Hi from Richard @ MyShantou.net

Welcome to MyShantou.net!

My name is Hong Feng (洪峰) but you can call me Richard. I am studying in Durham University, UK. I was born and grew up in Shantou, so I can say I am a 99.8% local Shantounese! Well, 0.2% was lost, or say influenced, in my life of studying oversea in the last three years. And that 0.2%, is the main reason why I want to create this blog.

While I was studying and traveling abroad, I’ve been to quite a few countries and visited their famous cities. But every time when I am back to Shantou for holiday and compare my hometown to those cities, I feel there is really a long way for Shantou to be a modernized city. Shantou is one of five special economic zones of China, however, its recent development doesn’t seem be qualified to be a highly developed economic zone. I feel I need to do something for it as a local Shantounese.

Creating a blog may be a good idea, but why it’s in English? Well, this should be referred to my experience of traveling and my foreigner friends here. I often check out the information on the Internet when planning a trip to somewhere. But when my classmates from England came down to visit me this summer, I couldn’t really find any websites in English that provide them information about Shantou. For the same reasons, I have some foreign friends who are working or living in Shantou, but quite often I heard them complaining about there is little information to help them living here. So I hope making a blog might be a good idea for them and for those who wants to visit Shantou.

This blog is not going to run by myself. My friend Maggie is the other admin (Blogger) of this blog. I knew her when I was a volunteer at an English school last summer. She has been living in Shantou for more than 1 year and going to spend one more here. She told me she loves Shantou, and as a local here, I am very happy to hear that :-). But I just want to say that this blog is not going to be run by only two of us either, we need, and are hoping, more people can come and join us! Not matter whether you come here for a short visit or have been living here for a long time, we will be very happy if you can share your experiences and your point of view about Shantou with us. We will give out user IDs for you to log in and write by yourself easily if you want to be a regular blogger of MyShantou.net, otherwise you can just send your articles or photos to our emails and we will post them here for you.

OK, finally I hope you will like this blog and here will be helpful for you. Welcome to Shantou and MyShantou.net!