No news is good news?

I arrived in Beijing several days ago, and will spend a week here before traveling around by train for 3 weeks visiting other places in China. Several things of note right off -- Beijing is a lot more developed than Manila, the air's none too clean (to put it mildly), and there is strict government censorship. Currently more than 2,700 websites are blocked in China, including Google.com, Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, and this one -- Blogspot.com.(I am able to blog from within China, however, because I've set up a VPN, virtual private network, for about $13 for one month in order to get around China's Great Firewall.) At the hotel where I'm staying in downtown Beijing, it's possible to get BBC and CNN on the television. It's interesting that every time these stations report on the protests in Hong Kong the screen suddenly goes black, yet the news reports on the terrible smog during the Beijing Marathon yesterday were not censored.Smoggy day in the city -- afternoon view from my Beijing hotel room.

Photo from earlier today at the Great Wall