The air was bad today and class was boring.

I had a reading class today which consisted of more propaganda. The story went that there was a Chinese girl who went to Australia as a foreign student. While she was there she became the domestic help for this couple. The couple had a bad relationship... To make a long story short the husband asked the Chinese girl to steal from the wife for him, she said that it was against her culture, the husband got punished and the Chinese girl was the hero... Such a pile of crap. Decadent Westerners have no values anymore, it is great that we have the Chinese around as a moral compass...

The next class, well more like the next lesson in the same class, was devoted entirely to reading aloud. We read a story that was about as asinine as the earlier one only this time we got to say it out loud as a class. Two hours of reading aloud as a class and repeating after the teacher later it was finally time for lunch.

Lunch was sushi with a large group of people from my class. However, although we sat together, there was very little inter-group communication. For the most part, I talked with my Italian friend Marco while the Indonesians talked amongst themselves. After lunch, I continued to talk with Marco for some time until I went home and started to escape into the internet.

I was reading Wikipedia when Neal called and invited me out to dinner. We went for a walk through the terrible air, past the fourth ring road and into "China's Silicon Valley" where we walked through rows of vegetable hawking street venders and cart-top baked sweet potato sellers until we hit a dirty street with some decent looking restaurants. We settled on a Sichuan place where we had great Shuizhuyu (fish cooked with chilies in oil... lots and lots of chilies and oil...) and talked about Canadian politics. We came to the conclusion that, despite whatever problems we might have as a country, it is a great thing when the critizisms of government policies revolve around them delivering better than expected government surpluses.

After I got home I did some homework. The same boring crap that keeps me so inspired. Then, my roommate pointed something out to me which I had never really noticed before. That our internet here is special. It is special in that we, as foreign students, have the option of accessing websites from outside China. Chinese students do not have this option. As an experiment, I unchecked the "visit foreign sites" box and started to look around. What I found was that in addition to the blocking of the BBC, there was no google, no hotmail, MSN messanger did not work (although skype did), and the only website I could think of to visit was www.chinadaily.com.cn (although I don't recomend it). They treat their university students worse than we treat our prisoners.

These are the students going to the Language and Culture university. They are the ones who were looking for more contact with foreigners. Instead, they live in a completely different world that happens to occupy the same space. There is no great Chinese-Foreign exchange of ideas and cultures here. There is plenty of Foreign-Foreign exchanges, but this should not matter to the ones paying me and thousands of other foreign students twice a worker's wage for studying their language. The fear, or perhaps the arrogance, of the Chinese leadership is encumbering the whole purpose of this university.

As a final note, my internet got cut off just now. I am writing this offline and hope to post it as soon as I can. The interesting coincidence is that I was cut off in the middle of an msn conversation where I was talking about the militant nationalism of this country. Further, the network is still working, it is just denying me access... lets see if rebooting solves the problem.

--Update... my internet was off for about 15 hours until it suddenly started again. Interestingly, it cut out in the middle of an msn chat about the Chinese government. Could be a coincidence.