All things Chinese

After the best nights sleep in over a week I feel like a new woman, and am ready to start a new day. The plan today is to buy a lonely planet guide book as you are not allowed to bring any books into China we didn't want to start off on the wrong foot so we adhered to the rules. The guy on reception has given us directions to the biggest book shop in the world and is pretty sure we will get it there. It's quite a long way from here but the tubes are pretty easy to follow so we set off on our quest. This place is crazy, they have motorised bicycles as well as mopeds that are all allowed to drive on the pavement and at times I think I'd be safer walking in the road. We disembark at children's palace and as soon as we get off we are instantly at the bookstore. It is huge, and I wonder how we are going to find anything in here even if we were Chinese. We have a few attempts at asking a couple of the staff if they speak English but no one here does. I try and use my initiative and ask someone in the English book section if they can help and we show him a copy of the lonely planet in Chinese and explain exactly what we want, but after he's spoken to a couple of people they tell us they don't have the book or anything similar in English and they only have the likes of Jane Austin. After nearly 2 hours we admit defeat and after a bite to eat we head home.
When I explain to the guy in reception he says he can order it on line and it will arrive tomorrow so we go with that and place the order. It's really strange how they're so advanced with so many things and yet are so restricted at the same time. Tonight the television reception is down and since being here the Internet has been rubbishy, or so I think. When I mention it in reception he tells me they have no Facebook or google here and if I'm using this as my search engine I need to change it to Yahoo.
We head out and buy a few bits at the supermarket and tonight cook a bit of dinner before grabbing an early night.Read more