It's a strange feeling, time seems to be passing more quickly as I approach the end of my time in China. Perhaps it's my desire to return to the familiar world back home. Perhaps it's me becoming more accustomed to my surroundings. Perhaps it's just a side effect of aging. At the same time, I'm feeling less and less desire to write updates. Maybe I'm just doing less interesting stuff now or perhaps I've run out of interesting "firsts" to write about, but I find myself without much to say on a day to day basis. Although, I can always complain about the weather. After six weeks of relatively dry, if hot, weather, the rains have returned and they are miserable. The commuting gods have frown upon me, as torrential downpours have coincided with my walk home for the better part of the last week. If I've learned anything from this internship it's that I am never going to allow myself to live somewhere that could be described as a "monsoon zone."
My training with Allied seems to be more or less wrapped up and I've started assisting on the implementation of the new CNC line set-up, which is causing more hassles than I expected. It seems that the problem is that they left a job for IT guys to a couple of machine operators. My experience made me somewhat useful, but I couldn't get the job done, so they're going to fly in someone from Luxembourg (really, I couldn't have come up with this if I'd tried). Right now there are 3 teams working on the CNC line: 1) The team from the machine manufacturer (based out of Shanghai), 2) The team from the contracted customer who are helping to set-up the outsourced work (based out of Toronto), 3) The team from Allied learning to run the line (the team is pretty much just my mentor Michael). With this many people, we have a tendency to step on each other's toes, which leads to a lot of waiting time, which I usually spend talking to the guys from Canada, learning about what they do and telling stories. One of them, Marcin, told me stories of living in Poland during Communist rule when he was about my age, it did not sound like fun.
I took of Friday to go on a tour of Alibaba that was set-up by our program director Denise. I read up a little bit on the company beforehand and expected it to be somewhat like a cross between eBay and Amazon, which was pretty accurate. I was kind of disappointed when they deflected a number of my questions, but they did have good coffee, which surprised me. It was nice to hang out with my Stanford friends again this weekend. We searched out a number places we'd been planning to try in Hangzhou, including a Mexican restaurant (Pancho's). I ordered the Burrito al Pastor, but what I got looked like BBQ Pork fried rice wrapped in a tortilla. I didn't even know where to begin tearing this place down, so I'm not going to. Just two more weeks until I can have real Mexican again. After the debacle that was this Mexican restaurant, we went out for drinks at the other Mexican restaurant in Hangzhou (Maya Bar), which was much better (probably because it's harder to screw up a margarita than a burrito). We learned some fun Chinese drinking games and I have a new goal, find 20 dice and 4 cups in a market. Hopefully it will go better than my last shopping trip, when I attempted 3 times to haggle with a grandmotherly woman who promptly shot me down each time. That kind of killed my shopping mojo for the weekend.
Oh, and other good news. I found out that the basketball game that I've been waiting for all summer is supposed to happen tomorrow or Wednesday, so that should be fun. I'll try to get someone to take pictures for all of your derisive pleasure.
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