Greetings from Qingdao

Greetings from beautiful Qingdao. I arrived here about ten days ago after three weeks of travelling around China. This will be my home for the next couple of months.

Qingdao is a clean and scenic seaside city. It's one of the prosperous coastal cities, but less hectic and much less poluted than Shanghai or Beijing. This will be the site for the Olympic Sailing Regatta in 2008 and, even though I'm not really into sailing, I think I'm going to try to arrange to be here. I've met a lot of really great people and I'm amazed that I'd never heard of Qingdao before six months ago.

I had planned to just study and try to meet Chinese people while I'm here, but I've been roped into teaching English. I gave my first lesson yesterday to a class of twenty 10-year-olds. It was a blast, but wow do they tire you out.

One continuing problem is Internet access. It seems that many of the sites I normally visit, including all of the *.blogspot.com domains, Wikipedia, and a number others are blocked. My attempts to get around this using the University of Helsinki proxy have been unreliable. In any case, the proxy is intended to give students access to university resources such as online journals not to circumvent censorship, so I don't feel entirely comfortable using it that way.

I have my own laptop and should be able to set up a tunneling service between it and my personal server located in Helsinki, but getting the laptop online is a pain as well. Unlike Shanghai Wifi is quite limited here and Internet performance in general has been patchy.

I'll try to get the problems sorted out but until then there won't be too much blogging. I like to do research on the topics I blog about, and it's frustrating when every second site doesn't work.

Thanks for keeping the site alive while I'm away and feel free to use this as an open thread to keep the discussion going (since the earlier one must be getting to be a nuisance by now).