I’m going to China for a week in October. I have a few things I feel I better figure out while I’m there, including:
- Exactly how evil is the internet censorship and filtering for ordinary tourists such as me. A laptop and some network tools should be enough to tell, as the hotel boasts free internet access…
- Time zone stuff. China has a single time zone for the entire country, which by itself is fascinating for such a huge area. And when looking at a time zone map, you can see that the country picked a time zone that is the equivalent of western Australia, which seems to be a lot of sense for the east coast of China. So, the western parts of China are terribly off. The question is: do the people ignore the time and follow the light, or do they obey the time and spend parts of the lives in more darkness than what they otherwise would? If you go north/south at the eastern and western edges of China, you’ll end up in time zones that are five hours apart!
- Chinese typing is with glyphs; some tens of thousands of different ones. In a Chinese dictionary, like a Chinese to English one, how do they sort the Chinese words? I mean, glyphs just have got to be very hard to sort in a logical manner?! Or how do they find the words?