long and useless

Alright, I've been gone for two weeks and there's totally an explanation for that. I went to China to celebrate my little brother's graduation in style, and I thought I'd be able to access the internet there. Well, there was access but it seems that one of the sites that China has blocked is Livejournal. I know, shocking. I can get around it, but it involved a lot of hassle, so I figured I could live without lj for a couple weeks. Kinda. ;)

Ate tons of food, sweated my arse off, saw the Three Gorges along the Yangtze River and I'm really glad I went before the whole area is flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. They're flooding in 2009, and while I was ambivalent about the whole thing before, now, I'm not so pleased with it. Yes, it'll bring jobs and electricity and vital use to the impoverished hinterlands of China, but every time I think about the fact that much of the Three Gorges will be flooded, covering up a lot of its original beauty with the silt water of the Yangtze, and I just want to cry. The government is also relocating 1.5 million people and most of them are farmers and dwellers of small villages along the river. They've lived out their whole lives on cliffs and banks, and I wonder how being forced to relocate will change their lives.

I'm all in cadoodles about it now, but...

Anyways. Shanghai was tons of fine, as usual.