Cold Turkey

When youtube was blocked, us expats in China handled it well. Yes, it was quite frustrating at first, but you get by. A life without youtube is still livable, and as a result we looked elsewhere and discovered Chinese alternatives and in some documented cases, actually replaced our youtube fixes with more productive things, like hmmmm, I don't know, studying mandarin..?

In the past we've often had our Favourite networking and video sharing sites taken away from us, much alike naughty school children having their footballs confiscated, and just like school our balls were usually given back to us at the end of the week. However this time we've been waiting to get our youtube back for about 5 months. But we didn't despair too much, because for all the time we missed searching and sharing videos of our lives, we found a replacement; Facebook.

Facebook changed everything for all of us, because now we are in touch with practically everyone we ever met. And not just can we add them to our friend 'list', but we can actually keep on top of everyone's thoughts and daily routines (thanks to the daily newsfeed), and we literally can spend hours checking through photographs, adding our own photographs, and snooping into other peoples' lives. That was until....(dun dun dunnnnn)...Facebook was also blocked. Ohhh the outcry of the thousands of expats in China! And from that moment, the expats of china officially went cold turkey. Call it a lifestyle revolution, if you like. I actually found it quite liberating. But as I marveled at all of the spare time I found I had in my life post-Facebook, what I didn't realize was that the other die-hard expats were desperately searching for a loop-hole that could get them back into Facebook land. Did they succeed? Of course. Never underestimate an expat who's in need of a Facebook fix.