There’ve been quite a few things going on here in China, and in Xi’an for that matter that seem perhaps trivial for their own spell-binding post, but put them all together and I guess we’ve got something. So let’s get started.
Shoes
The shoes I brought here are starting to get rather worn out with all the walking I do nearly every day. So I decided I’d look into buying a new pair of shoes, the Chinese
brands I’ve seen like Li-Ning, and Erke looked like they had some cool stuff. No dice. I wear size 12-13 depending on brand, which equates to 46-47 in Chinese (Euro sizes), and the Chinese brands don’t carry or even make anything larger than size 44. So I started looking at all the shoe stores, turns out, I’m a freak of nature. I really began to feel the pain my good friend Chris endures finding his size 15 shoes. Most of the shoe stores didn’t just have the shoes sitting out in boxes so I’d have to ask if they had my size, which was almost universally no. Pretty soon you just get tired of asking, and think “just show me what you DO have in 46 and let me pick from those!”. Long story short, I managed to find a pair of New Balance shoes in size 45 that must’ve ran big, because they fit nicely. Green, ¥327? Sold.
Phone
Finally got data service on my iPhone, now I can use it as intended. If only the GPS function would work correctly, it either thinks I’m in Beijing or Hong Kong, I’m in neither. But I can check twitter and tweet on the go, which is kinda the point.
Camera
I just noticed that CHDK works on my Canon SD780 now. Awesome. Except that it totally blew my mind. I have no idea what half of the stuff is, but if I figure it out I guess I can take pretty awesome pictures with my point-and-shoot cam.
Spring
The spring I’m used to as of the last five years was usually marked with flooding and college girls breaking out the skirts. Well it’s spring here too, but there’s no flooding. There are college girls in skirts though. One of the first things I wanted to do this spring was grill out. What’s better than a grill party with a lot of food, frisbee and beer? Well the lack of a grill kinda shot that down, but my American colleagues and I did the next best thing. We went to nice barbecue place, and ordered 100+ sticks of barbecued beef, lamb, and chicken along with a case of beer. Mission accomplished.
谷歌 (Google)
Well it looks like Google has held true to it’s word. Within the last 24 hours they (Google) have elected to stop censoring search results for google.cn, traffic to the Chinese site is now redirected to google.com.hk, the Hong Kong site. Now you might say, “China and Hong Kong are the same place”, well that’s only partially true. if you refer back to my post about Hong Kong, you’d realize that Hong Kong enjoys the full, wide-open, censor-free internet, as compared to the intranet we have in the mainland. Google has now left it up to the Great Firewall of China to do the censoring and will not be doing any censoring on their own.
Read more:
http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2010/03/23/in-brief-googles-china-move/
In all honesty, I applaud this move, someone needs to bring light to the bullshit going on with censoring the internet here. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the censoring is so sporadic, and broad in what they do and do not block. For instance, Flickr = unblocked, Picasa=blocked, wtf? Most things blocked by the GFW simply have a Chinese clone that takes it’s place. Facebook? We’ve got Renren (Chinese for “everybody”). Youtube? We’ve got “Youku”. Twitter? Well, I haven’t seen a very good clone, but fortunately we can still reach twitter through mirrors. But on the other hand, we (read expats in China) are bracing for the fallout. China isn’t happy about this but we have to wait and see if they decide to retaliate.
I’m currently keeping my eyes on the Google China Status page, to see what gets blocked next. If Gmail gets blocked, I’m going to be quite unhappy, and then shelling out some cash for an American VPN. I’d be totally okay if they decided to block the ads though, that wouldn’t bother me in the least!
Coming up…
Coming up I’m planning on detailing some of the food here, including typical meals, snacks, comparing the Chinese version to the American version, and detailing some of the strange (yet wonderfully delicious!) snacks. I’ve also uploaded some new photos to the photo albums, check ‘em out!
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