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.