The Joys of Censorship

This is my first blog in over a month. Lest you think me a blogospheric slacker, let me tell you it is simply not true. I am a slacker in some areas of my life, but my blogs month long silence was not self imposed, but rather a matter of censorship. Beginning around May 15th, several sites(Twitter, Blogspot, and others) were no longer accessible in China. If you typed in the website, you received the familiar error message "Website cannot be found." The truth is that the Chinese goverenment, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Tianmen Square(June 4th was the most famous day, the day of the tank, but Tianmen Square and the protests in 1989 actually lasted for 6 weeks starting at the end of April), launched a prempitive strike against any possible organized protest attempts. So....that meant any websites that could be used to organize a large group of people, such as Twitter, were not accessible from China. Even using a proxy, a website that allows you to sneak around such internet blockades, I was unsuccessful in updating my blog. How is it then that I am updating my blog today, you might be asking? Last night I arrived back in America for a few weeks! Home sweet home - it will be a short stay, but my baby sister is getting married, so I will be heading to Pittsburgh for all the festivities surrounding the wedding, before flying back to Shanghai for year number 2.