This was my first visit to an internet café/bar. This one was in a small hotel. There were several rows with more than 50 stations. Each station had an LCD monitor, web cam and headphones. It was a weekday afternoon, only about half of the computers were occupied. There were a few westerners. Most of the people were playing games. There was a bar counter where you could order drinks.
The rate is 4 rmb/h. You pay a deposit of 20 rmb (S$4) and get a card with an ID and a password. When you check out they will deduct from your deposit. I used for less than 30 minutes and was charged 2 rmb (40 cents). I think they charge by blocks of 10 or 15 minutes.
Many sites were blocked, even blogs. I tried several sites whose url contained the word blogspot and got the message ‘the site you are looking for is not available’. So I could not see Victor’s blog or Amai’s.
My friend who has visited many places in China said such cafés were common.
4 comments:
not surprise. china had locked a lot of sites. there are also quite a lots of sites which we cant find from outside china. *for internal use only*
Hiya...U r back! Glad to see you!
Er...My china friends can't view blogspot website, unless they have to dial to another host agent which is very troublesome for them to do so.
I don't know if this site works for Chinese surfers: http://anonymouse.org/
If they can access to this site, they can virtually access any websites from there, because their ISP will not be able to block any sites that's opened WITHIN that website!
Hmm... that explains why I didn't get any comments on my blog from mainland Chinese readers. :) Could one of the reasons for blocking my site be because I put up photos of condoms and sanitary pads on my site? Not likely - I was in Shanghai in Dec 2004. I found that in the bigger bookshops, several educational VCD titles containing instructional sexual material were being sold openly. So it seems to me that China, or at least Shanghai, has opened up quite a lot on sex matters. Maybe she's blocking blogspot sites more because of political reasons instead.
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