been having alot of fights with the great firewall of china lately – it seems like this great country is intent on taking away everything i love about the internet. youtube, tumblr and blogspot have been down for ages, and gmail hasn’t been working for me for the past two days.

i’ve had countless conversations with people about living in china and how the government affects us – in some ways being here means you have more freedom than you do back home, and for the most part certainly allows you to live a kind of lifestyle that would be difficult to pull off anywhere else in the world. still, there are little reminders that slam you in the face every once in a while – those of us who lived in beijing before the olympics will remember all the hectic measures that were taken to “clean up the city”.

sam and i were over at our friend greg’s place last week and he told us an amazing story of him & his wife being thrown into the back of a van on one of their first weeks in shanghai, ostensibly because they were taking photos outside of an important embassy/residence. since so rarely do us foreigners face anything this extreme, it’s quite the shock to hear your friends talk about experiences like this.

hmmmm. a long rambly post on a buzzing thursday afternoon at the office. work is steady but not unmanageable, and these are my favourite times at the agency.

ps. the photo above is of a really neat lightbox that i saw at my friend nick’s place. sadly, it was stomped on and broken later on that night during a particularly exciteable game of twister.