This week my Chinese teacher assigned me some very interesting homework. One of the things I've asked her to focus on in class is Reading a Menu, so we've been covering a lot of the most common characters that appear in a Chinese menu. (As an aside, when I mentioned that it's difficult for me to understand what I'm ordering, she said that Chinese people have the same problem! There are some common dishes, but most of the time the restaurant names a dish whatever they want, without a hint to the ingredients or cooking method. So my problems are no different than anyone else's.) As homework she told me to watch the documentary series "A Bite of China", which talks about a lot of the local dishes around China, and some of the history behind them. I found the series on YouTube (which is blocked in China by the way) in Chinese with English subtitles (perfect for me to practice my listening skills), but due to a crappy connection it took me almost 2 1/2 hours to watch a 50-minute episode! How frustrating. There are 7 episodes altogether.
(By the way you should all watch this series. Here is the link to the English version: "http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/879149".)
A bit of an aside on some of my technology adventures on this trip.
As I mentioned Internet connectivity is big issue. Related to that is dealing with the Great Firewall of China. Many sites are blocked including Blogspot (my blog), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (my Chinese homework), and from day to day various international news sites may be blocked or not. Sometimes google.ca is blocked and sometimes not. Most Chinese people seem to deal with this by not bothering with any of the blocked sites - there are Chinese equivalents to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - and in fact most of the technology they use seems to be based on their mobile phones rather than computers anyways (more on that later).
I bought a new ASUS tablet for my trip, which turned out to be a pretty good choice. It's got a keyboard docking station which is handy for typing these long blog posts and emails. (One of my classmates in Beijing had a similar tablet with no keyboard and she spent hours and hours typing emails. Trying to type on a touch-screen really sucks.) However I still haven't found decent apps for managing my photos and editing my blog. The apps I've tried (via Google Play) have all sucked pretty badly so I'm relying on some of the built-in apps for photo editing and blog writing. I really should have figured this stuff out before I left, trying to deal with things like this in a foreign country with bad Internet is not easy!
A couple of useful things I have picked up though: I use the Astrill VPN service to bypass GFC. Most of my classmates in Beijing use this service, and it seems to work most of the time. Sometimes it gets blocked but they have many servers and I can usually find one that works. Here in Xi'An I had problems even with the VPN, and I had to jump through a few hoops to configure my computer to use some of Google's public services (DNS for the techies out there) instead of the local Internet provider's. As a result *most of the time* I can get access to my blog and international news, even if the stability of the connection is a bit flaky. I'm not sure if any of this would have been easier if I'd just bought a standard Windows laptop ...
(Another aside: My VPN quit for about 2 days in the middle of writing this post! Finally when I got it working again, Google wouldn't let me log in, since I was now "logging in from an unusual location". I could either (a) verify based on access to an alternate email account (which is my old Telus account, which I don't have any more!) or receive a special code via SMS (to my Canadian Blackberry! which costs a small fortune to use here). Oh the difficulties of travelling in China! Not only that but I briefly lost my Blackberry, until I tore apart my entire room and found it in the bottom of my knapsack :-S)
I also installed Pleco, which is the world's greatest Chinese/English translation software and electronic dictionary. It can recognize hand-written characters (very handy when I run into something I'm not familiar with which is like all the freakin' time) and it has a full English/Chinese dictionary. In fact I was so impressed with this program (after I installed it on my tablet) that I bought a touch-screen Android phone just so I could have this program available to me all the time. This has been a lifesaver on numerous occasions - reading menus, getting "instant translation" when talking to the locals, etc etc. I still use my trusty little pocket dictionary (I'm a bit old-fashioned) but I've come to rely on Pleco and my trusty Android phone.
Also on my phone I have Weixin and QQ. I've used Weixin but not QQ (the version of QQ on my phone is in Chinese only and I haven't figured out the menu :-(). These are the two most popular programs in all of China. I've mentioned that people stand around playing with their phones - these are the programs that they're using. In fact, when I give out my card with my "telephone number" and "email address" people look at me like I'm out of 2012 or something. "What is your Weixin and QQ?"
Weixin ("微信") means "wee letter", kind of like a Twitter. (A text is a duanxin "短信", or "short message".) In English we call it "WeChat" or "WeeChat", pretty clever eh? A pun in two languages. Weixin is actually like a combination of Facebook and Twitter but with all the privacy removed (yes it has even less privacy than Facebook). It includes a "look around" function that lets you see all the Weixin'ers in your vacinity, and allows you to look at their posts and photos. I've been using it to keep in touch with my friends back in Beijing, and some of my new Chinese friends, but one of the fuwuyuan here came up to me and commented on my photos. I guess as a foreigner I kind of stand out when they're "looking around". Handy stalking tool perhaps?
QQ is like Skype, or so I'm told. Like I said my QQ is in Chinese and I haven't figure out how to use it. A few of the Chinese folks have met want to "QQ" so I'll take a crack at it at some point. In the meantime I'll email and Skype with the rest of the folks who are still stuck in 2012.
Speaking of technology, there are cameras everywhere! On the subways, in the malls, even in the "ancient"parts of the city, where they stand out like a sore thumb:
Who watches all this stuff? Like everything here in China, you can bet it's a labour-intensive process. I have a theory that all the new buildings that are getting constructed here are for all the people they need to watch all the monitors from all the cameras everywhere.
They're even monitoring my blog! Check out the following handy tool that comes with blogger, so I can keep an eye on you guys ;-) (this is from a couple of weeks ago):
Note the hits from China? Isn't my blog blocked in China??? I'm sure having difficulty getting to it. Who could be monitoring my blog from China?
(By the way did I mention that China is a wonderful place and things are perfect here and there is hardly any pollution at all?)
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