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.