Blogs

Wed, 08/04/2009 - 16:26

Ben: Word of Mouth

It wasn’t until I moved to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou that I began reading blogs. Unable for the first time in life to roll out of bed, scratch myself and wander down to the corner shop to pick up a copy of the latest paper to read over breakfast, I found myself instead sitting down in front of the computer for my fix of news and current affairs.

The longer my China sojourn lasted, the less interested I became in news from back home. Who cared what then Prime Minister John Howard was up to, or how the Australian cricket team was doing. What I needed was information about my surroundings.

As interesting as the English edition of the state run China Daily was, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for and didn’t really answer any of the questions I had about daily life in my new home. How was I going to find a job? Where could I meet people with similar interests? What about renting a house? And where the hell am I going to find some good punk rock in this city? Thank god for Google, a series of searches and answers to these questions and more where provided by a variety of blogs.

The blogs I read whilst in China covered a variety of different topics and were written by both locals and expats. Blogs written by Guangzhou locals in English were hard to find. I’d follow links through to what looked like a fantastic local art gallery or gig venue only to find that their page was available in Chinese only. If only I could read the characters on the screen, perhaps a whole new world would open up to me!

Luckily the blogs written by expats gave me a peak inside a new world but with the advantage of being written from a relatively similar perspective. Here were outsiders like me, commenting on the process of immersing themselves in a new culture.

From one blogger I might learn about an awesome noodle dish that I had never heard of before and even tips on where to get it; from another, details of an upcoming Cantonese Opera festival. This was gold. Local daily papers catering to foreigners where non-existent and the few magazines targeted at expats were hard to find and often out of touch.

The information I found in blogs gave me ideas about places to go and things to see and allowed me to get on with the process of living my own life, not just the life of a curious bystander. At last, armed with information about my new hometown, I was turn off my computer, grab my keys, wallet and cigarettes, leave my apartment and step out into a whole new world.