You can thank the Chinese, and I will use them as a convenient excuse as to why I have not been present on the blog for months.  The government here, exalted and wise, hath decreed that wordpress and all associated blogs are forthwith to be stricken from the cyber-domain of the People’s Republic.  The positive spin I’m trying to add to all that though is that up to now, my life in Beijing has been rather straightforward and dull, so thankfully anyone trying to keep track of me has not missed out on much.  Even better news yet than that is that I have escaped Beijing’s frigid confines for the sunny tropical city of Kuala Lumpur, down in Malaysia, where I am tittering away at the keyboard in what may be the nicest internet cafe I’ve ever seen.  Better yet, this evening my sister Tori and I head out to…Mumbai.  We will be spending the next four weeks cutting a path of Bennett-bred destruction through innocent little India and Nepal. Most of this will consist of eating.

As to life in Beijing, it is acceptable.  I found the north of China to be different from the South in ways that I had not known ever before and could not have anticipated, largely through little things in the course of daily life such as the food on offer or lack of certain things like a beloved changfen for breakfast or decent Hunanese cuisine just about anywhere.  The other main difference (and this doubles as a complaint) is the harsh guttural “accent” of the northern Chinese, which seems to based around saying as few sounds as possible to convey meaning.  Its astonishingly incomprehensible and upon being back in Shenzhen for a few days I felt everyone back south spoke Chinese quite well — even the Cantonese speakers.

Work for the first semester has wrapped up, and the holiday now has been most welcomed.  I live at the main campus of the university but teach at a branch campus for freshman some 1-2 hours from my apartment.  The bonus of this is I only teach 2 long days a week and am otherwise furnished with freedom to do as I please.  My classes are 25 students on average, 18-19 year olds and mostly girls.  I’ve tried to tell the boys they are very lucky, especially in a country with such a wide gender imbalance yet they still insist on sitting in same-sex clusters in the classroom.  They are however typically quite fun to teach and the worst I’ve had to do all term was shush them.  Its a breeze compared to the high school students I’ve had and the sheer size of the class, especially once their ability is weighed in.

Beijing as a place to live is okay.  What Shenzhen at times lacked in road capacity, Beijing has in spades, though they seem adept at clogging them, as I can note when gazing from my apartment window over the highway.  It is not as fun or engaging an environment for taking walks and the city’s scale is increasingly designed for the supremacy of the automobile, a development I find distasteful but will spare the rest of you from hearing further about.  The other thing is that as a political capital, particularly in a one-party state, it is stuffy and it feels like it.  It lacks the vigor of Guangdong Province and the freewheeling, enterprising, anything-goes nature that typified Shenzhen.

When my contract is up, I am anticipating returning across the Pacific to finally get to work on graduate school, though the destination is up in the air as of now.  I’ll know more in the spring after I’m back to Beijing.  But until then, the Spring Festival holiday is in full swing.  Tori and I left China last night and I will not be back for 5 solid weeks, as I get a free week sans sister to do my own gadabouting in the Indian subcontinent.  Until I get back to Beijing though, I will have access to this blog and will try to post as the connection allows.