Thursday, April 19, 2007

About Beijing

I need to share my experience visiting Beijing. First rule, very difficult to find someone that understand English. Don't try to take Taxi to anywhere if you don't bring the paper with mandarin written of your destination. Also if you take Taxi, be carefull. My first come to Beijing, I've got cheated by Taxi driver. From Airport to Hotel normally 100 Yuan, but they charge me 300 Yuan.
For internet, I've checked few website are banned. Example wordpress.com and wikipedia.org. But if you have VPN to you office, please do so. They won't filter traffic inside tunnel VPN, like IPsec and even PPTP.
If you would like to buy something like souvenir, you should know the price first. Without knowing it, you also can get cheated. Actually not really cheated, for us their price is consider is low, but the right price should be half than the original or even 1/10. I bought some Beijing T-Shirt, originally they offer 120 Yuan, but after negoatiation I could get 12 Yuan. And after I walk to another shop, the other shop offer only 10 Yuan :-))
I have only few experiences about place for buying souvenir. The first one is before Great Wall Badaling gate, and the other place is Wang Fu Jing.
Things are very cheap here, you would like to spend all of your money here :-)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, content filtering in China is very common. Encrypted connections, be it SSL or VPN, are some ways to workaround this problem.

Ibrahim / Ibam said...

Pakai PPTP standar yang nggak pake IPSec, juga bisa lewat di sini. Padahal beberapa box seperti Packeteer bisa melakukan filtering dengan enkapsulasi PPTP/GRE/L2TP.

Anonymous said...

Haa .. baru Beijing, Saya dan beberapa teman malah ketipu di roma bbrpa th lalu. Sama aja ya .. mau asia atau eropa :))

Ibrahim / Ibam said...

Hehehe, iya Pak. Selalu hati-hati di negeri orang.