Saturday, August 20, 2011

All the Deets


Now for the details.

I will be in Qingdao, China (http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en&q=qingdao+china&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl) for two years. I will be able to come back in the summers, but for the most part, China is where I will be during the school season. There is a twelve hour time difference in Qingdao, so add twelve hours to whatever time it is here in the east coast and that’s what time and date it will be in Qingdao. I will be in the future, so if you want to know what it’s like, I can give you a twelve-hour heads up.

Since there is such a large time difference, live communication will be somewhat difficult, I could most likely only talk to people in America during my nighttime, which would be your morning, or the opposite if it’s not a school day. The best way to contact me would be to e-mail me or talk to me over Skype.

But there are rules.

The Chinese government pretty much checks everything sent over the internet, encrypting helps (which I am going to do) but it doesn’t totally prevent it. So if you want to e-mail me, what you can do, for the few days I’m still in the states is you can call me or send me a Facebook message asking me for my e-mail address. The reason I am doing this is because I need to make sure the people that want to contact me are competent individuals. And one of the reason for this is the Chinese government’s restrictions about religion. They have freedom of religion, but they don’t really have freedom to express that religion publicly, i.e. the internet. So when referring to things like prayer, God, the Bible and all things religious you have to use code. Yes, I’m serious. So you might say “Hey Clay, I’ve been talking to my dad about you and he thinks you’re doing great. I’m definitely thinking about you often.” It’s one of those “better safe than sorry” things. Because I can’t just have everyone willy nilly sending me e-mails, because someone would not read this and things might happen. So if you want to e-mail, or to Skype, that’s great, but I need to know.

At this point you might be wondering how I could update this blog if I’ve already talked about God and his will and camp and all that jazz. This is my introductory post on my blog I never really update, and at the end I will link you to the blog I am going to keep up to date when in China. At the moment the commenting is disabled for the same reason as the e-mail thing. For the most part many of you will just observe.

If for some reason you want to snail mail me something, that is totally fine, just send me an e-mail and I can send you back the address along with rules about customs etc.

Now it’s looking like I’ll be leaving on Friday the 26, or Saturday, which means I only have a week or less here in the good ole United States. The Flight is about 24 hours, so I will have a good amount of time to read, watch movies, sit, read and watch movies.

I can’t really think of anything else for today, I guess if you have questions you can post them in the comments area on the blog or on Facebook and I’ll do my best to answer them.

The link to the blog is clayinqingdao.wordpress.com

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