That's what the title means in English. Above is the Mandarin Chinese way to welcome you to my blog, although the proper characters are 欢迎光临. As you can probably guess, I just typed the pinyin (a sort of romanized phonetic alphabet for Westerners) into Google and quickly found someone who could write/type proper Chinese. Then it was just a case of CTRL+C and CTRL+V.
I thought for my first post I should explain who I am and what I hope to do with this blog over the next couple of years. The first thing you'll realize is that my Chinese sucks. I'm in Shanghai for the next 18 months and while I can speak enough to get by (e.g. Being able to fulfil my basic human rights) I can't read or write. My vocabulary is rather limited also. So this is most probably not going to be an educational blog in regards to learning the Chinese language. However I might talk about it every now and again as it's the secondary reason I'm in China.
The primary reason is that I need work experience! I just graduated in International Management and didn't really fancy entering the real job market back home due to the current recession. I've never really done anything exciting in my spare time. I never did summer placements or internships, never did Camp America or anything like that. Therefore I have no real experience and nothing I can really offer employers other than enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. So my plan for when I get to Shanghai is to find an internship, learn lots of new things and then hopefully regurgitate my experiences to a graduate employer 18 months from now!
Why China? Well I was initially thinking of calling this blog 'Shanghaied'. The obvious link to Shanghai put aside, it's apparently some old school navel term for when sailors are forced (through drugs or physical influences) to join someone's ship against their will. These people have been commandeered by a ship's crewman and then spend months sailing across the seven seas! Lovely!
How this links to me? Well, while I'm not really forced to get on a ship (well a plane) and spend a year and a half in a faraway land, the current situation for UK graduates in the job market is rather dire. Every year there are more and more graduates and less and less jobs. Due to aformentioned laziness, I can't distinguish myself from other grads and due to the aformentioned recession there is a very high probability that I'd be unemployed for a year. Or stuck in a dead end job. So not only have I decided to do an internship (aka. Get paid slave wages so someone decent will employ you), but I have decided to do it in China. Why?
1. I want to learn Chinese
2. It's cheap, so I can get paid £500/month and actually survive
3. It's a fuckin awesome country
4. Look at that....
Badass.
I've been before, twice, and I absolutely love the place. The food, the entertainment, the culture, the standard of living, the cheap booze... it's all good in Zhong guo (China). Plus doing an internship in a country as weird and distant as China sure as hell looks better than doing one in England.
This post has gone on long enough. Next post I'll probably explain the actual name of my blog and then say farewell to England!
So.. until Monday, have a good one.
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