I'm giving this site one more chance (to be fair, I think it's the computer I'm using that's making all the troubles, but I'd rather blame somebody else), partly because this blog has got some awesome things that we saw in it, and partly because I'm going to be annoyed if I can't get everything written out. I'm really hoping that I can get this to go onto the database as being in Datong - because everything I've read has given the city a bad review and I want to give it a bit of a better review. Honestly, the city's [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Still having issues with apostrophes on this site for some reason, bear with me... Today was just a travel day. It was a bit less comfortable than I had thought, but it was actually a pretty awesome day altogether, so nothing to complain about. Our train left Pingyao at 11:45 (in theory at least), so we had time to go and grab some breakfast at a place just down the road that does really good Western food - the Chinese food here seems to be of dubious character, so finding good toast that hasnt been sweetened beyond recognition is [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Today we travelled out to the Wang household. The Wangs were the family that set up the banking industry in Pingyao, so they were ridiculously rich. Unbelievably rich actually, the residence is absolutely massive. Im pretty sure its actually bigger than the Forbidden City, and if it isn , theres definitely more buildings in there than the Forbidden City. At their peak, there were four different generations living in the complex, which was so big they needed to build a bridge to get across to the other side of the house. When empress Cixi travelled through Pingyao, sh [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody Still having computer problems, so there will be no photos again until we get to Datong at the earliest - I don know whats going on, it downloaded some updates automatically and now everything is stuffed. I love computers. Especially old ones. Anyway, not to worry. Weve had adventures. I was reading another blog on this site and they were talking about catching a train in third class in Thailand, and the different tribulations they went through. After reading that I realised that Im a complete wuss and that I shouldn be complaining about our trip - and Im [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Weather here is not so good, but we’re carrying on undeterred. Xian is a beautiful city, I like it better than Beijing, although I think I’ve given Beijing a much better chance to grate on my nerves, I’m sure that if I stayed here for a long time I’d find things to complain about - in fact, if I was here for a week in this weather I’d probably leave it as soon as I could - but there’s awesome stuff here. I’m just trying to think of what I did today - I’m actually writing this days later [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Our holiday from our holiday starts today - well last night actually, but that was just sitting on a train from Beijing so that doesn’t really count. We got a nice train out though - we got a soft sleeper and they’re actually comfortable and clean - a nice break from reality! We had three of us too, Lloyd had to work, so we had the whole room to ourselves. The bottom bunk is a kind of lounge to sit on, so we sat up for a while having a chat and then just went to sleep and woke [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Today we finally made it to the great wall. We were supposed to go a fortnight ago, but Sue was sick. Then we were supposed to go the following Thursday, but the big poo of a national day got in the way again, so we put it off till today, so it's been a long time coming, and to be honest I half expected we'd never make it. The part of the wall we went to is called Simatai, which, according to the website, is celebrated for its steepness, queerness, and intactness . It is definitely intact, and its [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody! Today, we went for a wander around the CBD today, around where Kate works. It's pretty cool, a few skyscrapers are going up now, one that is so huge it's incredible, and of course, the rather ridiculous CCTV Building. If you look at it from the right angle there's a building you can see through it that was built at about the same time, but apparently, when they were celebrating the opening of the CCTV building, there was a stray firecracker that flew into the neighbouring building (that was about a month away from completion), and burnt it out! [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody. Something pretty cool happened today - one of those moments when all the shame and embarrassment of hanging around Lloyd pays off. We got free tickets to the China Open. And not just cheap tickets - centre court tickets from 11:00 to 7:00PM - we got to see Djokovic, Venus Williams, Davina Safina, and we saw Roddick on one of the other courts - it was awesome. And even better - cans of Heineken were only RMB10/can, so life was good. I can't think of much to write though unfortunately - it's basically all we did all day - [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody Electricity issues again, plus late nights, more excuses, but here's the next blog! After all the excitement (or not) of National Day, we slept in a bit this morning, once again we had plans of going to BaDaChu, but that didn't pan out, so we waited until about 11:30 to decide to go to the Beijing Zoo, even though we've only heard terrible things about it. It's easy to get there now too becuase they've just opened line 4 (in the last week), which goes right outside the zoo, so it was pretty simple finding our way there, before [View Full Entry]

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