Pho Real

Pho Real

23-26 September 2010

Shanghai, China

This week was mostly spent preparing job applications mixed in with some paid work --- which entails reading articles on investment anomalies and summarizing them. Alongside these real world efforts, I dropped into habits for the week, and each day I went on a run through the French Concession and ate at my latest favorite Vietnamese place, Pho Real.

One other very exciting thing happened: I broke through the Great Chinese Firewall! I did this by buying a personal VPN from Witopia for about $60 for the year (no monthly option). Now, when I open Internet Explorer, it opens to Google Netherlands because my computer thinks I’m in Amsterdam. (With the personal VPN, I get to choose to connect to a VPN from a long list of cities around the world.)

It was a funny feeling to sign into the facebook for the first time in a month and, more importantly, I was able to access my blog myself. (Before this point, I was emailing blog entries to a friend, who was then posting them.) This also allowed me to check my blog stats for the first time, and it was particularly interesting to see where the audience is. For the last month, I had the following hits:

Past Month Blog Hits
United States	247
Spain	90
United Kingdom	22
Netherlands	15
France	10
Japan	9
Germany	5
Canada	4
China	3
Cambodia	3

When I just looked at hits for today, Romania, Denmark, and Hong Kong also come up.

Anyway, back to the real world. The result of the week’s efforts were that I submitted 15 job applications, mostly for management consulting. Fingers crossed. I am trying to follow my friend Hardy’s advice: “Find a job so we can travel around China.”