The Great Firewall

Oh China… Such immense natural beauty everywhere you look and, with ancient temples adorning the highest of peaks, it may hard to fault this country but it took about a month before I started to enjoy being immersed in organized chaos.

Had I known what Chinese New Year was really like before coming to China, I would have either gone to Russia or burned two weeks in Beijing laying low until the Chinese Spring Festival was over.  The idea of coming to China during the Chinese New Year sounded like a great alternative plan after I had to leave Mongolia before their New Year Spring Festival started but, in reality, it’s a horrible idea.

There were some initial growing pains to suffer through while getting used to life in China.  Making my way through security at the border with Mongolia was quick but we sat there in a waiting room for four hours until the undercarriages were swapped to accommodate the narrower rails in China.

Fortunately, I was able to put this time to good use.  I was aware of “The Great Firewall” but I completely forgot to install a VPN app before leaving Mongolia.   The China firewall is huge pain in the ass and it blocks pretty much everything hosted in North America.  Within half an hour of arriving in China, I already really disliked being here.

Here’s the struggle I went through:

Step 1: Download a VPN App.  Nope!  Google Play Store is blocked

Step 2: Google an alternative way to download a VPN app.  Nope!  Google and all other Google services are blocked.

Step 3: Try Baidu to search.  Nope! Baidu is the Chinese search engine and it does a very poor job at translating anything and it filters out almost all of the content I was searching for.

Step 4: Try yahoo.com, duckduckgo.com, etc.  Only Bing works.  Ugh!

Most Android APK download sites were blocked so it took me an hour before I was finally able to find and install a VPN app.  I was then finally able to access certain things like Facebook, Google Maps, and WhatsApp.

It was about 1:30am when the train was ready to continue the Trans Siberian journey.  It being January with not many travelers, I had an entire berth to myself so I threw my bags on the opposite bed and slept comfortably the rest of the night on my way to Beijing.