Writing in China

The city and the countryside in China are very, very different. Average income for cities is vastly more than in the countryside.

Also the style of living and acommodation and there are even different laws.

People in the city often look down on the country folk. One person I'm very close to grew up in the countryside, but as they have a good job working in the city, they will never tell anyone this.

It's something that China needs to do something about to drag the country up to a more civilized level, but I don't think it's going to happen very soon. The sheer scale of things will see to that.

More on these differences at a later date.

Yesterday Beijing turned cold. There can be quite a lot of rain in summer here, and true to form, it's been raining quite a lot lately. Yesterday though it was raining and cold.

Summer is coming to a close I guess. It seems to have gone very quickly this year. Soon we China will celebrate its Mid-Autumn festival, where people eat moon-cakes.

More on that as and when!

In the meantime, keep warm, wherever you are!

If you've read previous posts in my blog, you may recall me talking about the various adventures of my friend Bob*, whom I've known for many years in China.

Well, he came to Beijing with his old lady last week, so I've had a few nights out catching up with his gossip (not seen him in many years).

However, the reason he's here is to do some medical work in the big city, and it turns out he has a brain tumor. The 'good' news, if you can have good news when talking about brain tumors, is that it's apparently near the 'surface'. That is, not buried away in the center of his head. The bad (or worse) news is that it's big, so they need to operate quickly.

He's going into hospital today, and probably having the op later this week, so my best wishes to Bob.

*Not his real name.

Yesterday I mentioned that a load of blogs seem to have been newly blocked by China. So I made a list of them and checked them again today from work, which is usually a little bit more reliable than my home connection.

Sure enough about 65% of them I can no longer access. Most of these seem to have been blocked in the last few days.

Here's a list of blogs probably newly blocked by China: (From my droplist in no particular order). If your blog is on this list, then I may no longer be able drop EC on you, so please accept my apologies.

http://www.airfare-now.com/
http://blog.ourdoglog.com/
http://www.dharkanjhel.com/
http://www.review-spew.com/
http://www.my-sense-and-sensibility.com/
http://www.triciamgalvez.com/
http://www.kikamzpera.com/
http://www.nysilly.com/
http://www.thejoysofsimplelife.com/
http://www.justanotherpixel.net/
http://namesherry.com/
http://www.daisybookworm.com/
http://lisgold.com/
http://www.outofthemundane.com/
http://www.allthebs.com/
http://www.lunarhemizphere.com/
http://www.mariucasperfume.com/
http://www.pinchthatpenny.org/
http://www.staciesmadness.com/
http://www.newzaroundus.com/

I sometimes go to Macs for breakfast in China, as I don't really like Chinese breakfast food, but the service can be pretty useless.

Many of the stores are understaffed in the mornings, and only have one server doing everything, so you end up waiting ages for the grumpy person to serve you.

And then there's the coffee. Up until about three years ago, the coffee in MacDs was the same as everywhere else in the world (and I've been to Macs in a lot of countries!) Then they suddenly changed it to an almost foul tasting brew, which totally ruined breakfast for me.

A friend agreed, but suggested I do what he did, which was to dilute it 50%. I tried this and whilst it wasn't wonderful, it made the coffee bearable at least. However, trying to get the servers that I want half coffee and half water is sometimes a nightmare. They simply can't grasp this amazingly difficult concept, and I often give up and just ask for a separate cup of hot water, which I mix myself.

Grief I can do without in the morning...