Welcome to China Part 1

It has been four years since we lived in Shanghai and two and half years since our last visit. While our escape from the Pudong Airport was ultra smooth (efficient immigration lines and no waiting for a taxi), we have since had a thorough review of the '1984 + Catch 22'-esque China.  

The Great Firewall of China

Wikipedia and Flickr are unblocked compared to when we last lived here. Yeah!  Blogspot.com, home of this blog, continues to be blocked. Before, we could easily enter our blog entries at blogger.com, publish, and then use a backdoor in "settings" to view the blog post.  Now, blogger.com is completely blocked.  We have exhausted our geeky gymnastics just to publish this entry.  I must have tried 30 or 40 proxy servers before John figured out how to use blogger's publish-by-email feature.

Our custom maps (My Places) on Google Maps and our spreadsheets and documents on Google Docs are also inaccessible.  There goes all our trip research.  No google+.  No youtube, not to mention Facebook.  John cannot read many of the blogs he regularly follows, including our good friend Kathy's blog on workpress.  No twitter either.  But imdb?!  Just about all my regular visited sites are blocked.

So, unable to make progress on blogging and trip research, we headed out to do some errands. We had no idea that the time we saved by not surfing would be so valuable later. Stay tuned...