Finally, classes are completed, exams are done and graded. We’re on winter break. Most of my friends in the states have finished their break and are back in school already. We on the other hand are just starting our break. If you read my post about Christmas, you’d already know that it’s not a big holiday around here, so they don’t make it a point to finish fall semester before Christmas. But the great thing about our winter break is that it’s six weeks long! Amazingly most students I talked to said that over the break, they simply stay at home. I don’t know what they do there, watch TV, hangout with family or friends. But staying home for six weeks sounds pretty boring. So I’m going to make the best of my 6 weeks and do as much traveling and cool things as I can. Prepare for some great posts and pictures in the coming 2 months! Before that happens, I’ll reflect a bit on the last couple weeks.

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.