Hi mom and dad and dj and phoebe and snakey,

My internet is down so i can’t use my computer in my room to skype or ichat you guys before I go to Shangai(three hours).

We are taking a sleeper train there, and should arrive manyana morning, early. We are visiting the CCTV(China Communist Television) station there. CCTV is the largest tv broadcasting and has over 10 stations on tv. we are also going to the workers daily headquarters-which is one of the largest newspapers distributed in China. I believe one of these bulidings is on the top ten tallest buildings in the world. We are visiting the largest though.

This is all for my media class, which is improving. Today we flipped through 33 of the China television stations to record who owned the station and what was being shown. There was not one station with international news, and only about three were news related channels. And even then they were covering two stories: China in Space, Baby milk crisis! The rest of the channels were mainly soap operas and period drama’s ( set at least 50 years ago). It’s funny how the sitcoms work. They are allowed to have modern drama’s, and drama’s that take place during the safe time periods (the time periods that the tone has already been set for). Any time between 1966-1976 is not allowed-too controversial. In fact I’ve been asking people about the cultural revolution, they either don’t know or don’t want to talk about it.

I knew life and media was closly monitored here-but it’s to such a large extent! Even if people here want to know about the rest of the world, it’s close to impossible to find news on it. And even within China there are three stories covered on every news source- Olympics, Olympics, baby milk, space launch, olympics, olympics. TV is so boring here. It’s better than it was 30 years ago-then there were two newspapers and one magazine for the entire nation. Other news sources had to copy word for word what the “example” news would say. I just want some weeds or nip tuck or something that’s not a Tang dynasy soap  opera! Oh and there was one more thing on TV-smoking monkeys. Apparantly monkeys at zoos here have been given cigarettes to calm their nerves and are now addicted-oh China, classy.

One more story. As I mentioned before they have very little access to outside news, therefore no close to nothing about the elections in the US. We asked many many people if they knew who McCain and Obama were and we got blank faces. But when we said black man, and white man they knew exactly who we were talking about.

So Shanghai should be good times. I miss you all so much and want to talk to you (especially DJ). Dana don’t throw too much of a rager…the plants might die.I don’t think I’ll be able to email you from there, so I ‘ll talk to you all in five days.
Love you sooo so much!