Beijing - Internet

There is a lot I want to say about Beijing, so I think I'm going to break it into a couple posts like I did for Varanasi.

We have had friends that have gone to China, lived in China or worked in China, so we had heard things, but you never REALLY understand the internet situation until you are there. A LOT of stuff online is blocked in China. It's CRAZY. I had actually forgotten about websites being blocked until we landed there. My blog was blocked - haha I couldn't even log in to post stuff on it, which I think was the biggest shock for me. FB, Twitter, Youtube are all blocked. If you try and search certain things while you are in China, it won't bring up everything. Example, try searching Tiananmen Square while there and it will not mention ANYTHING about the protests that happened there. They censor out so much information and do not want their citizens reading anything negative.

China has their own version of Google - remember reading about the fight Google had with China a while back and it caused them to pull out of China?? See, you forget about these things until you get there. Even though we don't use some of the blocked sights regularly, I didn't like it. I didn't like being told I couldn't search for certain things online and having it taken away from me. I guess it's one of those things - you want to use it when you can't have it, but when you have it, you don't care LOL. But it was really annoying - another thing we can be grateful for :)

Love Melissa and Arnold