I know when I ordered/created my VM in Azure I choose "East US" (6 months back) and even now in the Azure Web console it shows the same. When I signed in to that VM today and opened Firefox and went to www.google.com, I saw the page in Chinese.
Later I also received an email alert from gmail saying it blocked a sign-in attempt (I have a emailing program on that VM that runs in the background and sends application alerts using gmail)
"Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account ****@gmail.com, using an application such as an email client or mobile device."
Which confirms that my VM was indeed in China, Hong Kong to be specific.
How can this happen i.e Azure says the region is "East US" and gmail/google says its in China - can someone please help me understand this.