Be careful. there can also be mudslides when really wet weather.

belle,

do you know which train station? the one cricketbird is referring to is the north station. actually not a bad area.

I assumed you meant the main one on south of beijing lu.

be vary wary of random people posting numbers for airline tickets. there have been many scams. there is no way of verifying if the cards handed out in the street with cheap flight tickets are genuine.

use websites like www.elong.net, www.ctrip.com, www.qunar.com or walk into a real ticket shop on the street.

a jailbroken iphone can connect to itunes, download applications etc.

Basically you can do everything you were able to do before but with a whole lot extra. All sorts of applications, utilities etc that are not in the apple store can be downloaded through cydia but you still have full access to the official apple store.

Doing a software update will undo the jailbreak so if you need your phone to be jailbroken in order to unlock it to use on another network then its best to postpone an update until the hackers have come up with the next jailbreak fix which is usually very quick.

Currently the latest firmware update 3.01 is compatible with the jailbreak solution for firmware 3.0 but requires a little amount of knowledge to get this right.

Google jailbreak 3.01 for more info or if you are not confident doing it yourself there are loads of places in Xiaoximen that will do this for a small fee.

most iphones are sold locked in which case the only way to unlock is to jailbreak first.
If you're lucky enough to have bought your iphone from Hong Kong or Italy then it is probably already unlocked and you won't need to jailbreak.

Not sure what you mean by the latter diminishes the overall function. If anything the reverse is true. Jailbroken iphones can do everything a non-jailbroken iphone can do and much much more.