Fighting the internet in China

Good news, everybody! I've arrived safe and sound in Shanghai, if not a little (a lot) jetlagged. China so far is...interesting. Fascinating, even. It's definitely very different from Korea, but I'm trying to take Shanghai on its own terms without constantly comparing it to Korea.

This, obviously, is not happening. Every time I go to a restaurant, or get on the subway, or even walk along the street I find myself thinking how this would be different in Korea and, sorry Korea, but China is currently winning that fight.

Well, on every front except one: the internet. In Korea, the internet was generally cheap and relatively fast (except if you were trying to watch a youtube video or stream anything. That just doesn't happen in Korea).  Here, however, not only is there the Great Firewall of China to contend with, but there's also something that just feels so very third world about the internet here. At least here in my hotel (and also in the Starbucks down the road). Occasionally sites will load on command, but more often they have immense difficulty loading even the simplest .jpegs. What's worse, though, is that the internet will just cut out and decide that you've loaded one too many pages in a given time period and refuse to load any more for the next 5 or 10 minutes. Which is just great fun, given that my internet-induced ADD leads me to often have 5 or 6 browser tabs open at any given moment.

The Great Firewall itself is proving to be as problematic to me as it was to the Mongol hoards. Apparently it's going to take a far stronger VPN than I had initially planned to get around, so I'll probably in the end wind up paying for one following Chinese rules for internet browsing. I NEEDS MY FACEBOOKS AND I NEEDS THEM NOW.

In the Becoming A Real Person In Shanghai front, I went to the school location yesterday, which happens to be in a crazy ritzy part of Shanghai (in the Pudong area across the river). So I'll go from teaching in a pretty poor area of Korea to a pretty rich area in one of the richest cities in China. Exciting. Also, apparently, our school is some sort of Model Location or whatever, which means that the bigwigs from corporate come by from time to time to observe/bother us. Hurrah.

More pressing, though, is the housing search. Debating whether to have roommates or not, finding a neighborhood, and ultimately finding an apartment that I can actually live in is apparently not the easiest thing. But people have done it before in Shanghai, and I've found apartments in Washington DC, so in theory I should be able to find a place to live. It'll just hopefully be sooner rather than later. Side note: if anyone happens to know of apartments in the Jing'an or Huangpu areas of Shanghai for less than RMB4000/month, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. THX.

I'll keep you guys posted on the living/working/internet situation, assuming I do not suffer a nervous breakdown stemming from facebook withdrawal in the near future.