The Little Blog That Could

It should have occurred to me that this blog might not be feasible.  Not because I'm lazy, and not because I'd run out of things to write about (while the first may be true, the second most certainly will not be).  It should have occurred to me, having spent almost 3 months in this back-ass-wards country, and way more time paying attention to its back-ass-wards-ness from afar, that I may have technical problems keeping this blog up to date.  Sure enough, not only does the Chinese government deem it necessary to censor Google searches, and Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos, but apparently a blog from yours truly fits the bill as well.  As much as I'd like to take credit for raising the suspicions of Hu Jintao and his cronies, it's safe to say that they just have a blanket-block on Google's blogger.  Cause, you know, that'll really show those pansy-ass-liberal engineers from California.  You go, Hu.

Nearing the point at which I just accepted my blog's fate as a one hit wonder, several friends proposed the idea of using a VPN to get around the censorship.  Without going into too much detail for those even more technologically illiterate than me (very hard to do), a VPN is a program that allows computers to remotely connect to other servers.  In other words, I can log onto the internet as if I were in the US (or anywhere else the VPN has servers...in this case, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and other countries), even though I'm in China.  I can't imagine that the government hasn't found a way around this yet, but, alas, they haven't.  So here I am, in China, making the government's nightmare scenario (free speech and access to information) come true.  This is truly doing God's work, I tell you.

The blog survives!  Forward march...

Before my last stint in China, in 2008, someone told me the following: "If you spend a day in China, you'll want to write a book about it.  If you spend a few weeks in China, you'll maybe want to write an article about it.  If you spend a few months in China, you won't really have anything to write anymore; it will all be a blur too difficult to synthesize into a cogent piece of writing."

I experienced virtually that exact progression during my summer here in 2008.  And after spending my first day here today, I realize that it's going to be tricky to resist the urge to report the many oddities that crossed my path in a given day.  It would take too long.  So you'll have to bear with what is probably going to turn out to be a pretty random blog indeed.  Otherwise, we would have chaos.  And we can't have that.

So let's start with a few pictures:

My guess is that isn't what anyone was expecting.  There will be time for tall buildings, throngs of people shorter than I am, and fabulous vistas masked by smog.  All of that will come.  For now, we have....potato chips.  To be specific, two of the 10 or so flavors of Lays I came across while walking through the massive supermarket near my hotel.  None of the flavors, were, well, normal.  These were probably my two favorites.  What's even funnier is that this isn't even really a good example Chinglish, where the translation is nowhere near the intended meaning.  Like "Man and wife play ping pong in bedroom" standing in for characters that mean "Beef and broccoli."  With these chips, though,  The characters are translated almost exactly into English.  So you're looking at the kinds of things that Chinese folks like their potato chips to taste like, or at least what the friendly people at Lays think they do.  Who am I to judge?

I, for one, had a Subway sandwich, a Budweiser, and ice cream from Cold Stone for dinner this evening.  Proud to be an Amurrican.

LGA

I'm sitting in LaGuardia Airport in New York, having arrived 3 hours early for my flight to Detroit where I will connect to Shanghai.  I figured, international flight, so get to the airport early, yeah?  Turns out, LGA doesn't really do international; I almost got through the entire check-in and security process without showing anybody my passport and Chinese visa.  So a quick word to the wise: flying internationally through LGA, even if it involves a layover, may be the way to go.

I figure I might take advantage of the extra time before my flight to start my first blog.  I never really fancied myself a blogger.  I love to write, and have always chided myself for not doing it more often.  But blogging always seemed like too much of a hassle.  I always felt that to begin a blog meant committing to posting as often as possible, even if there was nothing in particular to post about.  And, let's be honest, even if you assume that people are interested in reading what I have to say, is there really a way to write something that would cater to all of my friends and family?  Ultimately, I've arrived at the conclusion that none of that really matters, much.  The whole point of a blog is to make it whatever you want it to be, right?

And if there was ever an opportunity to give this blog thing a chance, it would be now: the beginning of my crazy, exciting, scary, educational, and potentially life-changing adventure to China.  And here we hit another snag: I am such a cliché.  Look at me!  I'm an overprivileged white guy, unsure of what I want to do with my life, unclear about where my place in the world is, on my way to China to "find myself," and I'm going to keep in touch with my friends and family by waxing poetic about my experience there, and how it will change my entire future.  That's not really what I'd like this thing to become, and I don't think anyone else does either.

So how about this?  I'll just write for me -- about living in China, the people I meet there and the places I get to see, about the language, my pursuit of fluency, and the absurdity of Chinglish, about dealing with what I expect to be a fair amount of homesickness and the natural process of learning to live on the other side of the world from all of my friends and family.  With a little luck, some of it will be of interest to some of you.  The only things I can promise: my sledgehammer wit, a plethora of run-on sentences, and a few choice kernels of this adventure onto which I am about to embark.  (And, I guess, as I look over that last promise, I can promise to never end a sentence with a preposition).

Just overheard a few teenagers sitting near me at my gate talking about speaking Chinese.  Maybe I'm not the only one here preparing to be a stranger in a strange land....