From behind The Wall

Weeeeeeber reporting in!

If you've been wondering "What the hell is the guy doing over there in China? We haven't heard about him in AGES!", here's the answer (and plenty of other stuff, for y'all). My major issue of not being able to tell about my drunken odysseias everyday life here in Shanghai has been something called Golden Shield Protect. Colloquially, you may know it as "The Great Wall of the Internet" or "The Great Firewall of China". Basically what I'd been doing was digging a virtual hole in that infernal contraption of censorship that prevented me from watching cat videos sharing my adventures with You, dear reader, and now I'm through. A minor reason and delay was the lack of fancy-pancy pictorial memorabilia attachments that would make my battlefront updates on par with the others'. After prepping up and hitting the tourist mode with my smartphone camera and establishing a VPN on my laptop, I'm all ready to tell how it's like here. Ready? Go!

Instead, they have this.

Though it might sound like a fact too obvious to write down, it needs to be stated right away: CHINA IS NOT EUROPE. You can't stop noticing it every day in your daily actions. Nothing is like you are accustomed to. Personnel at foreign students dormitory don't speak English? This is China. You line up for hours to sign up (though you have a perfectly capable system for that on Internet), no one telling you what you are queuing for? This is China. People speaking to you sound like they were arguing with you? This is China. There are no toilet seats? This is China. Suddenly you are illiterate? This is China. You eat out absolutely incredible 10-course meal with your friends and realise you only paid 3 euros for it? THIS. IS. CHINA.

Oh yes, the food. Oh my God, the food! It's everywhere and it's so cheap that you don't even notice it, unless you start dividing your bill in eight to get the price in euros, then burst in laughter at the fact that with the same amount of money you can't even get the starters in Rosso! (To international readers: Rosso's an Italian food restaurant chain we have in Finland. Particularly affordable option to eat out.). There are so many restaurants and street food stalls that it also makes you wonder whether half of the population here cooks and serves food for living. My meals at the cafeteria generally cost roughly one euro, and this is your bang for the buck:

So far I've learned that best way to order food in the
 caf is to point at something and say 'that'.

Not bad, eh? Currently I eat there almost all the time: breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's just that cheap (and tasty enough considering the price). Writing this introduction also brought to my attention that I'm STILL not tourist enough and taking as much pictures as I should be to bring out this city to you the way I see it. So please, excuse myself, I need to leave now. I have so many things to shoot. Expect to hear about me more soon.