Little Annoyances

I was hoping when I came to Guangzhou the internet would be faster than it had been in the other places I'd lived in China. My dad's internet in Beijing was faster than mine in Xinjiang and Guangzhou was a big modern city. Alas that isn't to be. The internet here is slow, slow, slow. I'm sure somewhere in the city there are fast internet connections but I'm forced to use the school's internet, I don't think I have the option of getting something different, which is slow even by slow Chinese standards. Some of this is a matter of degree, it now take three hours instead of one to load a short Youtube video, but I notice the difference and it's really annoying. I left my computer on overnight to try and download this 400MB program, not exactly a huge file, but when I woke up the morning the download had failed at about 30%. In the US I could have downloaded this in about 30 minutes. In Alaer maybe a few hours but not nearly so long as here. Actually despite it's remote location, and tendency for the power to randomly go out, I had a faster connection in Alaer than in Chagzhou since I didn't have to use the school's crappy internet connection. Here though even calling people in the US has become a crap shoot with it just not working sometimes. Browsing simple websites isn't that much of a problem, besides the whole Great Firewall issue, but anything else is a pain.

One other annoyance of coming to new city is that I don't know how to do any of the stuff I used to take for granted. One example is that my phone recently ran out of credit and I'm not sure how to fill it up again. I don't know how to find a store which sells the right sort of phone cards and even than it's hard to do that without someone helping, the phone menu is mostly in Chinese. Also since my phone is out of credit I can't call anyone when I'm in the store and ask them to translate.