Life in China

A heck of a lot has occurred in the past month. I got to Beijing to realize that my plane ticket from Beijing to Hangzhou (the town I work in) was canceled from the time that I printed it to the time I landed in Beijing. I was therefore stuck in Beijing for about half a day not realizing what exactly was going to happen to me. Fortunately a girl at the airport was super helpful and went well out of her way to assist me. I was on a flight to Hangzhou late that night and I got there to crawl into my surprisingly spacious apartment. It is on the tenth floor of a gated community with 24/7 security guards and it is only about a 20 minute bus ride from the tourist district of Hangzhou. There is a beautiful wetland park, the Xixi Wetlands, walking distance from my apartment and there are foothills mountains literally one block away forming the end to this section of the city!

My first weekend I took a part time job at a school for kids in a nearby town. It was about a four hour bus ride there because of traffic and that was a horrible weekend. I got food poisoning, I had problems with my ATM card, and I got home at 3 AM and had to be at the bus stop to catch the bus to work at my real job at 6:30 the next (or same technically) day. After a very short repose I went into work only to learn that I would be spending 12 hours at work every day I went in. Fortunately the school was giving me 4 day weekends which makes up for it in a way.

The next couple of weeks nothing big has happened except for a cool night at a Mexican restaurant, Ponchos, to celebrate the fifteenth of September (the sixteenth is Mexican Independence Day but the Mexicans get drunk the fifteenth and sleep through the sixteenth) I have toured the city a bit and I now know my area pretty well. Last night I found an amazing Muslim restaurant. The heavy, grimy flavor of corn oil that every Chinese restaurant uses to prepare their food was absent and instead there was the strange taste of...real butter! On top of that, beef was an awesome change from the typical pork pork pork pork pork. I have had pork hooves, pork ears, pork brain, and almost any other body part which comes to mind.

I just purchased a VPN connection so I will be able to access everything as if it were in...Virginia because that is where my server is located. I have been trying free proxies but as I have not posted you can see how well that has worked (they allow partial access to sites but they tend to time out and become unusable very quickly). I now have a VPN connection which is legal in China. You are legally allowed to bypass the Great Firewall the government just makes it difficult for locals to bypass. The cost of a VPN package is about a month's salary for an average Chinese citizen. It isn't pocket change for me but it makes life a hell of a lot easier and it won't kill me. Expect updates at regular intervals now!