When we arrived in China and had a relatively easy time getting through customs we began to think maybe this whole "communist" thing was overrated. Sure there were a few more guard-types around than other places, but it didn't seem out of the ordinary in any way. Until we tried to get onto our website to post a journal entry.

China has what is known as "The Great Firewall" - it blocks access to millions of websites, anything that can possibly say something bad about the government. Apparently they decided ours was one of these. Yet it is a very random selection - while BBC, Wikipedia, and Reuters are all blocked, YouTube, CNN and USA Today are not. In reality, it is not our website specifically that they have an issue with, it is most likely our hosting company, which probably has some users with questionable content.

So that means for you, our unlucky reader, that we will not be able to create our normal easy-on-the eyes content. While there are ways around the firewall that at least allow us to view websites, because of the complexity of how the blog functions we'll be limited to posting by email and hopefully at least putting some links to our pictures and videos to outside sources. When we get to Vietnam in a few weeks we'll go back and update our posts with pictures and videos, do the galleries and maps, etc.

UPDATE: I have since found a way through using anonymizing proxy servers to do just about everything. While it runs considerably slower (and thus makes doing all the little things to make this website work an extra big pain), we can now pretty much do everything except insert pictures into posts.