China - on teh internetz

China has a really fascinating online world. It doesn't just stop at the "great chinese firewall" which blocks a lot of sites (annoyingly) which ends up slowing everything down a whole lot, especially for foreign sites. That's the negative. The positive is that with such a huge amount of people online and so often (they've got a bit of an internet addiction problem here, particularly amongst young people) it spawns a lot of websites. And because there are a lot of expats here, and it can get really lonely and isolating, I think it drives a lot of foreigners to start blogs (like me!) about their lives here.

I guess perhaps it's more apparent here in Shanghai with its huge concentration of expats from all over the world. I love that Shanghai is such an international city in a way (although sometimes I'd definitely say it's what I've come to call 看起来 foreign - i.e. "foreign" or rather kind of Western and yet still with a whole Chinese flavour to it), which is something I also really liked about Sydney (I once wrote a long blog post about it - not this blog though).

Just thought I'd share my enthusiasm!