Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Great Firewall

First impressions of China - fantastic. Great food, a nice atmosphere of bustle and while still being really chill and a great little hostel in Urumqi.

And then - I tried to blog back to all of you.

It turns out www.wanderinggeneticist.blogspot.com is a really scary site aimed to promote riots, raping and pillaging and otherwise subversive behaviour because my lowly travel blog is blocked by the 'Great Firewall'.

Okay, it's not like I drew attention of Hu Jintao and he stamped the 'Block' form...all of blogspot.com hosted sites are blocked.

How am I blogging right now, you ask? I hacked that shizz.

No - I didn't become a computer hacker in the 2 months I've been away...there are proxy sites I can access my blog with. Except I can't post anymore photos. Sorry!

I thought that for sure I'd have access to a silly travel blog in China...that was until I got to the Chinese border. At the Chinese border there are a whackload of soldiers all standing at attention when the train rolls in. Then, the mount the carriages en masse and spend 10 minutes inspecting each passport (for what - I have NOOOOO idea) and then the customs guy comes in and inspects everything.

The customs dude found my computer and beckoned this lovely Chinese border official to inspect it. She turned it on and went straight to the My Pictures folder.

The first thing she saw - a caricatured photo of Mao (now my fb profile pic). I might have groaned out loud when that happened. And Mao was right next to a picture of Borat. Thankfully, another dude walked by and saw the Mao picture and started laughing and broke the ice.

She then proceeded to go through my pictures one by one....I have about 4000 photos on here. She took particular interest in a picture of a kid in Peru - he was really cute, he just happened to be naked. I was like 'Oh SHIT' again, so I decided to give her a description of all my photos and everywhere I had been.

Finally, when my list of countries that I have visited were exhausted and she was duly impressed, she started to get to my worm gonad pictures. About 2000 of them, and finally gave up...just when she was getting to the good parts!

What the customs officials didn't know was that I am now a smuggler of contraband. Yup, the Lonely Planet (aka - the Bible) is banned in China and I had to smuggle it into the country. So really, the photos were all just a distraction for the real stuff. Man, I'm good...I can bribe AND smuggle now.

1 comment:

  1. Ah Torahhhhh, you crack me up! Benefit of great nation, wtf, worm nads etc. It's a good thing I invested in the upscale depends otherwise I'd have a nasty stain on the office chair... Save the Mao and Borat images, I may use the combination as my new home page. We miss you and love your writing. Brilliant as always. XO

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