![\"Chinese,](\"https:\/\/theball.tv\/common\/images\/2002\/china\/weihai\/ch_yantai_eggs.jpg\")
\nSome things just leave a bad taste in the mouth<\/p>\n
\nSome things just leave a bad taste in the mouth<\/p>\n
With only 4 days to go ’til the Opening Ceremony of the World Cup 2002 Japan\/Korea, the ball finally reaches the other side of this 7000 mile wide continent. Holy Smoke, the sea air is welcome since our last sniff of English Channel air, the recent soup of Beijing air, oh yeah, and the self inflicted tab smoking. I can hardly believe that Chris, the ball and I, have made it this far and with only a short ferry trip over the Yellow Sea to the start of a month of football heaven in Korea and Japan, to go. So flicking through the Weidong Ferry Co. brochure we decide to treat ourselves to a Royal Class cabin for the 17 hour ride. “Not so fast, oh World Cup travellers….<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
…you must go to the passenger service and check it’s OK for you to travel with us, then check with Police that leaving on last day of your Chinese visa is OK”. No plobrem we say, with the aid of our new found Chinese friend Maggie. Two buildings and one hour later we return to the ticket office with the OK from both authorities, only to find that we are still refused tickets on account of the Chinese ferry company worrying that the Korean customs\/immigration folk would not let any foreigners in that arrive by boat during the World Cup!<\/p>\n
But we not hooligan…<\/p>\n
OK, but dutch nutter was refused entry, spend 8 days on our boat and try to kill himself.<\/p>\n
Hmmmm… nice?!<\/p>\n
Flying OK but sea no good.<\/p>\n
[Borrocks] We really need to travel by sea.<\/p>\n
Not possible.<\/p>\n
To cut a long, 5 hour story short, Maggie, her father, the British Embassy in Beijing with Chris and I, had no joy, but, for the second time on our trip, we made a concession to our surface travel and scored a beautiful top right 40 yard goal as we sped up our journey against time and booked two air tickets to Seoul.<\/p>\n
Colin and John from the British Embassy also told us that we may still have plobrems at Yantai airport. But why we say. This is China, comes the reply. Well, tomorrow 3pm we will find out.<\/p>\n
During all these negotiations my blood pressure certainly rose and, no doubt, this heavy handed approach to security will provoke and not deter the possibility of violence over the World Cup. Here’s to hoping that patience and football will prevail and that the media don’t fuel the borrocks which tars all football fans with the brush of the warriors. (Wise er… word type things, mate, ed.)<\/p>\n
Michael Owin, David Beckerham, China loves you.<\/p>\n
Well it’s ‘down on the beach’ for a little expert filming and football for me!<\/p>\n
Later, Phil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\nSome things just leave a bad taste in the mouth<\/p>\n
With only 4 days to go ’til the Opening Ceremony of the World Cup 2002 Japan\/Korea, the ball finally reaches the other side of this 7000 mile wide continent. Holy Smoke, the sea air is welcome since our last sniff of English Channel air, the recent soup of Beijing air, oh yeah, and the self inflicted tab smoking. I can hardly believe that Chris, the ball and I, have made it this far and with only a short ferry trip over the Yellow Sea to the start of a month of football heaven in Korea and Japan, to go. So flicking through the Weidong Ferry Co. brochure we decide to treat ourselves to a Royal Class cabin for the 17 hour ride. “Not so fast, oh World Cup travellers….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china"],"geo":{"latitude":37.526336700000001656007952988147735595703125,"longitude":122.0436858999999998331986716948449611663818359375,"description":null},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2002\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}