Ryan called yesterday and we talked like we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. His phone works in China and there are plenty of internet cafes, but he can’t get into his e-mail. The hotel has internet access downstairs, but he can’t get to any of the websites he knows. They have Chinese versions of Google, Youtube and Twitter, but they’re not the same.
Ryan says the hotel rooms are really small and they’re all sharing rooms, but he should be used to living in tiny places by now. Our apartment isn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. He said it would be hard to adjust to how different Chinese hotels are if he wasn’t already living in Hong Kong.
One of our concerns was what it would be like in communist China. Hong Kong is part of China, but it’s separate from everything else. There’s nothing communist about Hong Kong. Ryan says I wouldn’t even notice the difference between communist China and capitalist Hong Kong. It’s all pretty much the same. The main difference is that no one speaks any English and all the signs are only in Chinese. That doesn’t surprise me at all. He’s in a city of 3 million. That’s small by Chinese standards, while Hong Kong has 7 million and is influenced by people from all over the world.
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No hate, please. There's enough of that in the world already.