China - Day 88 - China Retrospective

Wow, I made it. There were times that I seriously doubted whether I would last here, but I did. I don't know how I could write something cohesive about my experiences in China, so I'm going to resort to bullet points:

Things I'm going to miss:

• Being able to find milk tea everywhere
• Food being inexpensive and tasty
• The very impressive workshop at Allied
• Being good at basketball
• Exploring the city with my friends as an isolated group in a huge city
• The Shanghai Metro System and high-speed rail to Hangzhou
• Baozi and jiaozi. It's going to be hard to go back to eating Ling Ling
• Very kind and generous personal interactions

Things I'm not going to miss:

• Being stared at all the time everywhere I go
• Having to debone meat as I eat it
• Everyone smoking everywhere all the time
• Littering, spitting, people urinating everywhere
• The lack of personal space
• Monsoon weather
• Only having instant or overpriced coffee to drink
• Chinese "Beer" - an insult to beer
• Being functionally illiterate
• Not being able to drink tap water
• Everyone's lack of concern for safety
• Everyone's general disdain for strangers
• Getting the run around from my company when it's time to get paid
• Not being able to get a straight answer out of anyone
• Feeling like I'm risking my life every time I cross the street

Things I might miss or might not:

• People pushing/cutting in line - It's incredibly rude, but I'm good at it
• Never having to pay for a meal - Never being allowed to pay for yourself does get a bit insulting after a while
• Grocery Stores - They have some delicious surprises and some of the most foul "food" I've ever seen
• People watching - People act very differently in public than they do back home
• Chinese fashion - everyone tries to stand out and ends up looking silly
• Chinese ambition - People seem much more ambitious, but less creative here
• Strangers telling me I'm handsome - On one hand, it's very flattering. On the other, it's a very creepy way to start a conversation on the bus (which happened to me twice).

China - Day 85 - Goodbye Xiasha

I wish I could say it was a tearful goodbye, but frankly, I'm glad to get out of here. My last day at work was a pretty good encapsulation of my summer and my experience in China. I spent most of the morning watching the Canadian contractors working on a test workpiece and chatting with them as the machines worked. When it came time to change fixtures we learned that the pallet changing vehicle had been fooled with, rendering it inoperable, so the rest of the day was shot. Later, I went to collect my final salary and was met with a number that was significantly lower than what I expected to be paid. The company had included a number of charges on my salary that shouldn't have been based on my contract, but it took a call to Denise, the program coordinator, to get them removed. I had accepted the fact that I wouldn't be making much money this summer, but to be nickeled and dimed like that really left a bad taste in my mouth. In an about face, I had dinner with the president of the company where I had a surprisingly nice steak and a nice conversation. These conflicting treatments by the company are a perfect example of the duality of my experience in China. And the cherry on top of the sundae of today: the power was out in my apartment when I got home (It was turned back on 15 minutes later after an annoyed phone call).

China - Day 83 - When it Rains, it Pours

Miraculously, I'm not talking about the weather, but rather basketball. After waiting 11 weeks for my company to finally play a basketball game, I get two in four days. We finally played the police and they were far and away the best team we played all summer. They were much more physical and organized than anyone else we played (this seemed painfully obvious in hindsight). For once we were actually the smaller team, and we got positively worked. It seemed like I was the only one of our players who could actually hold his own in the key, but I was pretty useless there when 3 guys would collapse on me (due to their very effective 2-3 zone). It did frustrate me that they played dirty (ironic), but I got over it (my bruises are still holding a grudge). We ended up losing, but the loss didn't sting, strangely. Probably due to my surreal "last week in China" feelings.

Work is... strange right now. I've been trying to self-teach about CNC milling in practice and helping to finish the set-up of the 1816 line. I come and go as I please; the autonomy feels strange in this type of internship, but I'm just trying to learn as much useful information as I can while not getting in the way. Actually, not getting in the way is kind of a problem because there are about 10 guys from Allied who watch the Canadian contractors setting up and running the machining, so it gets pretty crowded. Oh well, they'll be here after I'm gone, so I shouldn't feel too bad.

China - Day 80 - Once more around the lake

September 3
Friday, we finally had the company basketball game that I've been looking forward to all summer. The game went pretty well for my team (we won by about 30) and I had a good game; I think I ended up with more steals than points, which was strange, although not that surprising given my ballhawking and the lack of hustle by most of the players. It was a lot of fun to get out there and play for a team again. I think we might have another game on Tuesday, but that's still up in the air.

After the game, as per usual, we went out to dinner as a team. The meal was rather uneventful, but it seemed to drag on for hours as the guys kept drinking and smoking and talking. I could tell that they were occasionally talking about me because they kept using a few of the words I can pick-up in spoken Chinese: "Tang Mu" (my name), "laowai" (foreigner), "meiguo" (American), "ta" (him, accompanied by a nod or a point). After about an hour and half (and two beers, which was enough for me) I told Michael to stop ordering me beer because I was full, which is a sign that he usually understand means I'm ready to go. The drinking and the smoking continued and my mood deteriorated. I didn't want to be rude and cause a scene, so I went along with it, accepting a third (and fourth) beer and going along with all of the toasts and trying to follow the conversation that completely eluded me. I gave every non-verbal signal I could signifying that I was ready to call it a night: bored expression, staring into the distance, pretending to sleep, but nothing worked. I had to repeatedly shoot down offers of a "massage" (offered with a wink and pronounced "mah-sah-gee," which confused me for about a minute). It felt like I was being held hostage. After another hour (2.5 hours into dinner at this point, after all the other customers had left the restaurant and the management had turned off the lights), I firmly told Michael that I wanted to go home. Thirty minutes after that, we finally left. I was angry (in addition to being sore from the basketball game), so I wasn't very talkative. Michael seemed surprised that I was unhappy and was cautiously trying to make me feel better to no avail because the time for that was hours ago.

September 4
I went to work today, but I'm not sure why. When I try to find something to do, I'm told we have to keep waiting for a part to come in or there is nothing to do. Even my desire to teach myself CAD skills has deteriorated due to the amount of self-teaching I've done this summer. It's going to be an (un)interesting last week.

September 5
First things first, Stanford football. Other than my family (and one particularly resilient Volvo), nothing has been in my life longer, which made it especially painful that I was missing my first home game in 5 years. But, thanks to the aforementioned smallness of the planet, I was able to listen to the game on the KZSU website. We won big over Sacramento State, but I still wish I was there. Hearing the train whistle in the background didn't make me any less homesick.

China - Day 77 - Begin the Countdown

Wow, I'm leaving China in 10 days. It's hard to believe I've been here for almost three months, I'm actually starting to get used to it, but at the same time I'm anxious to return home to the life I led for 21 years before these last 3 months. It's going to be nice to go back to a place that I speak the language, but I'm not quite there yet.

Things have been excruciatingly slow at work this week. There are delays on the machining line set-up as we have to keep waiting for control parts. It's frustrating because I understand the problem, but not enough to help fix it, so I'm just waiting for parts to come in.

The good news is that our company basketball game looks like it's actually going to happen. We're scheduled to play tomorrow at 5, so hopefully nothing else goes wrong and I can actually play in the game I've been looking forward to all summer. We apparently have another game scheduled for Tuesday, so I might get two games in. I'm excited

The less good news is that the weather has been absolutely miserable for the last week and there are no indications of it letting up any time soon. There are currently 3 typhoons in the South China Sea that are dumping rain on Eastern China. Apparently they closed middle schools in Shanghai, it's that bad. Even though we're about 100 miles inland, we're still getting rained on. Woo.

China - Day 74 - It's funny how time speeds up

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.

China - Day 66 - An uneventful week

The work weeks was fair uneventful. The one big thing that happened was the arrival of the guys from Husky Canada to teach Allied about the new CNC machines. It's been nice to talk to them to get a different view of industrial production. I'm finding that the manufacturing industry is much easier to understand from their perspective than from Allied's perspective. I guess I'm not doing a very good job of integrating myself into this company/country.

In other news of the week, I went back to running during the week after having played basketball for the better part of the last month. It was difficult, to say the least. I could barely make 5k without stopping for a breather, which is sad because I made it to 7k in July before I stopped running. My joints were incredibly sore this weekend, I'm thinking that the running on the concrete here is not the best thing in the world, I think I'm going to return to playing basketball.

The weekend was fun, I finally went on the shopping spree I'd been planning for the last month (had to wait until I got my second paycheck). As I was getting off the bus at Wulin Square I noticed that the guy sitting across the aisle from me was wearing a Stanford Football shirt. If I had more time or a better understanding of Chinese I would have asked him about his shirt, but I didn't want to miss my stop. Small world, huh. The shopping went well (my reconnaissance trips on previous weekends definitely paid off), but I did notice some strange behavior. As I wandered through the countless malls of downtown Hangzhou I wore my headphones, which I thought was the universal "Leave me alone" signal, but that didn't stop dozens of salesmen from trying to entice me into their stores, strange. While I was standing in line to check out at H&M this Chinese woman would not stop bumping into my back, I think at one point she starting leaning on me. It seems that the concept of personal space is a purely Western construct, but I definitely miss it. After a while she tried to maneuver around me, but I moved my leg quickly and gave her a look that said "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" That stopped her shenanigans.

After I finished my shopping I had a few hours to kill before meeting Michael for dinner, so I decided to take up residence in a Starbucks, where I could get a coffee and continue reading my book. I got my coffee and found an comfortable chair (finding a good chair in a coffee shop is pure luck, no matter where you are) and proceeded to read and people-watch for the next two hours. The coffee I had was burnt, like almost every brewed coffee I've ever had from Starbucks, but it reminded me of home. Burnt, fresh coffee is still a step up from the instant coffee I've been drinking.

Michael and I went to a restaurant that serves traditional Hangzhou dishes along the famous Hefang shopping street. The food was quite good; I even willing ordered Xihu Xia (West Lake Shrimp). Eating with Michael has given me a fair good understanding of Hangzhou food. After dinner we walked around Hefang for a little while and I stopped at a street vendor to buy deep fried ice cream balls that my friend Susan described as "deliciously disgusting," which was incredibly accurate. The taste was a combination about sweet and cold and fried and slimy. It could have totally passed for the state fair. In a little shop I found a fan that I thought would make a good decoration for my room. I reached for my wallet to buy it, but Michael insisted that he pay for it, as a gift to me. Combining this with the numerous dinners he's bought me (including this one), I'm starting to feel guilty for all of the hospitality that I've been receiving in China. I'm used to the expectation that I'll be allowed to pay once and a while, even as the guest. I suppose I should be enjoying it while I can. It's strange how hospitable people in China are when they get to know you, because it seems that the Chinese have a general antipathy towards strangers, as evidenced by the lack of personal space and rampant littering/spitting/smoking. I think I need to get over my reservations and just enjoy Michael's hospitality.

I went shopping during the week and bought these Blueberry flavored potato chips. They are supposed to be "Cool and Refreshing," and they actually are, kind of.	A startlingly accurate description of fashion in China. There are a lot of stores selling genuine luxury goods, but many, many more selling fakes.
They're still selling Lebron Cavaliers jerseys in Hangzhou. I guess they didn't hear about The Decision	Rather than a public thermometer, they have a public decibel meter. Yep, China is loud.

China - Day 46 - A (tourism) star is born

July 31
When my boss's boss asked me to give a speech about American college, I said sure, figuring that it would be more like a conversation with some Chinese college students, like the conversation I had with ZheDa students a month ago. Well, I was kinda wrong. I realized it wasn't exactly what I expected when I saw the note posted on the company billboard advertising it to the entire company. After a few powerpoint missteps (it's funny to see that those presentation issues are universal), I got started with the speech, but things got tripped up pretty quickly when I realized that most of the audience didn't speak English and I had to pause for my boss to translate the speech. There were about 25 assorted people from the company there and I'm not sure how much of the speech translated, but they did laugh occasionally, so I think it went fine. When we got to the Q and A session, I was expecting questions about American colleges, but I ended up getting many more personal questions. Apparently everyone has to ask for themselves if I have a girlfriend. Following the speech, we went to a hotel restaurant in Xiasha that I'm sure was the classiest restaurant in Xiasha (which isn't saying much). The food was fine, although it was buffet, so it was rather tepid. Overall, a strange but somewhat fulfilling day.

China - Day 36 - A (basketball) star is born

Work was not terribly interesting today, but after work was a lot of fun. The Allied basketball team had a practice today before our game against the police and apparently people have been talking up my basketball skills. I didn't want to disappoint, and in this crowd, I didn't. Even though I'm a mediocre at best basketball player at home, I'm pretty good here, definitely good enough to start on the company team. I tried to keep my own stats, but lost track around halfway through. If I had to guess, I think I ended up with about 24 points, 15 rebounds, 5 blocks and a steal in 90 minutes. I think I represented American basketball quite well; I was able to play a power game and run over guys all night. Baseline dribble penetration worked really well for me and I surprised them by hitting a few from the elbow after dominating the glass for the better part of the game. It's somewhat strange, the Chinese are positively obsessed with the NBA, but they don't play particularly good basketball, at least at the rec league level. I think the reason for that is that they grow up watching the NBA and try to emulate the things they see NBA players do without working on the fundamentals, which underlie American youth basketball. For the most part, the guys I played with were very sloppy. There were tons of dropped passes, fumbled hand offs and chasing the ball on the floor; I felt like Tim Duncan (The Big Fundamental) out there. However, what the Chinese lack in fundamentals, they make up for in energy. I've never seen the fast break run so many times in my life. I had to sub myself halfway through the first quarter to catch my breath and to let some of the other guys get in the game. I noticed that the Chinese guys would only go off when they were about to pass out tired which said two things to me: 1) These guys are very committed to the game 2) They hate to be on the bench even if it means half-assing it on the court.

After the game we went out to dinner with the team, which is actually the first time I've been taken out to dinner by the company. I've been told to expect a few things when being taken out to a dinner by your coworkers: strange food, lots of drinking and fascination with me, the laowai. All of these expectations came true. Strange food got off to an impressive start with chicken feet, the classic weird Chinese dish. Following my policy of trying everything, I had it and I was disappointed. It was basically chicken skin over very small bones and had no taste whatsoever. The Hundred Year Egg was a bit more off-putting, it looked and smelled like death, but it tasted and still had the texture of a boiled egg (not my favorite). I tried to follow the conversation, but it mostly went right past me, although I did pick up on a few words that I think they were using to describe me (meiguo, laowai). One of the things they were curious about that my mentor translated for me was a question of how many beers I could drink (note: in China, beer is generally served in 600mL bottles (about 22 oz) and is 3.1 percent ABV) and I said twelve, which I could probably drink over the course of an evening. I don't think that last part translated well and it seemed that everyone at the table took that to mean that I would have twelve of those bottle by the end of the meal and they accepted that challenge by toasting me every 5 minutes (ganbei - empty the cup). I ended up going through five and half bottles by the end of the meal and was still able to walk out not drunk (tipsy, sure, but not drunk). I think I did a good job representing American basketball and drinking today.

China - Day 26 - Monsoon season sucks

Last couple days have run together, so they don't get differentiated. It has been raining for the better part of the last week and I'm rather not enjoying it. The monsoon season is one of the things that I definitely did not anticipate about China, but it is a reality that I've had to deal with. I have to walk about a mile to work every day; my usual route is completely uncovered, but on days it's raining pretty hard I'll walk under the elevated highway that runs right next to my apartment complex, which keeps me pretty dry. From the looks of it, I'm in for at least another month of monsoon season (Damn you El Niño).

On the work front, things are changing up, which is good because I felt like they were stagnating. I finished the fixture and the machining plans for the fixture and the workpiece, which took much longer than anticipated, but I was glad to be done with the same fixture I'd been working on for two weeks. Today I got to edit a production fixture that had to be readjusted due to casting issues, but I fixed it pretty quickly, so I decided to play around in Pro/E a little bit and it is very different from NX6 (less intuitive in my opinion). Perhaps it is a more powerful tool, but I've barely scratched the surface.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but my company has a basketball team that occasionally plays games against the teams of other companies (because basketball's very popular in China). Anyway, my mentor told me today that we have a game coming up against the police (of Xiasha, not Sting) and that they want me to play. I've only played basketball twice in China, but I've done alright thanks to my willingness to play rough in the post and being six inches taller than the next tallest guy. I'm not sure if those tactics will work against the police though. Hopefully the team won't be relying on me because my game is pretty rusty. Oh, and I found out that we have company jerseys, which means that they take this seriously. No pressure, I just have to live up to their expectations of my entire country

On a completely unrelated note, I want to talk about the food over here; it isn't exactly what we would consider to be Chinese food in America. I'm living in Zhejiang province, which has it's own distinct style of food that can be very different from the food in the next province over (like the difference between French food and German food). I do most of my eating at the company canteen because I live in an industrial district where there aren't many options for food (there are only 2 restaurants and a convenience store within a 1 mile radius). The cooks in the company canteen are from Anhui province which has food similar to Zhejiang that tends to be salty and somewhat bland, compared to other provinces. This style of food is very different from the Chinese food I'm used to at home (mostly Hunan and Sichuan/Szechwan). Vegetables are featured very prominently and meat is used sparingly. There is an important distinction between Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese food: in Northern China they grow wheat, which means they use noodles as their primary starch. In Southern China they grow rice, which means rice is used as the primary starch and that most noodles are rice noodles (which I happen to hate). As someone who loves chao mian, this has been quite frustrating, although it does make going out on the weekends more enjoyable because I have the option to eat Western food or food from other provinces.

China - Day 20 - (Insert clever tagline)

Yeah, so the last three days have been so uneventful that they don't merit a breakdown by date. I'm still working on fixturing and now I'm creating a primary machining fixture (the first one I created was actually a secondary machining fixture, so now I'm backtracking). I should hopefully finish this up soon and move on to another project, but little things keep popping up and I make little mistakes due to a lack of direction. This is getting a little frustrating, but I'm looking forward to finishing up with this fixture soon. Hopefully I'll get a chance to teach myself some Pro/E soon (since I figured out how to change the language of that program to English). Tomorrow, however, will not be that day as there is a scheduled power outage from 7:30 to 15:30 while they upgrade the factory's connection to the power grid. I'm not sure if I need to come into work, we'll see.


On the fun front, I'm going to Shanghai this weekend. I'm leaving on Friday after work and coming back Sunday night; I'll be staying with my friend Susan (although there are at least 3 of us crashing with her, so I'll probably be sleeping on the floor, couch if I'm lucky). On Saturday we're going to get a tour of Google Shanghai and a meet and greet with some of their interns from Chinese universities. I'm going to try to swing by the Apple Store that's opening in Shanghai on Saturday that isn't too far from Google, although we'll see how the day goes. We aren't going to try to go to the Expo; we're going to put that off until later in the summer when the crowds have hopefully subsided.

Because things have been so slow lately, I'm going to delve into two topics that have crept into my mind over the last 3 weeks: corporate paternalism and children in public.

China - Day 12 - Work's picking up

The last two days have been kinda boring in terms of stuff actually happening, oh well, here goes nothing.

June 29
Not much happened at work today. I'm starting to think that I'm going to have to stay on top of Michael so that I have enough work to do. It's strange to be in the position of self-driving my own internship, but I guess it's necessary here. What I've gathered from Chinese students and other assorted sources is that internships are a relatively new phenomenon in China and it seems that Allied is not experienced at having interns. I think I might be their first intern ever, much less their first foreign intern. I've started to get more persistent with Michael, which I think is going to help me get more work to do, although I am definitely disadvantaged by my inability to communicate with the majority of the company. The fact that I don't speak very good Chinese means that Michael is pretty much my only conduit of information and, as I've noted earlier, getting a straight answer out of him can be difficult.

Conservation is one aspect of China that rather perplexes me. On one hand, there are power switches for all the appliances in my room and they seem to take energy conservation very seriously. On the other hand, there are a huge amount of disposable packaging/chopsticks used, which surely isn't environmentally friendly. I'm not sure I've thought of a good reason for this dichotomy yet, but it is curious in the face of the pollution that grips the city and, from what I can tell, the better part of the country. I would think there would be more environmental activism, but perhaps that gets to the difference between American and Chinese culture.

On an unrelated note, I went for a run tonight and it was nice to see a different part of the town. Running through an industrial district after hours is a weird feeling, kinda like running through a ghost town. There were times I would have a 4 lane road all to myself, which was slightly disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the lightning that was firing in the distance in front of me. I tried to count the time between the flash and the thunder, but I forgot whether every 5 seconds you counted corresponded to the lightning being a mile away, or if it was 2 seconds. Either way, I didn't get hit by lightning, which is a good thing.

China - Day 6 - Time to get to work

June 22
It's my second day at work and it's going very much like the first. I'm having the second safety training session; however, the person giving the training doesn't speak very good English (and I certainly don't speak Chinese well enough to take safety training), so I have to guess at what he's trying to convey. Probably not the best situation for safety training, but I'm going to be spending most of my time in the office and I think I got the general gist of the training (Don't touch anything). After safety training they take me out to another warehouse for more training, but this time it is training to use a five ton crane. That is way more fun than anything else I've been doing, and I start to get the hang of it pretty quickly. It's pretty much a pendulum game, albeit with a 500 kg pendulum. As we walk back to the office, Michael tells me that his boss thinks I "walk lazy." I'm confused, so I press for information. Apparently, the way I walk with my weight behind be, not walking with urgency, makes me appear lazy. I resolve to walk like purpose, to use my "city walk," around the office.

After lunch I finally get my own computer after two days of prodding (and spending the first half of the day studying engineering drawings out of context got grating). The only problem, it's in Chinese and there is no way to change the operating system language to English without buying an English version of Windows. Oh, and the software I'm going to be using (Unigraphics NX6) is also in Chinese. Excellent. After an hour or so of my fruitless searching, Michael comes and changes the language of NX6 to English in 3 minutes. Oh well, I have my own access to the outside world (Internet is spotty at best in my apartment) and something to keep myself entertained at work. I went for a run after work and I got a lot of strange looks, like I'm the first person to run in the history of Xiasha. Oh well, it is nice to get some exercise in.

China - Day 3 - Welcome to Hangzhou, no wait, Xiasha

June 20
The next night after touching down in Shanghai, we got up for orientation which primarily consisted of a luncheon with alumni. The food served was Shanghaiese (aka Shanghai specialties), including a fantastic pork belly dish (no idea what it was called), jellyfish, eel and a number of less interesting dishes. I figured "When in Rome..." and tried the jellyfish and eel. The eel was quite tasty, but heavily masked with spices. The jellyfish was something else all together. It was a lot crunchier than I expected jellyfish to taste, kinda like hard jello. After the luncheon, we returned to our hotel to get our bags and head to the train station for the train to Hangzhou. This was the second time I seriously regretted bringing so much stuff. We got to the train station (Shanghai South) and it was a mess. There must have been easily five thousand people. After a number of false starts, we got to the right gate where we waited with 500 hundred of our newest friends for the train. While we waited, I went to find a water fountain because I was quite parched after running all over the train station for the past half hour. However, I didn't find a drinking fountain like I expected. Instead I found a hot water dispenser. Over the next couple of days it finally dawned on me that cold drinks are not really normal in China. It seems that the Chinese prefer their drinks warm, or at coolest, room temperature.

Jellyfish on the left, eel on the right