I turned 21 yesterday! I just wanted to pop by and document the day real quick. No pretty or artsy photos. Just iPhone photos in janky lighting. But good good memories. I also vlogged the day as I’ve been challenging myself to vlog this whole week, and it’s been going strong since Monday. Hopefully I’ll make it until the end of the week so that you can you can look out for daily vlogs on my channel throughout next week!
It’s been a crazy month of travels! I’ve been giving little updates throughout July and I’ll be sharing more about it throughout August, so I won’t be going into too much detail about that in this blog post. Whilst traveling in Europe, I found time in the evenings to catch up with the blogosphere, read your lovely comments, and reply to them. Now I’m back in Beijing, so once again I’ll be sparse with my replies (forgive me!), but I’ll still be reading all your comments via email notifications! By mid-August I’ll be back in Philly and have a few weeks to myself before school starts at the beginning of September. Eeek!
After my first technical interview, my dad gifted me a five year old juniper bonsai that he bought off Amazon. I wasn’t expecting a congratulatory gift and a bonsai wasn’t anything that I had asked for before, so I was quite surprised. I’m not gonna lie, it did stress me out a little bit to have to take care of a living thing. To give you an idea of how much I don’t trust myself with plants, my friend Julia bought me a DIY daisy months ago that I still haven’t planted it, because once I do, I’ll probably kill it. The idea of taking care of a daisy also stresses me out because daisies seem so delicate.
I’m so sorry that I haven’t been consistent about replying to your comments, but you can be assured that I’m reading all of them! Lemme give you a lil update about my Internet situation in Beijing: Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter are not blocked (surprisingly, but Tumblr and Pinterest are blocked), but the Internet connection sucks, so my activity on those platforms are still limited. WordPress is not blocked, so I’m able to write blog posts and upload photos, albeit uploading photos takes forever. I receive emails when there are new comments, so that’s how I’m keeping up with them, but Disqus is either blocked or takes five-ever to load, which is why I haven’t been replying consistently. Bloglovin’ is on the same boat, which is why I haven’t been keeping up with your blogs or others and why I haven’t been sharing Friday Favourites, other than the fact that I’m generally bad about sharing Friday Favourites every week.
I lived in Beijing for 8 years before I moved back to the States for college, so I know what the Internet situation is like in Beijing. Or so I thought!! When I went back to Beijing over winter break, the Internet situation was worse than I remembered. The VPNs that I used to use weren’t working, but luckily, my family had recommendations. However, the Internet connection was so weak that I couldn’t even connect to the VPNs! Forget about trying to access social media; I couldn’t even access websites that weren’t blocked by the government! Luckily WordPress wasn’t blocked, which I was surprised by. Hopefully when I go back this summer I’ll still be able to access WordPress.
Somehow I survived winter break in Beijing, with much thanks to Sheena and Ray, who I hung out with almost every day. We didn’t have the Internet to distract us, so all of us were going a bit stir-crazy, and it’s not like it’s nice to be outside in Beijing due to the pollution. What a wonderful opportunity to unplug! you might say. Well, to a certain extent, yes. But there was also legit online stuff that I had to get done that I couldn’t get done, which stressed me out. Imagine not being able to check Gmail because Google is blocked…
So I’m creating a list of things that I can do whilst in Beijing as I will be spending the rest of my summer break there, and unfortunately, this time without Sheena and Ray to keep me sane. It’s more of a summer to-do list than a summer bucket list. Actually it’s more of a summer suggestion list than a summer to-do list.
Before we get started, I have two questions for y’all:
At the same time, I’ve been really thinking about getting into Youtube, but doing that plus live Stories is… too much time spent behind the lens for my caring. On the other hand, live video is the “thing,” so I feel like I need to keep on it, whether or not I get into Youtube. Ughh. Sometimes social media is annoying.