By riakkim
七寶/Qibao Traditional Boat Village
I'm sure you've all heard of it- China's Great Firewall, that blocks most everything convenient to Americans; our social media, video streaming sites, to our beloved Google. The obvious answer that I hear around this is "VPN!," but it was hard for me to really fathom how suffocating and suppressing it really was on the inside when I arrived in Shanghai.
The small things I really take for granted back home and in Seoul- like all my social media, all my chatting apps, Google (and not Bing), YouTube, WordPress- they're all blocked in China, and coming back from such a controlled environment felt surprisingly liberating and entirely refreshing. Perhaps it's because I'm part of a generation addicted to their smartphones and used to information, it was frustrating to not only have slow internet, but to even use sites such as Bing in order to find more information. Even when planning my brief visit towards Macau on my way back to Seoul, or trying to access my airline tickets on Gmail- everything was quite difficult and roundabout- taking far more time than it should have.