Finally.. my first blog.. from China.

I'd started off highly-motivated and very ambitious. I'd just gotten a teaching job in China, my first overseas assignment, and as I had a 5-year travelling (and teaching) plan in place, I thought I'd maintain 2 blogs -- one, a teaching a blog (to be filled with the anecdotes of teaching) and the other, a travelogue. I'd spent a long time working on choosing the best layout and template, writing the description, the whole works. And then, when I finally got to China, I discovered that they had a firewall that blocked out most blogs. Needless to say, I couldn't even read my blogs, let alone update them. My friend, on being bugged by my exasperation, gave me a list of proxies to try. It worked for a while, but just for a while. And then, even before I could post my first interesting entry from China, it was back to square 1. I couldn't load the pages anymore. After that, I just gave up and totally abandoned the whole blogging idea.

I'm into my 10th month here in China. A while back, I chanced upon information that there was one blogging site whose blogs weren't blocked by the great firewall of China, and so.. here I am!

Initially, I'd had the same big ideas about categorising my blogs, one for teaching, one for my travels, one about books (I'm currently in a reading frenzy), and one about writing (something I'd always wanted to do, but wasn't able to devote much time to), but then I thought about it long and hard and decided to be practical. Let's face it, teaching isn't exactly a leisure job, not if you want to do it well. Sometimes it gets so crazy there's hardly any time to sleep, let alone blog. So, I decided to keep just one blog. After all, I don't even know if I'd really blog diligently and frequently anyway, so keeping it simple would be a good enough start. I figured I could always break it into categories later if it got too messy.

And so.. here's my first blog from China. Hopefully, there'll be many more to come.