My trip in China draws to a close after today. There are still a few more things to do at the factory this afternoon, followed by shopping and dinner this evening, but then it's the long trip home to America tomorrow morning. I should be back in my condo early afternoon on Saturday, which will feel like it should be the middle of the night. Of course, now that I am used to the time change over in China, it's time to flip it back and re-adjust all over again. Bring on the sleeping pills!
I've had a tremendous time here in Beijing, and I'll have plenty of stories to tell when I get home. I'm also looking forward to normal food, the new Harry Potter movie, the Friday Night Lights finale, and the new Washed Out album. And being able to go from one place to the other without encountering about a billion people on the way!
See you all soon!
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Fish head soup
I only have two days left in my trip, and then it is back to the US of A! This has been a tremendous experience, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. Tonight we will head to Tiananmen Square and possibly the Olympic Village if possible, which would be pretty awesome. Then on Friday, that will be my opportunity to do some shopping and buy cool stuff for you people back home. Apparently it is very common for people to negotiate prices at the place we are going to on Friday, which by the way I learned from Amy Daml, another American over here in Beijing.
I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but Mao Zedong is on every single currency bill that they have. You buy everything with Blue Mao or Green Mao or Red Mao…and people in China really, really like him too. He is regarded very highly by the Chinese.
So what has been my favorite food so far? I would say it is a tie between Beijing Duck and Sheep Kidney. Yes, sheep kidney is very, very tasty, though maybe it was just the way it was prepared that I really enjoyed. It was very tender and covered in a crispy and slightly spicy breading…fantastic. But yeah, duck is great too. Beijing duck is different from how they prepare duck in other parts of the country, but however they do it here is pretty darn tasty.
Sheep kidney is one of the crazy foods I have had here, but I don’t think anything will be as crazy as what I will refer to as “surprise fish head soup”. I have pictures too! See, this is the bowl of soup that was ordered, and we were told that it was fish soup:
However, as we continued consuming this soup, this eventually surfaced:
If you thought a fly in your soup was bad, wait until you find a whole fish head in there. Gross! I still can’t believe I ate any of that.
If you were wondering how my digestive system is doing, let’s just say that when you go from a diet of grilled chicken breasts to a diet of fried sheep kidneys, the body goes through a bit of shock. I am already imagining the wonderfully bland food that I plan on eating when I return back home. Luckily the breakfast is all western food, and I have resorted to simply having a bowl of corn flakes and some watermelon in the morning. But the food here has been very tasty, and the entire eating experience has been very cool.
To briefly talk about work…Dave and I finished our audit on Tuesday and summarized our findings to the factory on Wednesday, so our objective is complete. Now there are a lot of other random projects and topics that we wanted to cover, which we will do for the next two days. But ultimately it is “mission accomplished” at this point, and it feels good.
The weather here is very humid and hot, and I am glad I decided not to bring any undershirts and have been going single-layer all week. I haven’t seen the sky in several days, and I don’t know if that is just thick fog or if it is just very smoggy and polluted here. I kind of think it’s the latter. Speaking of weather, I heard Minnesota got pounded with some terrible storm a few days ago, eh? Like 3 inches of rain in an hour? Crazy! Some of the Chinese have heard that Minnesota’s government is shut down, and I think they have the impression that the entire state is in total chaos right now. I suppose depending on your perspective, it might be?
One final picture from my camera…my stupid camera battery died before I got to the Great Wall, but luckily my coworker Dave had a fully powered camera and took lots of pictures up there with the group of us in a few of them too. But here is my one picture of the Great Wall:
Also, that writing on the mountain in the background says “Mao Zedong”. Seriously, the guy is everywhere.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Day 6
Hey hey! The weekend is over, but much fun was had, and many sights were seen. Sunday was spent at the Summer Palace in Beijing, which is this huge area that was built for a Chinese emperor a long time ago. Apparently this is one of four of his summer retreats across China, because apparently one ginormous resort x100 isn’t enough. There’s a big lake at the center of this palace, which by the way is completely man-made. And it’s not like this lake is small, either…it’s probably 10 or 20 times the size of Lake Calhoun, maybe more. It’s massive. The architecture everywhere is super cool too, and unfortunately some of it is off-limits, but you can at least see most of it. The biggest attraction was this building on top of a hill that we climbed up, and inside was this Buddha where you’re supposed to make a wish (and donate money too). Very impressive.
There are tons of boats on this huge man-made lake, and you can take one down the river connected to this lake and go to the Beijing Zoo, which we all did afterwards. They have pandas there! Real pandas! A very important diplomatic tool, it turns out. America has received many pandas from China.
The last thing we did on Friday was to visit (and I’m probably going to spell this wrong) Nan LuoGuXiang street which had many shops and lots of interesting foods being sold all over the place.
On Monday night, the Chinese engineers took Dave and I to a Korean barbecue restaurant, a place where you cook all of the food yourself over hot coals that are inserted into the table when you arrive. There are also people coming in constantly to remove the gratings above these hot coals as we cook food. I can already imagine the FDA’s response to a restaurant where you cook all the food yourself and dodge the scalding hot gratings that are being removed regularly by the waiting staff. But the food was incredibly good. I took pictures of the meal as well, which I will share soon!
The remainder of the trip is four days of work, and we’ll fly back home on Saturday morning. But one evening will be spent visiting Tiananmen Square which should be great, and maybe another evening might involve looking at the Olympic Grounds. Plus I still haven’t eaten any extremely bizarre or dangerous foods yet, though I did have cow tongue tonight which was very chewy but tasty.
Random things that pop into my head now…when I was walking around at the Summer Palace, an Asian man pointed at me and exclaimed “American!” When we were at the zoo, a trolley was playing “happy birthday” wherever it went. On the roads, there are dash marks to indicate lanes, but the drivers are completely unaware of them. The moment the last person at the table finishes eating, that’s when you get up and everyone is excused; nobody sits around and chats more. Finding your way around here would probably be easy to do because almost everything with Chinese writing has english writing as well, like all the road signs, restaurant menus, etc.
I will look forward to a regular sleep schedule, and, well, sleep in general, when I get home. The initial jet lag was very tiring, and it’s taken me a while to readjust my biological clock. This is the first night of the trip where I haven’t fallen asleep prior to 10:00 PM, and I typically wake up at around 5:00. But it’s a good kind of tired, and I didn’t come to China to sleep! Regardless, I do need sleep so I will sign off for now (I’m writing this on Monday evening though I plan on posting this on Tuesday morning at the factory’s free internet).
Anyway, I am having more success uploading pictures today, so here you go!
This is what we had for dinner last night. We had to cook the meat ourselves at the table with hot coals that were sitting underneath that grating.
There were several structures at the Summer Palace, but this was probably the biggest one we found. Very cool architecture!
The "Silver Pagodas" out in the countryside of Beijing. We also climbed up those mountains in the background after checking these out. Needless to say, we all got our exercise that day.
I suppose I should prove that I really am in China! This is a bridge going over the massive man-made lake at the Summer Palace.
Ni-hao!
This was written on Saturday evening and not posted until Monday...I plan on updating again this evening (which apparently is the morning for all of you....)
Ni-hao! That is one of the very few things I now know how to say in Chinese, and it means “hello”. I’ve also learned how to count to 5, which is quite the accomplishment, yes? Eee, arr, san, suh, wuh. That’s how you say one through five in Chinese, phonetically. But actually, 4 and 5, or “suh” and “wuh”, sound somewhat different…”suh” is like how you say the first part of “surprise”, and “wuh” I think is more like “woo” but not exactly like saying “woo”. So as long as I only have to greet people and deal with 5 or fewer items, I should be able to communicate effectively with everyone in this country!
I am still having a wonderful time, and for the most part, I have overcome my jet lag. I am trying to fully adjust my schedule to be more normal, but the last few nights I have had to go to bed before 10:00 PM and end up waking up around 4 or 5 AM. On Friday, I was just very tired overall and was starting to wonder when I had last felt so tired. But I had a very fun dinner that evening and that pepped me up quite a bit.
Some more comments about the food here…on Friday we went to a Szechuan-specialty restaurant, and the three Emerson Beijing engineers who took Dave and I there said that Szechuan is the best type of Chinese food. Apparently there are eight different types, and Beijing Chinese food is another one of them. I’m not quite sure what the other six are. I think I mentioned this last time, but the norm appears to be to order tons and tons of food and not eat it all because there’s just way too much food to eat. The eating process also lasts at least 30 minutes and usually about 45 minutes, but when you’re using chopsticks, you eat a lot less food so it’s not like we’re just packing in tons of food at these places. There were maybe five or six things that were ordered for five people on Friday, and the craziest thing was definitely the fish which was served on top of the fish itself. Like, the whole fish was there, head and all, but all of his insides were removed, cooked, and sitting on top of him, but the fish itself was there on the plate too.
Saturday was spent sightseeing, and I can now say that I have walked on the Great Wall of China, which was SPECTACULAR. The scenery from where we were is just amazing, and I’ll be sure to post plenty of pictures of it when I get the chance. There are some very steep inclines and treacherous steps all over the place. For the most part, it is in decent condition, though I noticed that the less-traveled parts of the wall are now overgrown with weeds and vegetation and what not. In order to get up to the wall (which is always built on the tops of mountains wherever it is built), we took a big chair lift to get there, and to get down, we went down this awesome toboggan chute which was like going down a big metal luge. It was somewhat freaky, obviously, but still really cool.
Before the Great Wall, we visited this place called the Silver Pagodas which consisted of some cool ancient Chinese structures in the middle of a forest. There’s also a huge path you can climb to get a nice view of the area, and we made it about 2/3 of the way before we decided that the view was good enough, haha.
There are so many people in Beijing…I bet if you were standing in any part of the city, you would see at least 10 apartment or condominium buildings that are at least 20 stories tall. They are absolutely everywhere. 25 million people live in this city! That means that the traffic is ridiculous too, and seriously, people drive like maniacs here. They also honk at people all the time, way more than we would in the US. But they also don’t really seem to get upset on the road…if someone is in their way at all, the drivers just honk until someone is out of the way and then just keep going about their business.
Let’s see what other random things I can think of…we ate at a Subway when we went to the Great Wall, and apparently Subway is very popular in China. I also told my coworker Dave that if we heard any American music in China, it would definitely be U2, and sure enough they were playing through a bunch of U2 albums at this Subway at the great wall. Oh and another bit about driving…when we ate at this Subway, our driver parked the minivan on the sidewalk leading up to the place and even got out of the car to move the traffic cones blocking off the way to the sidewalk out of the way so that he could park there. And while we were eating, an employee of Subway came out and yelled something, and the driver got up and was laughing, and the employee just laughed too and didn’t seem to care. It was about the fact that he was obviously parking illegally, like, ridiculously illegally in my opinion since I’ve never seen anyone just up and park their vehicle on the sidewalk of a restaurant, but they all just sort of laughed it off and went about their business.
Tomorrow I am going to see the Summer Palace in Beijing, hopefully followed by some shopping. Should be fun!
Ni-hao! That is one of the very few things I now know how to say in Chinese, and it means “hello”. I’ve also learned how to count to 5, which is quite the accomplishment, yes? Eee, arr, san, suh, wuh. That’s how you say one through five in Chinese, phonetically. But actually, 4 and 5, or “suh” and “wuh”, sound somewhat different…”suh” is like how you say the first part of “surprise”, and “wuh” I think is more like “woo” but not exactly like saying “woo”. So as long as I only have to greet people and deal with 5 or fewer items, I should be able to communicate effectively with everyone in this country!
I am still having a wonderful time, and for the most part, I have overcome my jet lag. I am trying to fully adjust my schedule to be more normal, but the last few nights I have had to go to bed before 10:00 PM and end up waking up around 4 or 5 AM. On Friday, I was just very tired overall and was starting to wonder when I had last felt so tired. But I had a very fun dinner that evening and that pepped me up quite a bit.
Some more comments about the food here…on Friday we went to a Szechuan-specialty restaurant, and the three Emerson Beijing engineers who took Dave and I there said that Szechuan is the best type of Chinese food. Apparently there are eight different types, and Beijing Chinese food is another one of them. I’m not quite sure what the other six are. I think I mentioned this last time, but the norm appears to be to order tons and tons of food and not eat it all because there’s just way too much food to eat. The eating process also lasts at least 30 minutes and usually about 45 minutes, but when you’re using chopsticks, you eat a lot less food so it’s not like we’re just packing in tons of food at these places. There were maybe five or six things that were ordered for five people on Friday, and the craziest thing was definitely the fish which was served on top of the fish itself. Like, the whole fish was there, head and all, but all of his insides were removed, cooked, and sitting on top of him, but the fish itself was there on the plate too.
Saturday was spent sightseeing, and I can now say that I have walked on the Great Wall of China, which was SPECTACULAR. The scenery from where we were is just amazing, and I’ll be sure to post plenty of pictures of it when I get the chance. There are some very steep inclines and treacherous steps all over the place. For the most part, it is in decent condition, though I noticed that the less-traveled parts of the wall are now overgrown with weeds and vegetation and what not. In order to get up to the wall (which is always built on the tops of mountains wherever it is built), we took a big chair lift to get there, and to get down, we went down this awesome toboggan chute which was like going down a big metal luge. It was somewhat freaky, obviously, but still really cool.
Before the Great Wall, we visited this place called the Silver Pagodas which consisted of some cool ancient Chinese structures in the middle of a forest. There’s also a huge path you can climb to get a nice view of the area, and we made it about 2/3 of the way before we decided that the view was good enough, haha.
There are so many people in Beijing…I bet if you were standing in any part of the city, you would see at least 10 apartment or condominium buildings that are at least 20 stories tall. They are absolutely everywhere. 25 million people live in this city! That means that the traffic is ridiculous too, and seriously, people drive like maniacs here. They also honk at people all the time, way more than we would in the US. But they also don’t really seem to get upset on the road…if someone is in their way at all, the drivers just honk until someone is out of the way and then just keep going about their business.
Let’s see what other random things I can think of…we ate at a Subway when we went to the Great Wall, and apparently Subway is very popular in China. I also told my coworker Dave that if we heard any American music in China, it would definitely be U2, and sure enough they were playing through a bunch of U2 albums at this Subway at the great wall. Oh and another bit about driving…when we ate at this Subway, our driver parked the minivan on the sidewalk leading up to the place and even got out of the car to move the traffic cones blocking off the way to the sidewalk out of the way so that he could park there. And while we were eating, an employee of Subway came out and yelled something, and the driver got up and was laughing, and the employee just laughed too and didn’t seem to care. It was about the fact that he was obviously parking illegally, like, ridiculously illegally in my opinion since I’ve never seen anyone just up and park their vehicle on the sidewalk of a restaurant, but they all just sort of laughed it off and went about their business.
Tomorrow I am going to see the Summer Palace in Beijing, hopefully followed by some shopping. Should be fun!
Thursday, July 7, 2011
I have arrived!
Hello all from Beijing, China! I’ve been here for two evenings now and have been overcoming the jet lag as much as possible. Last night we got back to our hotel around 7:30, and I could only stay awake for about another hour before I had to go to bed. I can’t remember the last time I went to bed at 8:30, but I also had a pretty easy time falling asleep. Now I'm up early and am writing this from my hotel.
The trip has been incredible so far. My company sent me over here in first class where instead of asking you questions like “would you like some peanuts?”, they ask you questions like “would you like a cheeseburger or a salad? Along with a bunch of drinks that are free? And I’ll keep offering this to you every 20 minutes if you’re awake?” The flight to Beijing was cool too…the flight attendants even call us by name, asking things like “what do you want for your appetizer, Mr. Waller?” I kept wanting to say, “you do realize I’m just some young punk…”
Anyway, the flight to Beijing was about 12 hours, and I slept through maybe 3 or 4 hours of it. We landed at about 10:00 PM, and my body was a bit screwed up at that point since it really should have been 10:00 AM. The airport is where I saw my first bundle of really confusing advertisements…one of them showed a guy who was hunting bears on a golf course. No idea what’s going on there.
Going through customs was really easy and took maybe 10 or 15 minutes. After we got out, there was this long line of people with signs with a bunch of people’s names on them. I found the person with the “Dan Waller” sign who works for the hotel we are staying at, and she was very friendly, as are most of the people here. We drove back to the hotel, and I slept some, though not a lot, since my body was telling me that it’s the middle of the afternoon and isn’t supposed to be time to sleep all day!
The hotel I’m staying at here is a Hilton and is very nice. There’s a glass-top desk here that I’m writing this on right now, and the bathroom looks very cool with some cool Eastern design stuff going on. I’ll try to post pictures if I can…(I’m writing this offline and will post it online when I get to work, where the internet is free. Turns out it isn’t free at the hotel!)
Ok, so food. So far, it is delicious, and the restaurant we went to last night was incredibly good. For breakfast, the hotel serves a buffet, and thankfully they give you regular silverware since I think everywhere else is going to require me to use chopsticks. It’s a big buffet of the foods I’m used to, like fried eggs, french toast, watermelon and other fruits, though there’s some asian food in there too which I will have to try. Their pepper is only white pepper, no black. Oh, and breakfast is also where I saw this big digital billboard that swapped between lots of advertisements, and half of them seem to show off the Chinese military with all of their tanks and missiles and troops and all that. The other ones are for cars and what looks like Kung Fu movies to me.
Lunch was a very different experience, which I had at our work cafeteria. There is one container of food that they give to everyone which had chicken, potatoes (and potato-like-things that I didn’t recognize), spinach, noodles, a couple of chicken drumsticks, and then some rice on the side. Oh and a banana too. And a piece of bread. A TON of food, and yet nobody in the cafeteria seems to eat it all. It seems like the norm is to eat about 50 – 75% of what’s on your plate, and then if you can take the food with you (like bananas), then you do. Also, nobody brought anything to drink, which was really crazy to me. It might be that a lot of the food is somewhat wet, so maybe they don’t feel like they need a beverage to wash it down? But seriously, there wasn’t a single person who brought a beverage to lunch.
The only available utensil was chopsticks, and I am definitely no expert at using them, but I can at least feed myself. Large objects are wonderful. Rice is a total mess for me, and if I wasn’t trying to grab the sticky white rice and went for fried rice, I’d be in trouble. They even use their chopsticks to pick up those chicken drumsticks, which takes some serious dexterity in my opinion. I finally figured out how to do it myself after dropping it several times. The people around me seem to have a more lazy approach to using chopsticks and use them to stab the food rather than grabbing it around the outside. Maybe I’ll give that a try today.
We had dinner at a restaurant that I didn’t learn the name of. The Chinese custom is to order food that everyone will buy, but between four people we still ordered four family size dishes and had a bunch of food leftover at the end. If I remember right, it was duck, beef, chicken, and a vegetable. The duck was sliced into these thin strips of meat and skin that were very neatly arranged on this plate. There was also a dish of sweet and sour sauce and hot sauce and another plate of these very thin tortilla-like things, though thinner even than tortillas. The objective of all of this was to take a few pieces of duck meat and duck skin and dip them into either sauce, set them onto these thin tortilla-like things, sprinkle either garlic pieces or onion pieces on top, then roll it up like a burrito with a closed-off end and then eat it. And it was incredibly tasty. Oh yeah, there was also this other meat dish mixed in with some small vegetables and curry sauce, and you take these small buns and stuff all this stuff into them and eat those. Our Chinese hosts joked that these are like mini hamburgers. I suppose it’s true.
And one last thing about the restaurant: there were tons of waitresses there, probably one for every three guests, though it wasn’t all that full at the time. They all stand in various corners of the dining room, and they are basically beckoned over as soon as you are ready to order or want them to bring you something else. When we ordered our food, they brought it all out at different times, bringing one plate after maybe 5 minutes and then a new one every 5 or 10 minutes after that. They also offered us all of the bones from the duck we ordered and brought the bag out to us, which in my opinion is kind of a gross and disturbing offer, haha.
There is probably a lot more to tell, but I should probably start getting ready for the day. I woke up somewhat early after going to bed extremely early, and I feel much more refreshed now. I’ll likely post this when I get to work and will see if I can get some pictures uploaded too.
The weekend plans are to at least see the Great Wall and go to the Summer Palace. I think it’s supposed to rain on Sunday, unfortunately, but the weather should be good for Saturday. I’ll look to update this again sometime over the weekend.
And I would end this with the Chinese saying for “see you soon” or anything similar, but I still know 0 Chinese. Oh well!
Monday, July 4, 2011
Intro post
Hi all! This will be my journal for detailing the experiences of my trip to China from July 5th to July 16th, 2011. The main purpose of this trip is for business, and I will be traveling with a fellow engineer to check out how our China factory does things and to talk about some of our main projects. But this journal will focus on all the non-work parts of the trip, and I'll try to work in as many pictures as I can along the way too.
I hope you enjoy reading this! I am very grateful to have the opportunity to take a trip like this, and I will try to update it daily with what's new.
I hope you enjoy reading this! I am very grateful to have the opportunity to take a trip like this, and I will try to update it daily with what's new.
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