“Besides the usual social networking things people do online, I like streaming baseball games online and also use Youtube to sing karaoke and try duets with my girlfriend via Skype, a skill I’ve developed since studying abroad.
Another thing I do and think very useful for us international students is visiting the cooking-guide websites, especially when there’s a pot-lock party coming and each person must prepare something good that resembles one’s culture. The dishes must also be easy to make and the ingredients easy to find in a short time, so I visit these cooking websites for ideas. And when holidays are approaching, I also use the backpacker and couchsurfing websites for useful travel information and to read of other people’s experiences.
I don’t know about Dutch people but back in Taiwan we have websites where we can order lots of merchandise together with random people who register on the same websites to share the transaction fees – so for example products like dumplings, sweets, Christmas gifts and even diapers! And we also like visiting ‘epili’ (multimedia hand-puppet shows) websites, which attract hundreds of thousands of people, especially youngsters, with their special effects and stunts. But unlike the old-style, traditional hand puppet shows on stage, I think these multi-media ones have lost the touch of the unsophisticated simplicity.
I do wonder about the communication between people today, what it has really changed since we’ve got internet. Before, communication involved more active interactions: you called your friends to ask what’s going on and really talk to them. Nowadays you get to see their status on Facebook, so you really follow the details of their personal lives. And whether you ask for it or not, it’s there. So it’s sort of like you know much more about people but you spend less time actively approaching them, unless they’re online, when you can text them or just post comments. Perhaps I worry too much, but I sometimes picture all the terrible scenarios that could happen now that more and more of our activities are performed online. What will the online world be in another decade or so? Somehow I don’t really want to think about it.”
My favorites:
http://hichannel.hinet.net/mlb
http://tv.ipobar.com
http://www.couchsurfing.org
http://blog.xuite.net/iq943/recipe
http://www.ihergo.com/stores/popular/page1/category1
http://blog.pili.com.tw/controversy
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