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Headed for Tokyo in the morning. Will be there through the end of the week. For being a few days of vacation I’ll actually be quite busy with various appointments. Hopefully I’ll be able to take some good pictures and post them here and/or on Flickr.

Tonight was the 6th night of the last 9 that I’ve eaten dinner out. This time was a dinner marking the arrival of two new staff and the departure of one. The food was apparently Macao-style soup. I’m not sure what you would call this in English, but you basically get a little pot with a flame under it and put various vegetables and meats inside cooking them in a boiling broth. After a couple minutes you pick the stuff out with chopsticks and dip in a sauce and eat. While everyone was saying the food was Macao-style I swear I had exactly the same thing a few weeks ago and everyone was calling it Taiwanese food. Anyway, it’s actually pretty good (despite how it looks in the pictures) and you get to pick and mix your own sauces for dipping.

Looking forward to the weekend already…except that I’ve got another dinner on Saturday night!

I am not a big fan of J-pop artists. In fact I am not a big follower of any particular group from any particular country. But a friend of mine invited me to see Ayumi Hamasaki’s concert in Shanghai tonight. Ayumi Hamasaki is one of the most popular and famous Japanese pop singers of the past 10 years. She didn’t disappoint and put on a really good show to the delight of the mixed crowd. She is apparently quite popular in China and I would say at least 80% of the audience was local and the rest was mostly Japanese. I haven’t been to a live concert in quite a long time and actually quite enjoyed it. It reminded me of a Las Vegas show at times. Unlike a lot of other young popular Japanese artists, Ayumi can actually sing and she belted out quite a few big numbers. The pictures here a not so good as they were taken with the camera on my mobile phone, but you get the idea of what it was like.

I’ve been pretty busy the last few days including the evenings. Four nights in a row of eating out and not getting home until 10 or 11 at night. And once again tonight I have plans. I usually like the chance to get out of the house but five nights in a row is a bit much. I am looking forward to not having anything particular to do tomorrow night.

For whatever reason I (and probably everyone else living in China) am not able to access my Gmail account since last night. If anyone is trying to reach me you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll get back to you.

Not only is Gmail being blocked right now, Google (including even google.com.cn) is also completely blocked for some reason. I wonder what Google did to get the government angry? Or is this just one of those temporary blockages that no one can explain and mysteriously goes away after a few days?

I’ve had good success with Gmail over the past year since moving to China. Until now even when Google.com or Gmail.com have been blocked I have always been able to download my email using a regular email client like Thunderbird. This time – no dice. No access at all and no idea when the situation might improve.

>>> UPDATE: It seems this was a problem with OpenDNS. I turned it off and now both Gmail and Google work. I can’t believe OpenDNS would block Google (that would be suicidal) so I am guessing it was actually due to a conflict between my provider here in China and OpenDNS. China Telecom probably doesn’t like people using DNS other than their own. Who knows.