Burned by the Great Firewall of China...

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5/19/09 12:32pm

Along with adventure travel comes irony. And irony abounds here in our small city of DanYang, China. Everything seems to be going great here as far as teaching, enjoying our city, seeing the other areas of China on the weekends, but last night the internet began to hiccup for a few hours. First we could not get online at all, and then when we did finally get back online it was intermittent, and once it finally seemed to settle down and all was well in cyberspace, suddenly we could no longer even access Google with any confidence.

This morning, the situation has worsened. We can access Google, sometimes, but other sites are blocked and the only real site that is being blocked that I give a damn about is our blog. Just to verify I hopped on my bike and went over to an internet cafe this morning and sure enough, Blogger has been completely blocked here in China for the time being. Ditto YouTube.com...

For some reason, there is no explanation available from anyone of course, we can no longer access the host of our blog, Blogger. I've heard of this happening before we got over here but took the chance and also planned ahead and created our blog on Blogger but have a backup, Travelblog, just in case.

The irony is we can't ask anybody why our blog host is blocked, or any other sites for that matter, because then it would be apparent that we are trying to access forbidden sites here in China. Duh.

So I will be sending out an update soon to everyone I think is reading our blog and send them over to this blog instead. Maybe things will loosen up in a week or two, maybe they will get more restricted, we honestly have no idea. It's all part of the adventure in the Middle Kingdom.

Talk soon...

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