saw it because all my BBC live bookmarks in firefox finally load! It hasn't worked all the time I've been in China.

If you're in China try it yourself. Or maybe it's a fluke?

EXTRA! From the Web

Administrator — 2008-03-15T12:58:30+00:00

I don't normally do this but I've found a few articles regarding China which I had an opinion on.

One Man Went to Mao
In this Guardian article a journalist goes to China 'without a guide and using local transport.' Now to me using local transport implies something about local buses and other forms of local transport, possibly trains but I'm not even sure if I'd consider trains as 'local transport'. It doesn't imply using loads of planes as this writer did. And I know that I've travelled a lot but travelling around in China without a guide, without speaking the language is not as hard as he tries to make out. I've met so many people all over China who don't have a word of the language and yet manage to get by. If there were very few people who did this, why would there be so many guidebooks for people to do this? The title of the article annoys me as firstly the only mention of Mao in the article is about the Mausoleum in Beijing and secondly I think there's a huge amount more to modern China than the Chairman. Next week doubtless he'll be trying to get home on the tube without using an Underground map!

Spiked
I know that I'm not flagging up any particular articles but I found this quite interesting and I like the way that all their articles clearly show all the places that they got their information from. Yesterday I was reading 3 of their articles that have been written this week about China 2008. Their thinking is a contrast to a lot of the anti-China things that you read around while not being completely pro-China as it were. One of the articles I read was about a place which is currently in the news(not here though) and why Western people are saying by wanting to make it a separate country. I found it quite interesting as I agreed with a fair amount of it and especially when I eventually saw the poster that they linked to, I saw their point a lot more from how the anti-China lobby wants to portray China. There was another article about how we try and use the environmental issues for pressure on China. Obviously I consider the environmental issue important but at the same time, some of what the other article makes sense about growth then more money to deal with environmental problems(the model that the West followed).

Don't Eat Our Friends: Tianjin Gig

Administrator — 2008-03-10T09:09:36+00:00

On Sunday I went to a gig near BinJiangDao in Tianjin. It was in a really cool venue which was above a place where they do cross-talk (Chinese comedian speciality) and was promoting Veganism. It was nice to be able to go to a music gig as I haven't been to any gigs since I arrived in China. Inside the venue looks a lot like an outside skateboard park with a ramp for skateboards and lots of cool graffiti on the walls, but slightly unexpected because it's on the 11th floor of quite an upmarket department store. I thought that we were going to be able to buy drinks there but there were no drinks at all.

They got off to a bit of a late start due to some problems with the place below so they didn't start until nearly half 9. There weren't many of us in total about 70 people and there was only one other non-Chinese person who was there and not involved with the organsation of the event or in a band. The first act was a man from Inner Mongolia(Ganzi/刚子） with a guitar and he was wearing traditional Mongolian outfit and he did some traditional singing which I don't think was quite overtone singing as there wasn't any time when he was producing both pitches at once, but it was very close and really interesting watching him do this. My videos of him are on youtube here and here to give you a bit of an impression of what it was like.

The 2nd act（Fuchen/浮尘) was a so-so indie band but they were fairly entertaining. The 3rd act（YouZhiDaDou/优质大豆) was a 'rock band' who were ace and the main person in their band was a tall, thin man with long hair wearing a red thing which was a bit like a sari with a slit up the side. I'm making him sound more girly than he is by saying a sari. Not really a sari but I'm not sure how to explain it. He came to the front and told us about why to support veganism as a lifestyle choice and told us a funny story about something that happened 700 years ago. For most of their set he was banging on a huge drum and there was one song which was just made up of him and the other members of the band going 'lalalala'. It was ace though and a bit different.

After that there was a jazz group and while I normally like jazz I found it a bit boring, nothing that exciting about it. After the 4th act we left as it was already past midnight and it was freezing inside. I'll be putting some photos from the gig up in the next week and most of my photos from the winter holidays are already in the gallery.

Pleasures of the flesh

Administrator — 2008-02-12T14:59:54+00:00

I spent nearly a week in Chongqing. One of the days I went with some people from the hostel to this hot springs place to the north of the city. It was ace, very different about 50RMB entrance fee(but we ended up being there over 5 hours so well worth the money) and we were provided with towels and swimming costumes that were rather tight! There were loads of pools with that one entrance fee with varying degrees of hotness, some were swimming pool heat and some were absolutely boiling. We soon found out why the swimming costumes were rather tight when we went in the fish pool. It's basically a pool which is a bit colder than the other with loads of tiny little fish in it. You lie in the pool(there were loads of us in it) and in a minute or two the fish start coming up to you and eating your dead skin. It was rather weird at first and felt a bit like tickling but I soon got used to it. The guy next to me at one point had over 80 fish on him! The tight swimming costumes stopped the fish swimming up inside them, for a good reason.....

Another day I went on the cablecar across the Yangtze which was ridiculously difficult to find despite being rather straightforward I had to ask over 15 people. No-one seemed to know where it was when it was right under their noses. I also went to the HuGuang Guildhall which was quite impressive. Near there, at the bottom floor of the traditional food street (Chongqing is very hilly so things are built up on many levels) there are these two huge walls which people tape notices to when they're looking for a husband or wife. I took a fair few photos of those notices so you learning chinese lot can try and understand them. I'd never seen that before in China and the woman I talked to about it were still going to that wall in their 60s. I wonder if they will end up finding a husband that way.

Craziness on a train

Administrator — 2008-02-02T11:52:56+00:00

I went from LiuYang to Ganzhou in Jiangxi province(my 20th Province in China) on a bus. We passed a town which is where the Long March started and all the Chinese people craned their necks to look out of the windows. Got to Ganzhou and went to a huge outdoor forest-thing the next day. Ganzhou is quite a nice place and the temperature was a lot warmer than Hubei and Hunan. Went from Ganzhou at night to LongYan(Fujian Province which I visited in 2006) and arrived at 10pm at night. Managed to find a nice place to sleep which was all newly done and they were very friendly with me. Longyan was really nice, yet again warmer than Hubei and Hunan(worst weather for 50 years!) and I went about the various places in LongYan. From LongYan I went to the Hakka roundhouses in Yongding which were amazing and over 100 people live in each one!

From LongYan I went to Nanping then a few hours later got a train to Shangrao. Nanping had the only Mantou in China that I liked the taste of. Got to Shangrao and walked around there a bit. Shangrao wasn't that interesting for me or at least with the bad weather it wasn't that interesting. There were natural sights near Shangrao but I decided that with that weather it'd be tricky to go to them not to mention cold. From Shangrao I went to Nanchang and for the 2nd time I barely spent any time there(last time was in 2006 flying via there on the way to Kunming). Nanchang was quite cool but around the train station all the accomodation was ridiculous prices considering it was the same standard as lots of places that I've been staying yet about 5times the price. I got a hard seat ticket for the next day to Chongqing as no other tickets for the next week. The train station was completely crazy with 25 windows open and queues of about close to 40 people. So many people there that there were about 15 policemen running about with whistles to ensure that people didn't cut the queue.

Blind Massage

Administrator — 2008-01-21T13:54:08+00:00

I arrived in Zhuzhou and got a train almost immediately to Miluo. The train was completely packed no allocated seat but I got someone to budge up and shared their seat. They reminded me that Miluo is famou for a poet(Qu Yuan) who killed himself which is why in May they eat Zongzi crescent-shaped dumplings.Got to Miluo found a place near Bus station to stay, an old couple but they were very friendly. I went out and about a bit and decided that I wouldn't go to the memorial place for the poet that day as I was feeling very tired. The people where I was staying looked after me, poured me hot water so I could have a foot bath and wash my face in my room. The next day I got a bus to Milo Jiang(the river where the poet killed hmself) and had a look at the Memorial. No-one was around the ticket gate so I just walked in but inside really wasn't anything special one statue and a small temple.

After that went back to Miluo and looked for a place to have a TCM head massage as my sinuses were hurting a lot and I wanted to get rid of the blockage that I felt. I found a place and went in and explained to the guy the symtoms. I'm sometimes not very observant and I only realised when I was upstairs that he was blind. Previously I've always been a bit put off about the idea of blind massage in China as I somehow thought that I'd be exploiting the person and I imagined small cubicles, almost sweatshop conditions. No idea where this image came from but in this case it wasn't true at all. The house was his and he was the owner of the business and his wife was helping with it as well as 3 apprentices. The massage was really good and my sinuses unblocked.

Snow makes travel tricky. Very tricky.

Administrator — 2008-01-16T07:43:47+00:00

In Yichang I didn't really do much to be honest walked around, had some of the local snacks and went to the YiChang provincial museum. Which was rather mediocre, definitely compared to the other provincial museums I've seen in China. It had the usual assortment of pottery�but all the pottery was rather badly mended, you could see all the cracks on the outside as well as that most of them had some bit of what looked like newspaper(with chinese characters scribbled on it) inside. There was nothing on the 3 Gorges despite there being a huge poster outside the museum mentioning it. I got in for free as they didn't have the student ticket booklet with them so I was very glad I didn't pay for it. From YiChang got a night bus to Enshi.

The nightbus to EnShi took a lot longer than it was supposed to and ended up about 15 hours rather than the normal 9 hours due to the snow. The snow is the worst snow in 12 years in this area. When I got to Enshi I went to have some food and all the people there were really surprised to see a foreigner. EnShi is what�would be considered in�England a small city. I went to get some local snacks in the street food market and I got given a bread thing and a soup thing for free by stall owners. I tried really hard to give them money but they wouldn't accept it, they wanted to treat me. The bread thing was so nice I haven't had it like that anywhere else in china it's very very thin bread with a tiny bit of topping and spices and stuff. A bit like 'Chinese Pizza.'�