Baoxing Hotel Foshan

... before we became too familiar. We recovered at a coffee bar and 7 eleven with a couple of slurpies and would be retail threapy but sarah packed too much stuff alreadly... WE all told her so. now were sucking on a sugar cane stick and she insists she feels alot better, but thats what she said this morning about the 'fresh' air, and it indeed is ''fresh''! pictures to come, wish sarah well, the poor little dumpling...

We caught a train from HK to Guangzhou on the 4th. Its a very hectic city. Lots of people, bikes, cars and buses. people riding bike on the road with ridiculous things tied to the back. we are staying on an island in the city named shamian. its very pretty, but a true tourist hub. our hostel is lovely. we thought that we were truely livinh the high life until we visited a hotel across the road that ...

Enjoyed our meetings and colleagues. Went to dinner at a typical Guangdong/Canton restaurant. Menu was very creative. Plenty of exotics - baby pigeon, sting ray, fish guts, beetles, snakes, chicken feet. Was a bit naseous, but likely because of jet lag.

Arrive after 11 pm and my company screws up the pick-up. 20 guys trying to sell me sim-cards are chasing me around baggage claim because I'm clearly not moving out. After an hour and deciding I won't be picked up, I bee-line for the first cab in lineup. The ...

Guangzhou was thankfully pretty uneventful except for this one little episode I thought I'd share...

Because of the 'swine flu' or H1N1 virus most of the border control areas scan your body as you walk through with your passport. I wouldn't have even noticed this had it not been for Ollie getting pulled aside for his very 'high temperature'. He was immediatley carted off while I had to go through immigration and wait for ...

Arriving to Guangzhou late at night was like being involved in a futuristic / sci-fi movie. Tiered freeways, 6 lanes wide weaved in and out of each other and highrise buildings – I expected the bus to hang a massive right and drive up a building at any moment – but then I realised that I was just tired and my imagination running away with me. Highly voyeuristic, peering into ...

... for the bill we were astonished at the price. Nearly 500 yuan - over $60usd!! We were wishing we had ordered off the menu. When we left we took a look at the white tigers that were in the atrium beside the buffet.

Back in our room, we got on the internet, only to find out it is true that you cannot access facebook or twitter from mainland china. And it's also impossible to stream US television programming from the network websites.

... so proud as was he at the schools ability to come number one out of two in this heaving metropolis that is Haizhou a town which has at least 5 roads and 3 "canals", I'll talk more about them later, and we were number one middle school in the town. So a celebration meal was in order. The parents of the students paid for the meal for what in the end was for about 600 people. We were given a celebration fireworks display just minutes after sitting down whilst it was still light ...

... lowering their price more, and you still get basically what you want. An extended version of this tactic bumps you up to another, more expensive, model of what you're buying. This part of bargaining is tricky; sometimes it's wise to feign interest in something similar to what you really want and work your way around to the real deal. On a piece of technology, a printer or juicer or other such device, we might cave in at this point. But these are postcards we're dealing ...

... Zenhai Tower and Yuexiu Park. After being dropped back at the hotel I ventured out for a walk by myself and arrived at one of the first McDonald's in China. Ordered a Big Mac meal by pointing at the placemats, did the calculations in my head, and came up with the theory that a Big Mac meal was about the same price in Australian dollars anywhere in the world. Had a surreal moment when sitting outside McDonald's I realised that I was listening to John Farnham singing.