Happy Saturday!

There’s a beauty of being 14 hours ahead of my normal posting time. It is Friday night as I am writing this, which is Friday morning back home. It is my last night in Shanghai and by the time this post goes live, I will be arriving in Guangzhou and it will be Saturday night. The major part of the trip is done and I will be on a plane home next Saturday. The next week will be spent in my hometown, handling some personal matters and visiting some worth-visiting family.

In two weeks, I visited three major cities in China – Nanjing, Suzhou, and Shanghai. In each city, I visited museums, ancient villages and streets, historical sites, and learned a lot of Chinese history. One big thing I learned has to be the chronological order of the Chinese dynasties, well, at least most of it. I know Qing dynasty is the last dynasty, before that was the Ming, which preceded by the Yuan dynasty. Having been educated in the U.S., the only way I would’ve learned any Chinese history would’ve been through World History classes in high school. When I have a choice between US history and World History, US history will always take precedent as it’s my interest.

If you asked me if I’m glad the trip is coming to an end, I would say I am glad. At this point, I am “museumed out”. I don’t want to visit another museum for the foreseeable future, unless it’s regarding something weird and interesting, of course. Physically, I feel like I’ve run a marathon. My knees are stiff. I just want to lie down and sleep the days away but at the same time, there’s a feeling like FOMO (fear of missing out) gnawing at me, which made me force my body to keep going.

I am also ready to have my internet freedom returned to me. In China, internet is so restrictive that to be able to access my normal websites (like emails), a VPN is required, which is not always accessible. Especially for the duration of my trip in Shanghai when I couldn’t access the VPN, there were features on my phone that wasn’t able to function properly, like my watch hadn’t been able to sync correctly since I’ve been in China. Also, on my phone, I can’t use my translation app nor the voice-to-text function on the keyboard. I had been needing to manually back up my photos to my cloud drive since I’ve been able to backup any photos in Shanghai. I also feel like I’m constantly being monitored when I’m not using the VPN as if a policeman would knock on my door at any moment and haul me off to interrogation.

It’s one of the biggest reasons I didn’t want to go on this trip. It’s just one of those things that once you have a taste of that internet freedom (not saying uncensored because there’s nowhere on Earth that’s truly uncensored), you never want to go back.

Before I conclude this post, I’d like to tell you something amusing. I had the most bitter cup of coffee in Shanghai. I know black coffee is supposed to be bitter but that bitterness is usually tolerable for me. This cup, however, I can only compare it to biting into a piece of 100% cocao chocolate. There is nothing but bitterness and I surprised myself by downing the entire cup.

Anyway, thanks to Natalie for hosting WeekendCoffeeShare and I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.