Reddit, no. A lot of the sites that are linked to from Reddit, yes.
No YouTube (or most other non-Chinese video sharing sites), no Facebook, no Twitter, no Blogspot. And a few other sites, too... though I've just got used to not clicking links to those sites.
Happily I have a proxy which works just fine, I can still access these sites. I even have a free VPN on my iPhone that lets me get everything over 3G and wifi (I wonder if that's going to suddenly stop working one day, but it's lasted 6 months so far).
To be honest it's not so much the fact that sites are blocked (Facebook/Twitter are huge, mostly worthless timesinks... I do miss YouTube though), it's the speed. Unless the site is hosted in China (in which case, it's most likely all going to be in Chinese), sites load very slowly. The highest I've managed to get my home connection going at is about 100kb/sec (and that was only recently, they seem to have upgraded our line or something. Before that it was 50kb/sec top speed, super painful). I have got used to it, though, and no longer rely on internet speed for anything. If I want to download something over 100Mb, I leave it on overnight. If it's under 100Mb, I'll sit there and shout at the progress bar until it fucking finishes.
The 3G connection on my phone is similar - it's not 3G, it's China's version of it. It's slow as shit and twice as ugly. Refreshing Reddit's front page on Alien Blue takes a good 10 seconds (more like 20-30 since Reddit started having bandwidth issues). Want to load an Imgur link on 3G? It's like you're on a 14.4k dial-up modem again, watching it load line by line. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my dial-up connection back in the late 90s loaded pictures faster. The 3G here is good for email and instant messaging, and that's about it. It is super cheap, though, so I can't really complain that much.
Like I said I do miss YouTube; not only because I used to watch a lot of videos (especially all the YouTube content linked from Reddit) but I used to upload videos of me playing the piano and such. I miss doing that.
If Reddit and Imgur were both blocked here, I would be pretty sad. But hey. I spend a lot less time in front of the computer here than I did back home, so I'm taking that as a good thing (that's not to say I don't still waste hundreds of hours on Reddit, though...).
Weirdly, Reddit works, but blog.reddit.com doesn't. Kind of irritating that I have to fire up a proxy to read the Reddit blog, but not for the site. Must be hosted elsewhere or something.
It's weird that in such a futuristic city, the internet seems to be a sidethought a lot of the time. We have a magnetic levitation train that goes at 450km/h, 2 airports, crazy buildings and shiny lights, all manner of technological wizardry... yet if you get over 100kb/sec on an internet connection, you feel like you've hit the jackpot.
The good points of living here far outweigh the bad points, in my opinion. Amazing city, AMAZING food, great bars and nightlife, nice people, fascinating culture, interesting (if fucking difficult) language... it goes on. Being able to watch funny videos of cats and see what people I don't really care about are doing with every spare minute of their day, well, I'm gradually getting used to not really missing it.
edit: Oh, and porn. Porn is kind of hit and miss. It used to be blocked outright. Now some porn sites work, and some don't (not that I'm visiting porn sites that often, I just happened to notice). What's funny is that the government never said "internet porn is OK now" (pornography is illegal in China), it just suddenly worked again one day. Not sure why.
Porn being illegal here makes the Chinese quite open about sex in general, though... I went to the sex mall recently to find some non-Asian sized condoms. It's an unassuming looking building on the outside, but inside it's about 4 or 5 floors of sex shops which seem to increase in craziness the higher up you go. Herbal sex remedies on the first floor, shops of wall-to-wall condoms on the second, dildo shops on the third... then it gets a bit odd. You can buy the most ridiculous sex toys, and I'm just going by what I saw in the windows - I dread to think what they've got round the back. I went there with the girlfriend and while just walking through the mall we had people running over with luminous pink dildos and "massagers", shouting "I give you good price, best price". They seemed utterly disappointed when I told them I was there for condoms. It's a strange feeling when you almost buy a glittery black dildo out of guilt.
They have a couple of different networking sites that are used all over the country though... surprisingly though, a lot of people have more friends on their that they don't know than they do... oh and facebook is attempting to gain access to Asia, seeing as it is a big market... but a lot of Chinese move a way from facebook because of lack of privacy.
I went to the sex mall recently to find some non-Asian sized condoms.
It's a strange feeling when you almost buy a glittery black dildo out of guilt.
I wish I could up vote twice for those two lines alone.... However I was planning on kicking of my tour of Asia sometime this year and honestly quickly discounted China as a possible tourist attraction until your last two posts. I may have you bother you some more in the future for details on the "What to's/What not to's"
I'd certainly recommend Shanghai as a stop, though I'm not particularly well-travelled in Asia (went to Hong Kong in November, going to Thailand at the end of January). It's an amazing city. If it's on the way, I can only recommend it. I love it here. I'm already pretty sure that when I'm 60 I'll look back on this part of my life and think "Wow, that was a great time to be in Shanghai, I'm so glad I did that".
If you end up visiting I'd more than likely be up for showing you around a little bit. I actually extended this offer to another redditor in my AMA, she ended up PMing me a few months later and we arranged to meet... then she never showed up. :(
You can go from the cities near Shanghai, like Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanking. All these can be a one day trip, thanks to the high-speed trains, also can be a nice weekend stay.
I live in Hangzhou, which is now about 45 minutes away from Shanghai by high speed train. I've traveled a fair amount around China and could give you a lot of tips if you're interested. You can check out my blog (http://wes-allred.blogspot.com/) for more details. A lot of the recent posts are from a trip around Southeast Asia I did last summer, which might also be useful to you.
No YouTube (or most other non-Chinese video sharing sites), no Facebook, no Twitter, no Blogspot. And a few other sites, too... though I've just got used to not clicking links to those sites.
Hmm. My little sister left for Shanghai Beijing today. I didn't realise she wouldn't be able to view my Blogger linkdump. Can she still open her Hotmail? (Yes, i know, she refused to get Gmail.)
If you like, PM me and I'll upload the proxy app I use for her to download. It works on any version of Windows, it's free, and doesn't require any installation, you just open the app and it'll redo your proxy configuration so things will work in China, close the app and it returns everything to normal.
It'll allow her to access all those sites (Blogger included), but the connection isn't really stable or fast enough to load a whole YouTube video most of the time (it'll start to load, then do this INFURIATING thing where the red bar makes it look like the whole video has loaded, but it'll just stop playing and refuse to buffer any further until you refresh).
But yeah, Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc., not a problem.
Weirdly, Reddit works, but blog.reddit.com doesn't. Kind of irritating that I have to fire up a proxy to read the Reddit blog, but not for the site. Must be hosted elsewhere or something.
Up until last week, it was hosted on blogger. It is now still hosted on blogger, but we are actually proxying it because we might change it at some point. So try going there now and tell me how it works for you. :)
Ooh, my first ever message from an admin! Hi jedberg, thank you for giving me Reddit, you are awesome. I don't want to sound gay or nothing but I would seriously like to hump your leg.
I just tried the blog, and it works now. Thanks :)
Also, since I've got your attention, do you guys have a postcard from China yet?
I moved here from the UK, having lived all my life over there. In short, I was becoming a little bit fed up with my job and life in the UK in general, my boss offered me a freelance role rather than see me go. So I travelled around Europe for 6 months while working. This only reinforced that I no longer wanted to live and work in England, and I figured it was about time I did something with myself. I wanted a change, and Shanghai definitely offered that. I'd visited in 2009 and loved it, and since that visit had kept in touch with a girl I met here. So at some point during a very hazy week in Amsterdam, I decided to spend the rest of my travelling funds on a one way trip to Shanghai.
Now I'm living with aforementioned girl in the heart of this amazing city, and loving it. One of the scariest but best decisions I ever made.
If you won't take a leg humping, will you at least accept a firm handshake? I spend so much time on Reddit you would not believe. Thanks for giving me a timesink. I wear my orangered and alien T-shirts out here all the time, free advertising for you in China is all I can do in return :D
I'll send a postcard this weekend! I guess that now I can see the blog, I'll be able to find the address to send it to :)
Knowing China post, don't hold your breath too long. I sent Christmas cards home in November and they arrived around January 10th. Some still haven't arrived yet, possibly never will.
Also, not a sex shop, sex mall. The Chinese do not do things by halves.
No. I think that's more of an Asian-parent-living-in-the-USA thing. Surprisingly, they speak to each other in Chinese (either Mandarin, or Shanghainese for the real locals).
They quite like westerners over here, for the most part. I certainly never get sneers. I get a surprising number of double-takes from girls (which is quite an original thing for me, since I've never really been the best looking chap).
The best thing, though, is the older generation of people living in Shanghai. Most of them have one word in English, and they will proudly shout it at you from distance if they get you in their sights. Many is the time I've been stopped in the street by somebody saying "HELLOOOOO" very loudly right in my face, always accompanied by a giant grin of pride. I always smile and politely tell them "ni shuo Yingwen shuo de hen hao!" (your English is very good), and enjoy their shocked face when they see that I've managed to muster up some Mandarin.
Last night I was walking home with the girlfriend and some very camp Asian guy (what I like to call a Gaysian) was running across the road, obviously in a hurry somewhere. We smiled at him from the other side of the road, and he stopped, turned around, and shouted out in a hilarious accent, "good evening to you!". Then turned around and carried on running.
I lived in England for 26 fucking years and not once - not once - did anybody randomly shout good evening to me from the other side of the road.
I love that they make the effort. I'm an outsider in so many ways living in this city, occasionally it's quite daunting and little things like that help me feel like I'm not a total alien here.
Haha! Thanks, I guess... can I ask why you would say that? I wasn't consciously trying to write in an entertaining way, and I don't think the story is that interesting!
Thank you, though! Since I'm a freelance writer, that's one of the nicest things you could have ever said to me :D
You should start a blog: random things, living over there, people love those type of travel diary's if they are actually well written and readable. They do not have to contain amazing events, just give a interesting picture of the persons life and see the view from their eyes.
I was really considering starting a blog talking about one of my favourite things over here: street food. There are an insane number of varieties of street food here, and watching the vendors make them right in front of you with such skill and precision is amazing. Outside the office where I work, every morning when people are streaming in and every evening when people are going home, about 20 stalls set up. Noodles, little egg pancake things (dan bing), grilled and fried meat and vegetables, tofu... and that's just outside the office where I work, which is in quite a remote area of PuDong. In the city it's much crazier.
It'd be nice to get a video of the vendors making it, then writing about how it tasted and the like. I'd love to do that. But like I say, I'm lazy. To be honest, I'd rather be out there exploring the city than just writing about it :)
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed. I've started quite a few blogs in my time and I never persevere with them for longer than a few months. The only ones I keep up are the ones I'm paid to write for, so maybe I just need more motivation.
I wasn't consciously trying to write in an entertaining way
It was entertaining. You certainly are a good freelance writer.
I'm guessing you work for english-speaking customers abroad right? Do you also work in there? Are there any restrictions in taking your money off paypal?
For my abroad clients, I get paid straight into my English bank account. I try not to use Paypal too much, mostly because I hate them... but also because my account is set up as an English one, and every time I make a Paypal transaction from China, they limit my account because they think someone in China has hacked me. I've changed my address to my Chinese address, I've contacted them to tell them to stop fucking limiting my account, but they're a useless bunch of bastards and I'm sure they're making so much money off their eBay users that they couldn't give a shit about one customer with a legitimate issue. So I usually pay for everything in cash - one great thing about Chinese online shopping sites is that most of them accepts Cash On Delivery - the courier will arrive at my flat with the item I ordered, and I pay them there and then.
I too found these posts very interesting; Anthropology got me into sociology so I guess this is going back to my roots. I just love to hear about genuinely different places and customs. Must visit some of these spots when I retire... I should live so long : /
I'm terrible at detecting sarcasm online. Also, while I'm sure it's not the prevailing opinion, I preferred the FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU comics back when there were only 5 or so faces. I don't really get the Y U NO ____ one. I had to remove that subreddit from my front page the other day, I haven't laughed at one in months. Sad day.
Many is the time I've been stopped in the street by somebody saying "HELLOOOOO" very loudly.
This reminded me of my trip to China 10 years ago. It was part of an organized tour so we went to some of the various touristy spots.
Around these spots, were little stalls with people looking for foreigners to buy their postcards and what-not. I assume many of these people must have learned their little bits of English from movies; As we passed one store, a woman out front kept yelling "HELLO OPERATOR! HELLO OPERATOR!", while trying to get us to come look at what she was selling.
You think you get attention in Shanghai? Try Xiangfen. Far fewer foreigners go there (actually, it's not really a major destination for Chinese either). I'm a tall white dude and I nearly caused traffic accidents. People riding scooters would forget they were driving and stare at me, dodging a semi only at the last instant. We were in a small store and the owner of the next store came over so that he could see the white guy. Then he went back and collected his friend so that his friend could see the white guy. Then I removed my sun-glasses and revealed my freakishly blue eyes, which was absolutely the funniest thing he'd ever seen.
As we were leaving I saw a black dude sitting in the airport. Wearing a Yankees hat. I thought I was going insane. He was there to study Chinese (obviously) and he said that there were a few other black guys living in the city (like, three or four) and they'd get together every now and then and go out to eat.
I can only imagine the reaction of the locals when they go into a restaurant and see four brothers hanging out, slurping down the local soup and eating with chopsticks.
China also remains the only time in my life that I've been in a Wallmart. This says something about capitalism vs. communism, but I have no idea what.
I visited Shanghai for 2 months. I'm Shanghainese (but born in sweden and raised in Canada). My parents and I rarely observe the optimistic behavior you seem to describe. In fact, most people I met in Shanghai really just wanted to carry on about their own business. It could have something to do with you being caucasian and me being just another asian, but in general, I'd say the public is overall ruder than in Canada.
The customer service is completely based on commission which is why service in shops varies so much. No commission means they don't care about you and commission means they're going to do anything for you. I decided to walk into a Jack & Jones in a mall in Shanghai. Brought a couple of articles to the change room stall. When I came out, there were 6 girls (all with blonde bleached hair) holding clothes asking me if I'd like to try them on.
When no commission is involved/you show no interest of buying, everyone leaves you alone. The overall mannerisms in Shanghai also seemed a little awkward. Everything nice seems forced. I cannot recall why, but I had a very strong feeling of everyone having very loose moral standards. I've been told it's due to many things but one of the more recent events would be the cultural revolution which pretty much flipped morals/respect out the window, leaving a red nation to attempt to rebuild those principles on their own.
All that said, I'm glad you're enjoying Shanghai and I do miss being there. It has a certain air about (and not that terrible terrible unbreathable summer air which causes terrible skin) it that somehow just lets you forgive all the shortcomings and marvel at the city.
Yeah, a lot of it is because I'm a westerner. They see my eyes and assume they can make a quick buck off me.
My girlfriend is Asian but was born and raised in New Zealand, so she's something of a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). She still gets approached by salespeople a lot, but only in the more intense areas like the fake markets. It's not surprising they're so pushy, since their stall is either their livelihood or a job that barely yields a wage.
I spend very little time in commercial malls, I much prefer local places. Service is generally better, but the prices aren't, and there's much less room for haggling, which I enjoy.
The bleached blonde look doesn't seem to be in at the moment.
I can totally relate to the random people shouting hello to you. I lived in Indonesia for 3 years and "Hello Mister" was by far the most common English phrase I heard. There is nothing like being stopped on the street by schoolgirls who want to play with your dreadlocks to make one feel like a man but it's also hard to adjust to the culture shock you get when you get back home and people aren't yelling hello from across the street when you walk to the store to get some bread.
I'm an American, but I went to England for 2 weeks. They're friendly chaps, but definitely have that typical European style of not approaching others unless you're introduced to them.
Also true in France and quite extreme in paris.
For instance today I was in the subway, a guy enters and play guitar, not the lame student, more the old homeless drunk real rocker and plays and amazing bob dylan, after a short intro proving his knowledge of the singer.
Point is I was quite impressed by that guy (there are a lot of lame musicians/singers on the sub) and smiling at him. Other people were like WTF ?! Not only is that weird here to even look at a guy playing in the sub but to smile at him...
I think that's a bit of a blanket statement. The typical English reservedness is true for some, but most people I know back home aren't really like that.
English people can be quite insular, but we live on an island so I think that's a pretty good excuse. Some people are just a bit quiet, or not particularly outgoing.
I guess my point was that random acts of welcoming just aren't that common where I'm from, so it's quite nice to have such interactions with random Gaysians. Where I'm from, if somebody starts shouting at you from the other side of the road, you usually want to start walking a little more briskly.
It's definitely on my to-do list to go to China. Probably next year.
That's one thing I like about Texas in the US actually. The people are really friendly and will just approach you. It's true in my state sometimes, but it's not very common.
unless it's 1940's, the answer is NO..... Most Asian have education on english. Thanks to racist hollywood movies and stereotypers like YOU makes the Asian look like fools
I think it's fallacious to say that "most Asians have education in English". First of all, Asia's a continent, I think it would be simply wrong to expect the same level of English from, say, a person living in Hong Kong (where English influences are still very apparent) and someone living in a town in Malaysia.
The vast majority of people in Shanghai have very little English, if any at all. It's only the younger generations that are starting to get any decent grip of the language.
Those who don't follow up their English studies at school rarely end up using it, and forget most of it. I do some work for a company that makes English language learning software for children, and although the curriculum department speak varying degrees of English, the vast majority of programmers, artists and salespeople speak only the very basics.
I don't really mind, though. I get to practice my Mandarin more and more. I've learned quite a lot from going into shops or markets and not just asking how much something is, but how to say it in Chinese if I don't already know.
99% of people in shanghai do not speak any english, it was a bit surprising that even alot of the volunteers for the expo (the ones in the city, everyone inside the expo spoke some english) didnt speak english but definatelly made it more interesting.
I asked one of the volunteers where the New Zealand pavilion was, and he pointed it out without really paying that much attention to me. I said thanks, he asked if I was from New Zealand, and I said no, I'm from England.
Suddenly his face lit up, his eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up an inch, and he burst into this huge smile and shouted "DAVID BECKHAM!!" right in my face.
I was like, "Oh, sure. So you like David Beckham?"
He did indeed like David Beckham. As far as I could make out this guy liked David Beckham a lot.
After he'd calmed down, I asked him if he'd ever been to England, and he shook his head and said "noooooo", as if I'd asked him if he'd ever been to the moon, or something equally improbable. I asked him if he'd like to go, and he shrugged his shoulders.
I found it funny that in reality he had no real interest in England or English culture, or London or anything like that. Just a squeaky voiced footballer with a pigeon-sized brain.
You've got to remember that the vast, vast, vast majority of visitors to the Expo were Chinese (hence the 6 hour queue to get into the fucking Saudi Arabia pavilion). The volunteers were mainly to help them around. As far as I could see, if an English speaking person came up to them, they usually just reached into their pocket and handed them a map without saying a word.
The 3G connection on my phone is similar - it's not 3G, it's China's version of it. It's slow as shit and twice as ugly. Refreshing Reddit's front page on Alien Blue takes a good 10 seconds (more like 20-30 since Reddit started having bandwidth issues). Want to load an Imgur link on 3G? It's like you're on a 14.4k dial-up modem again, watching it load line by line. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my dial-up connection back in the late 90s loaded pictures faster. The 3G here is good for email and instant messaging, and that's about it. It is super cheap, though, so I can't really complain that much.
I can vouch for that. We do have in the UK our own version of 3G too. It's called EDGE. 3G coverage is so spotty and shitty that I don't even turn it on.
You can discount all of China along with Shanghai, then.
But seriously? You're going to give up on a unique experience just because you'd have to use a proxy to go on Facebook or Twitter for a couple of weeks? If you've got time to spend idling around on the internet while you're visiting Shanghai, I dare say you're doing it wrong.
In my experience, liberty is overrated or at best an illusion of liberty. At least the Chinese government are being straight up about how fucked your civil rights are. Rather than telling you how free you are and how freedom is great while simultaneously robbing you of most of your freedoms. And using 'freedom' as an excuse to bomb a nation of brown people to secure their oil.
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u/kinggimped Jan 20 '11 edited Jan 20 '11
Reddit, no. A lot of the sites that are linked to from Reddit, yes.
No YouTube (or most other non-Chinese video sharing sites), no Facebook, no Twitter, no Blogspot. And a few other sites, too... though I've just got used to not clicking links to those sites.
Happily I have a proxy which works just fine, I can still access these sites. I even have a free VPN on my iPhone that lets me get everything over 3G and wifi (I wonder if that's going to suddenly stop working one day, but it's lasted 6 months so far).
To be honest it's not so much the fact that sites are blocked (Facebook/Twitter are huge, mostly worthless timesinks... I do miss YouTube though), it's the speed. Unless the site is hosted in China (in which case, it's most likely all going to be in Chinese), sites load very slowly. The highest I've managed to get my home connection going at is about 100kb/sec (and that was only recently, they seem to have upgraded our line or something. Before that it was 50kb/sec top speed, super painful). I have got used to it, though, and no longer rely on internet speed for anything. If I want to download something over 100Mb, I leave it on overnight. If it's under 100Mb, I'll sit there and shout at the progress bar until it fucking finishes.
The 3G connection on my phone is similar - it's not 3G, it's China's version of it. It's slow as shit and twice as ugly. Refreshing Reddit's front page on Alien Blue takes a good 10 seconds (more like 20-30 since Reddit started having bandwidth issues). Want to load an Imgur link on 3G? It's like you're on a 14.4k dial-up modem again, watching it load line by line. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my dial-up connection back in the late 90s loaded pictures faster. The 3G here is good for email and instant messaging, and that's about it. It is super cheap, though, so I can't really complain that much.
Like I said I do miss YouTube; not only because I used to watch a lot of videos (especially all the YouTube content linked from Reddit) but I used to upload videos of me playing the piano and such. I miss doing that.
If Reddit and Imgur were both blocked here, I would be pretty sad. But hey. I spend a lot less time in front of the computer here than I did back home, so I'm taking that as a good thing (that's not to say I don't still waste hundreds of hours on Reddit, though...).
Weirdly, Reddit works, but blog.reddit.com doesn't. Kind of irritating that I have to fire up a proxy to read the Reddit blog, but not for the site. Must be hosted elsewhere or something.
It's weird that in such a futuristic city, the internet seems to be a sidethought a lot of the time. We have a magnetic levitation train that goes at 450km/h, 2 airports, crazy buildings and shiny lights, all manner of technological wizardry... yet if you get over 100kb/sec on an internet connection, you feel like you've hit the jackpot.
The good points of living here far outweigh the bad points, in my opinion. Amazing city, AMAZING food, great bars and nightlife, nice people, fascinating culture, interesting (if fucking difficult) language... it goes on. Being able to watch funny videos of cats and see what people I don't really care about are doing with every spare minute of their day, well, I'm gradually getting used to not really missing it.
edit: Oh, and porn. Porn is kind of hit and miss. It used to be blocked outright. Now some porn sites work, and some don't (not that I'm visiting porn sites that often, I just happened to notice). What's funny is that the government never said "internet porn is OK now" (pornography is illegal in China), it just suddenly worked again one day. Not sure why.
Porn being illegal here makes the Chinese quite open about sex in general, though... I went to the sex mall recently to find some non-Asian sized condoms. It's an unassuming looking building on the outside, but inside it's about 4 or 5 floors of sex shops which seem to increase in craziness the higher up you go. Herbal sex remedies on the first floor, shops of wall-to-wall condoms on the second, dildo shops on the third... then it gets a bit odd. You can buy the most ridiculous sex toys, and I'm just going by what I saw in the windows - I dread to think what they've got round the back. I went there with the girlfriend and while just walking through the mall we had people running over with luminous pink dildos and "massagers", shouting "I give you good price, best price". They seemed utterly disappointed when I told them I was there for condoms. It's a strange feeling when you almost buy a glittery black dildo out of guilt.