苹果
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006It’s tough to write from the internet bar. There are plenty of reasons to avoid the filthy internet bars, ranging from the stale smoke-filled air to inconvenience of having to walk 30-minutes from my house (each way) to the only internet bar that is satisfactory for me. Instead of quickly checking email, deleting spam, and otherwise having no messages, a visit to the internet bar is a 2- to 4-hour commitment that requires I try to catch up on what has happened in the outside world. If I try to chat with friends far away, or use Skype (currently my only vehicle for making long-distance calls), my visit takes even longer. The internet bar is a fine spot for travellers, but for daily interraction with the outside world it is far from suitable.
Tonight, I turned around to listen to two guys talking about me. I had been listening to a video when the cool breeze of a fan moved. I turned around to see what was happening and I only caught the words “加拿大人” (Canadian) while two boys were turned looking at me as they discussed me, obviously thinking I can’t understand their words.
It’s hard to know exactly how they know where I’m from, because no question seems to be off limits. Questions from university students and random locals usually centre on whether you like Chinese food, Chinese girls, your nationality, and any other detail of your life that pops into the mind of the interrogator. Even Chinese basketball superstar Yao Ming was recently mentioned in the China Daily as saying how there is no topic off limits in the locker-room with his fellow countrymen, but he had to learn there were certain topics off limits with his American teammates, because other cultures have different privacy boundries. I don’t have much problem with this, except that it’s annoying when I purposly come to the internet bar for the chore it has become. There’s simply nothing fun about writing a travelogue in a place that is inconvenient and uncomfortable.
I spent this past weekend in Beijing and made a big purchase intended to remove myself from the ritual of the internet bar: I bought a laptop computer. Less than 24-hours after my purchase, I arrived in my Nanchang apartment where the keyboard ceased to function. It is a hardware malfunction and I will have to pay to ship my laptop to Shanghai for repair.
Normally I detest laptops. They are not scalable like desktop computers. They lose value quickly. The components are specially engineered and thus have less market pressures to be price competitive compared to desktops — that translates to “freakin’ expensive” for non-economists. Since my goal is to stay in Asia to study both Chinese and Korean language, I had to concede to the fact that I can’t travel every year with a giant computer in tow.
I suppose this is all to say that once I have a computer I can write more often. So it might be another week or two (hopefully not longer than that) until I can return to writing regularly.



