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/

http://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/china-stuff/china-tech/google-now-in-hk-guess-it-wasnt-just-about-the-money/

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!

Final Exams: There’s only one word I can use to describe these and it’s pretty blunt. Clusterfuck. I have no idea who organizes them, or sets the guidelines, or what, but they need their head examined.

• First of all, I am told a month before finals that I need to prepare a final for my class, that’s cool, a month notice is plenty of time! Except the exam is to be turned in on Tuesday, not cool, Tuesday is three days away.
• The exams must be in some magical Chinese format, which consists of putting them on A3 piece of paper and then messing up my formatting and fonts so that the questions don’t make sense.
• When should I give my exams? No idea. We’ll let you know. Cue me not knowing until a week or two before. Fine, I had to cut my lessons back, but it was enough time to get in a review.
• Three weeks of exams. How do normal universities manage it in one week? Clearly it’s magic. For some reason, students need to hangout on campus for a week or more just waiting to take an exam. Can’t take it early so they can go home and they certainly aren’t studying for a week. The students aren’t busy, the teacher isn’t busy, but they can’t take their exam? What the hell.

Planning Trips: Now that school is finished and most of the students have gone home, this place has turned into a ghost town. All the vendors I’m used to seeing, gone. Restaurants in the backstreet, closed. Supermarket, closing in a few days. Pretty soon, I’m not sure where I’m going to eat!

Fortunately I’m getting out of here. I am ironically heading up north to see some great snowy sights, and eventually down south for some warmth. My friend Tyler will be joining me as well, so it’ll be nice to see an American friend in person rather than a picture or video chat. I’ve spent many hours, researching and trying to organize my vacation, it’s basically all I’ve been doing. So, I’ll post in a couple more days a quick outline of my trip, as soon as I get some things ironed out. Bringing me to my next point.

• Planning trips in a language you know is painful. Planning trips in a language you’re very unfamiliar with and can’t really read is excruciatingly painful.

The Google Tubes: Many people have been asking me what’s going on with Google and China. Truth is, I don’t really know. According to China they have a “very open” internet. But to most non-Chinese, the internet here is quickly becoming an intranet. There are hundreds of blog posts out there speculating on what might happen. But no one really knows. All I do know is that the Great Fire Wall (GFW) is seriously a pain in my ass. It basically blocks popular English sites, ones that most normal Chinese people wouldn’t venture to anyway, as they have their own Chinese clone of the exact same thing. So it really feels like it’s there to isolate the foreigners in the country rather than to protect the citizens.

For instance, the other day my iPhone mail app stopped downloading mail from the Gmail IMAP server. Okay, I’ll troubleshoot it. After a few days, I seriously can’t figure out the problem. Is it my phone? Is it my internet connection at home? Is it my router? Or is it the GFW acting silently in the background? I’m led to believe that its the GFW causing problems, but it’s hard to know, they don’t exactly come out and tell you “hey, the GFW just blocked your data!”.  Fortunately I’ve got a free VPN that’s been working well for me, as well as a few work-a-rounds but when those go down I won’t know what to do. Time will tell.

I think the most frustrating thing was not being able to “Google” anything. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I have this little mental bank, so to speak. It stores things that I just happen to think of and want to look-up online when I get back home. Generally I think of around three things per day, give or take. But my mental bank really only remembers the most recent 4 or 5 “things to google”. So once I finally got a chance to use the internet and check my email on my phone via Starbucks, I couldn’t remember most of the things I wanted to google! I think I need to make a list. Evernote perhaps?

Here’s a quick rundown of things that have happened over the past couple weeks that I didn’t have time to write about or don’t really deserve their own post.

• Installed the WPtouch theme, so my website is beautiful even when you visit from your iPhone, Blackberry, Android phone, etc. I’m really quite impressed with it.
• December 26th – Tianyu finally came back home, his first time back in Xi’an in about 18 months. His parents and friends have all been very happy to see him.
• On New Year’s Eve I had a great time with my friends and cousins at the Park Qin bar. Turns out the Park Qin is the local “laowai” hangout. Guess I’ll have to go back there more often.
• Have become increasingly frustrated with the grading system I’m being forced to use. How is it that in a class based mostly on participation, the final exam is worth 60% of the final grade? This is foolish.
• We’re nearly at the end of the semester, so finals are happening all the time. However they’re severely in need of some organizational help. There are students that have 1 exam at the very end and have to wait nearly two weeks to take the exam. They’ve told me they watch a lot of movies.
• I feel like the lowest teacher on the totem-pole sometimes. I have to work around everyone else’s schedules, yet it’s quite impossible to work around mine.
• My English students thought “Back to the Future” was an awesome movie. It has a great story, and it’s clean, and relatively easy to understand. Yet it’s old enough (1985!) that they probably haven’t ever seen it.
• After Tuesday, 1/12, all I have left to do is grade papers and submit grades. Then I’ll be on vacation until March! I hope to hangout with my friends as well as do a lot of traveling during my vacation. My buddy Tyler will be coming to visit during Spring Festival time, so look for a lot of pictures and blog posts around then.
• Megan Riederer, a close friend of mine, is studying abroad in Spain this semester and already has a good blog started. Meggrblog
• I’ve posted some new pictures in the Photos section of Christmas caroling, our Christmas party, New Year’s eve, and Tianyu’s return to Xi’an.

Cooking Lunch

I’ve been slacking a little bit lately as far as posting relevant updates, so I thought I’d just take a few minutes and write up some things I’ve been thinking about that don’t really deserve their article, so “Things I Didn’t Post”.  Thanks Gizmodo!

– British English. I hate it. No offense to the people that speak it, most of the Brits I’ve met are actually cool people. But why is it that the entire world learns British English when their population is only 60 million compared to the US’s 300 million? Yeah, I know they “invented” it, but still. Teaching phonetics to students who haven’t had any consistency between learning either is a headache. Why doesn’t poor rhyme with lure? Technically it does, but not in America. Why does car sound like it is spelled cah? There’s no “h”! I could go on, but I think you get the drift, at the very least a distinctly American Phonetics books is what I need. But dammit England, loosen your grip on the world, you’re only an island, America can totally take you.

– Google Chrome finally supports extensions! Now, if they only worked half as well as Firefox extensions do.

– Why can’t I find a can of compressed air? It’s so dusty here, I can hear my laptop fans running full bore because they’re dirty. I need to clean them, but so far, I cannot.

– Just started listening to some Christmas music last night, thanks to 30 free Christmas downloads from Amazon MP3 service. Despite my lack of decorations and the lack of snow, I have finally realized it is indeed December.

– I’m very pleased with myself that I’ve been able to expand my food ordering abilities. It’s a quality of life thing, no one enjoys eating cheeseburgers everyday in America, and I don’t enjoy only being able to order Kung Pao Chicken in a restaurant. My mental list of food has quadrupled, but still has a long way to go. Big thanks to Ben Ross over at How to Order Chinese Food dot com. Putting all his PDFs on my iPhone has been fantastically useful.

– I can actually read some Chinese! No, I can’t read a book, or the newspaper, but I can make out some easy sentences, or some of the words in a sentence. Hey, it’s a start! So I’ve been trying to post at least one tweet in Chinese everyday, just to practice. So far so good!

Lunch