Balmy Nanning!

Greetings from Nanning. I am now in the land of T-shirt weather and it’s fantastic! Great too put away the heavy winter coat for a while! Even though it is the capital of Guangxi province, Nanning has a very relaxed feel to it compared to Shanghai and even Dalian.

Arrived and met with my friend. We, along with a Polish girl I met along the way had a lovely dinner and found a cheap hotel. Ah, the cheap hotels in China. This one didn’t seem bad. 30 kuai a night, pretty clean (the beds didn’t smell) with TV warm water shower. All seemed well til I came back that night and remembered that there was a reason that the place was so cheap: paper-thin walls. I had experienced this before and had happily forgotten it!! So, you could hear the TVs and noise (I think they only let noisy, crazy people into these places) from all the adjacent rooms! Ah well, I slept ok.

Enough of that. Now to something more positive: I think the south of China has a more lively, vibrant atmosphere than the north. Maybe it’s the weather cos Dalian is more lively in the summer but still doesn’t match the atmosphere here. Last night we went to a night market area to eat barbecued mystery meat on sticks. The street had lots of places where you could sit outside or inside the open-fronted shops and drink a beer and eat some street meat. Really sociable. I can equate it with going for a pint in a pub in Ireland. Chinese people usually don’t get the whole pub culture thing. But it’s just a different way to socialize. Different way to meet your friends and have a laugh. Every county has their own way.

I have a rough plan. Tomorrow I am going to another place called Guiping (桂平), where I know a student. I then hope to head to the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces in the north of the province. Allegedly there are rice terraces built into the hillsides, some reaching altitudes of 800m. There are supposed to be some amazing views there, although there won’t be anything growing in the rice terraces, so I’m told. However they do have some interesting villages from ethnic minorities.

After that I will hit the areas around Guilin and Yangshuo, which are supposed to have some amazing countryside, although Yangshuo is allegedly just a huge tourist trap. I will be meeting my Chinese teacher, who is a local, so hopefully we might get to some more interesting places and avoid the touts and rip-off merchants!

I definitely made the right decision to head south. The temperature up in Dalian at the moment is from a minimum of -9 to a max of -3! Nanning today had a min of 10 and a max of 20! Maybe I should just stay! 20 degrees in January ain't bad!

Travel Update

I am now in Shanghai. Arrived here last Saturday. Had to adjust to the big city again! The crowds and the traffic and the sheer size of it!

My friend Seamus arrived on Tuesday from Hong Kong. They h a 23 hour train journey. I don't think he realized just how vast China is! We decided to chill around Shanghai rather than heading off to places outside the city. Started off in good style, getting fairly toasted the first night in his hostel. Their second day was a bit of a write off as a result. We sort of took it handy although Seamus did manage to buy a well-needed pair of shoes. The open-toed sandals were a bit nippy!

We managed to fit a bit more in yesterday with some shopping and a visit to the Jade Buddha Temple. There were some people there walking around with incense sticks praying. Seems a bit pricy when you have to pay 10RMB into a temple just to have a pray! It's hard enough to get people to go to mass in Ireland, never mid charging an entrance fee!

So, my plan is to head to Guangxi province next week. I'm hoping I can get a train ticket from Shanghai to Nanning: a whopping 32 hours train journey! Maybe I'll just fly! The plane ticket price as of today was half the price of the train ticket. The weather should be warmer down there. Then again, it's not too bad here: somewhere of the region of 6 to 10 Celsius during the day.

After Guangxi (Nanning, Guilin, Yangshuo etc), I'm planning to head to Hainan (the self-named Hawaii of China) for the Spring Festival. I may even get some of Yunnan in at the end. Play it by ear.

Off Again Soon

Looks like I will be leaving Dalian soon, off on my travels. I got a phone call from a guy who I went to college with and he and his girlfriend (sorry Seamus, fiancée (or financée as one guy put it!)) are arriving in China today. They fly into Guangzhou and then plan to head to Hong Kong for a couple of days. I want to meet them somewhere after that, so it looks like I will go to Shanghai this weekend and meet them there!

We’ll then do a bit of travelling. It would be cool to go to some new places, but we’ll see how time goes. Maybe we could go to Putuo Shan in Zhejiang province and there is also old reliable (and quite pleasant and not so crowded at this time) Hangzhou and Suzhou to see. I’d love to see more remote places like Sichuan and Guizhou, which are supposed to have some spectacular scenery and different ethnic cultures. I can do that myself another time. I was recommended the China Backpacker website for travel to places a little bit more off the beaten Lonely Planet track. I’m not dissing Lonely Planet. Often there is very useful stuff in it that would be difficult to find otherwise. I mainly use it for an overview of areas and usually find accommodation and eating places myself. In China, however, all the “scenic spots” as described in touristy folklore are all mobbed. It’s nice to find a quieter place!

Dalian’s internet is still slow. I read yesterday that it will take another two weeks to fix the undersea cables. To be honest, I don’t think they actually know. They are using grappling hooks to scour the seabed in search of the cables, since it is too deep for even unmanned submarine to operate. So, who knows how long it will take! I hear the internet in Shanghai works fine. Thank God for that! Maybe I will be able to upload some pics when I get there.

In China Copyright Allegedly Means the Right To Copy!

I had an interesting conversation with a student yesterday about Chinese law. She’s a law postgraduate student, so you’d hope she’d know what she’s talking about.

The story started when I recently got connected to the university’s network. I didn’t realise until recently that our apartments were connected into the campus Local Area Network. Anyways, the college has among other things, a server with tons of movies and TV shows available to watch and download! Wow, I thought that this would be illegal and it’s just cos it’s China that nobody gives a shit!

However, this student told me that it is all within the law, which surprised me! At home, it would be definitely be illegal to host and download this stuff. She said that in China it is legal to download music and video once you will not make a profit from it! Intriguing and hard to believe! She also said it is illegal for people to sell DVD’s (cos they are making a profit from it) but it is fine for you to share the content of that DVD over the internet!

It all seems sort of wacky that this is all legal. I must consult some other sources to verify!

Back in The PRC, Don't Know How Lucky You Are, Boy!

I’m back in the good old People’s Republic again (not Cork- China). Wow, the whole going home thing seems like a blur! Last thing I remember was drinking pints in Doyle’s and eating a doner kebab in Abrakebabra and the next thing I knew I was back in Dalian!

I did have a great time at home. Shame I caught a cold half way through which hampered my excursions a bit, but I did enjoy seeing family and friends, going to the pub (of course), paying a visit to Funderland (funfair which is a Mecca for the Chinese in Ireland) and dining on such quality foods as snack boxes, rashers and sausages and King crisps! At the end of my stay, I reckoned I hadn’t stayed long enough. Maybe so, but it always feels like that when you have to leave. It would have been the same way if I had stayed an extra week.

I am adjusting to Dalian life again. I don’t plan to stay here for long. I’d like to get going on my travels with a week or so, to escape the sub-zero temperatures! People in Ireland were whinging about the cold there. Man, it’s nothing compared to here. Then again, Dalian is nothing compared to more northerly parts like Shenyang and even worse, Harbin! However shitty we think things are, there’s always somewhere else more shitty!

I have to organise my travel plans now. I have a vague plan of hitting some places in the south, but that depends on contacting people I know, which I am in the process of doing. I also might see if there is anyone I know in Dalian who is going to travel.

The internet here still seems to be suffering from the effects the undersea earthquake. On December 26th, there was an earthquake with a magnitude of seven on the Richter scale off the coast of Taiwan. This knocked out something like 7 out of 9 undersea communications cables, which has affected internet and phone service from some Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan …) to the outside world. Some stuff like gmail seems ok but other sites are running very slowly. Can’t access flickr at all (so no photos for a while) and others are dog slow! Allegedly services should be up and running by next week, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the services are fine but a certain government has deliberately throttled the bandwidth to overseas countries, using the earthquake as a shield!!

Happy New Year

For anyone who reads my blog, I want to wish you a belated Happy New Year (and an even more belated Happy Christmas!). I hope 2007 brings you whatever you wish for!

I did make it back to Ireland for Christmas, and I am still here! It didn’t feel as weird coming home this time. Well, it had only been 4 ½ months since I left. The driving on the left did sort of freak me out a little bit at the start. Also at first, I thought the people did speak funny, but funny in a good way. It’s nice to be able to speak your own brand of local gibberish to people every day. I only knew a few Irish people in Dalian.

I spent Christmas in the West of Ireland, in Belmullet, County Mayo, where my mother comes from. Always nice to go there for Christmas, see the relations, relax and also get fattened up! I came back to Dublin for New Year’s and went to a friend’s house to ring in the New Year. I don’t think anybody bothers going to town any more for New Year’s in Dublin. People here just avoid the hassle and exorbitant prices by having house parties instead.

Note to reader: you can stop reading now if you don't want to hear me whinge about Ireland...

I haven’t noticed much change here, except things are more expensive. €1.45 for a 500m bottle of water in a SPAR shop in town! Are ya jokin me? I know overheads and wages are high in Ireland but I think those water companies are making a killing here!

I read recently on the RTE news website: “The latest figures from the Department of Finance show that there was an exchequer surplus of €2.265bn in 2006, which was €415m more than the €1.85bn surplus expected.” It’s amazing that the government has so much money floating around and the country is still in a shit state, with crap health care and public transport systems, not to mention the astronomical levels that house prices have risen to!

I also read that the number of American tourists visiting Ireland has risen to pre September 11th levels. It’s nice to see this news, however, I’m surprised that the sheer cost of things in Ireland hasn’t put people off! Ireland is a great destination but the greedy hospitality industry is making it less attractive to visit by charging such extravagant prices!