Terry's Adventures in China - Issue 3

Zao shang hoa (good morning)

It is Monday morning for me in China, Sunday night for most of you.

Well, I've been in China for nearly 2 months now and it's still going great. We finally moved into the apartment a few weeks ago and I'm finally starting to feel at home and settled. The apartment is really nice. It's very near work so we even come home for lunch most days.

My favorite purchase so far in China has been my chinese bicycle. Here's a picture. My bike cost RMB 280 which is $35. I haven't bought a mountain bike yet, but this bike is fine for now. I like having some independence and I've ridden it to work several days now. It is funny because a "foreigner on a bicycle" is quite a rarity here and everybody stares and says "Hello".

A couple of weeks ago I went to a beautiful small town called Yongshuo. It is a tourist town with lots of shopping and restaraunts and my friends and I rented bicycles for two. We had a really nice little adventure riding through the farms and taking a ferry across the river, etc. It was a great day out and the next week I bought my own bike.

Last weekend Joel, our driver Steven and a friend of mine Lu Qiufeng went to DuLe Park. We went to some caves and then climbed to the top of one of the Karst mountains (not really tall enough to be called mountains, but that is what they call them, so when in China...) . We have decided that they put temples at the top of these mountains and the challenge is to find the start of the stairs at the bottom of the mountain. If you can do that, you are rewarded with wonderful views from the top. We also visited a nearby village. This was really fun seeing how they lived and the animals and food they were growing in the fields. I got some great pictures of water buffalo. You should now be able to see all of my pictures on Picasa. Here is a link. http://picasaweb.google.com/terry.pinkerton

Yesterday my friend Lu Qiufeng and I went on a little adventure on our bicycles. We rode out of town on what looked like a fairly big road but it is under construction, so it ended up being a very dusty, bumpy adventure. It was fun though. We both had new bicycles and they were not really put together all that well. Her seat fell down and handlebars came loose. My brake cable was rubbing on the back wheel and the seat was coming apart (not really assembled correctly and a little self tapping screw fell out). After the adventure, we got a man who was power washing his motorcycle to wash our bikes off for us and we stopped at a little repair shop to get some bolts tightened back up. Our bikes looked like new again. Qiufeng invited me to her house for a drink. We put our locks on our bikes - nothing to lock them to. We were inside for 15 minutes and when we went back down, her bike had been stolen. Mine was left alone. Maybe the guy was going to come back for mine. Getting away with one bike with a lock on the wheel would have been hard enough. I feel really bad for her. Her birthday is next week. If she doesn't find it this week, I will buy her one for her birthday. I want her to be able to take more adventures with me. She won't be able to afford a new one, but hers only cost $25, so not too much for me to spend on a good friend.

I also have started my chinese lessons again. I took class with some other people I met in the hotel for a couple of weeks. It was beginner chinese, so a refresher for me. Kind of frustrating for me, but now I have started with a private teacher. Only had one lesson, but I think it will work out well. I surprise many people because not only do I want to learn to speak chinese but also to read and most difficult of all, to write chinese. I am so curious about the signs and chinese writing all around me. I want to be able to read it. It doesn't come naturally to me, but I'm slowly making progress.

Work is going well. We are in the middle of our prototype builds. We are building 166 engines on our new machining and assembly lines. We struggled for several weeks to make good crankshafts, but they are getting it figured out now. So, now the pressure is on engine assembly to make engines. We have our own problems, but they are slowly getting better. Next week there is a week-long vacation for China's national day. The goal is to get 100 engines completed by then, so it will be a week of very long days to meet the goal.

Another interesting China experience: They've found 5 snakes in the factory. Two of them were cobras. The other three they didn't see the head, so they don't really know what type snake they were. The most recent one was not very big but it was found in a box when they were opening it. It's a little scary. It really makes you think about where you are putting your hands and feet when you go hiking.

This Friday, Joel's wife Jami comes to visit for a month. We are all going to northern Vietnam for the week long holiday next week. The border is only 6 hours from here by car. We hope to go to a place called Sapa which is famous for it's minority tribes. It will be similar to some of the stuff I did last Christmas. I am looking forward to some more adventure, but as I had hoped, every day in China is an adventure.

Well, I need to go to work now. I hope you are all well and I hope you write to let me know how things are going with you. I hope you enjoy my new blog. Post some responses to me.

Zai jian (see you later) for now.

Terry's Adventures in China - Issue 2

August 31, 2006


Ni Hao ju Zhongguo (hello from China),

I hope you are all doing well. It was great to hear from all of you after my last email.
Well, I've been in China for exactly one month. The past two weeks haven't been too exciting - mostly work and settling in, but it has been very interesting.

Many of you asked if I had moved into the apartment yet. Frustratingly, no! The other guy's stuff is still in it. Our company, PAC is supposed to be moving it out but haven't managed to do it yet. Hopefully soon! Living in the hotel is kind of getting old. I think I'm getting used to the hard bed, but I'm looking forward to the soft one in the apartment. But, the hotel's a good perspective on how the chinese think and work. They have their procedures and they WILL NOT deviate from them. They come into the room at least 3-4 times a day to clean and make the bed and turn down the sheets, etc... They count everything and leave you little notes if a towel or washcloth is missing. If you hand them the breakfast ticket for the wrong day they charge you. To save energy, there is a little box next to the door that you have to put your key in. This activates a totally annoying little electrical control box next to the bed which turns on almost all the lights and the power to the TV, but not the TV which you have to go turn on manually, then you can use the remote control to change channels. When you take the key out to leave the room, it all turns off and when you come back in, you have to put the key back in and go turn it all back on again.

You see some really crazy things in the streets here. With over a million people in this city and most of them not able to buy a car, there are bicycles and motor scooters everywhere. They can fit a family of 6 on a motor scooter - gotta get a picture of that. Driving to work and back is like a thrill ride. There are constantly people walking or driving out in front of you and buses don't care about anybody smaller than them. They just push you out into on-coming traffic. You just have to get used to the horn blowing. Today we saw a guy sitting in the middle of a 4-lane street - whether he was begging or staging a protest or just crazy is anybody's guess.

This city isn't beautiful - not fancy or new - actually everything looks old, even when it is new, but every morning the whole city is swept clean. Hundreds of people, armed with brooms made from sticks, sweep the sidewalks, streets, highways, grass and even dirt roads. This is no lie!!! We've seen people sweeping a highway (interstate, motorway, whatever you want to call it), and every day on the way to work, they are sweeping the 4-lane road we take to work. We've seen them sweeping the leaves off the grass and even sweeping the dirt roads. And, when some big wig is coming for a tour of the plant, about 100 mops come out and they clean the floors of the plant. They mop the floor in the office about 10 times a day.

Last week I had a business trip to Shanghai. Work is work, but in the evenings, we went to some really nice restaraunts and did some shopping and walking around. I almost didn't get to go because as foreigner in China, you cannot get on a plane without a passport. Mine was in Shanghai already getting my work Visa processed. We thought about the train which was supposed to take about 19 hours. I thought it might be nice - get a sleeper and see a lot of China as it passed me by. But then we found out the the "express train" to Shanghai took 31 hours. That's crazy! Finally we found somebody who was coming on the flight before mine. He landed at 10am, handed me my passport, I ran into the check-in and easily made it to the plane. Whew!

I started trying to practice my chinese. I picked up a really good book in Shanghai and made some flashcards, but if I don't practice it every day, I forget what I have learned. I have been jogging quite a bit along the river and people are actually starting to recognize me now. They really think it is interesting to see a white person jogging and stare a lot. I have decided to smile at them and wave when they do this. Some of them stop staring and look away, others actually smile and wave back. This makes me feel like I am being accepted, not just a local toursit attraction.

Well, I am going to try to send you some pictures. If they don't come through, I will try to find another way. I haven't set up a website with my pictures yet. If you have one to recommend, let me know.

The first and second pictures are of beautiful Shanghai.
The third is of me sitting on the tiger my first weekend here.
The forth is Joel and I in the plastic balls at the lake - the second weekend.
The fifth is taken from our apartment which is on the top floor of a building like the ones on the right.
The sixth is a sign they put on the toilets in the hotel reminding people not to stand on the toilet seats and squat. There are quite a few squat toilets in restaraunts, public places and especially bars. Funny that they need to tell people this in a 4-star hotel.

Until next time,
Take care of yourselves,
Your friend,
Terry

Update #1 Monday, August 14, 2006

Terry's Adventures in China - Update #1 Monday, August 14, 2006

Ni Hao (Hello) from China,
I think you probably all know by now that two weeks ago I set off on my biggest adventure yet and moved to China to work. A year and a half ago Ford asked me if I wanted to work in Thailand and I decided that going to work in a foreign speaking country with a very different culture was exactly what I wanted to do at this point in my life. Unfortunately that job didn't work out, and I spent a lot of effort since then trying to find a way to make it happen at Ford but I didn't have any luck. Then, in May, a friend of mine, Joel Stueck, told me that he was moving to China. I told him I wanted to go with him and he told me to send them my resume. Within a week I had an offer I couldn't refuse. It wasn't easy to quit Ford, but, as one of my friends kept saying to me "what are your dreams worth?". It was time to take a big step and go make my dreams come true. The company I now work for is called PAC Group. It is a small company (400 people worldwide). We do project management and consulting for other companies. I work in the powertrain division doing pretty much exactly what I did at Ford. I am currently working on a project in Liuzhou, in southern China. Even though the city has about 1 million people (3 million in the greater Liuzhou area), it is considered a small town in China. It actually does kind of feel like a small town.

I put my house up for sale in June - it will take a long time to sell it in Michigan and I will lose quite a bit of money, since so many people have lost jobs there in the past year. When I returned from the UK in 2002, I found that I didn't like any of the stuff I had put in storage for 3 years and I sold it all at a garage sale. I told myself then that if I ever did it again, I would sell everything. So, I put my car up for sale and just before I left in July, I had an estate sale with the help of 5 really really good friends - I could never have done that by myself. I called it my "liquidate my life sale" - it is very difficult to get rid of almost everything you own. But if it didn't have sentimental value, it was sold or given away or thrown away. It is amazing what people will buy!

I quit Ford at the end of June. It was very sad. I worked there for 14 years and it was a great job. I have lots of really really good friends at Ford and I hope to stay friends with them for the rest of my life. It feels like I got to visit with and say goodbye to almost everybody I know. The same day I quit Ford, I left on a one week vacation to the Uk. I caught up with probably 40 friends in Scotland, Wales and England. Then I had a few parties in Michigan saying goodbye to my friends at Ford and others I knew in Michigan. And the last week of July, I went home to visit my mother and family and the same night that I left for the airport, I went to my 20 year High School Reunion. It was awesome seeing everybody again.

So, I arrived in Shanghai China on July 31st. On August 1st, I met one of my new colleagues, Bill and we both went to have a physical which is required to get our residency and work visas. I met some of the PAC people in the Shanghai office, and then one of our Chinese colleagues, Frank, took Bill and I around Shanghai for half a day. Shanghai is a huge and beautiful city. It is the biggest city in China with a population somewhere around 30 million people in the greater Shanghai area. We went up in a sky needle and there are apartment buildings as far as you can see in every direction. You wonder what in the world all these people do.

The next day I flew to Liuzhou and started work. I am currently living in a hotel, but my friend Joel and I will share a really nice 5-bedroom apartment. We should be able to move in later this month. I can't wait because the beds in the hotel are really hard and the beds in the apartment are really soft. I am looking forward to a good night's sleep.

Work is very interesting and I am starting at a good time. It is a new factory built by a joint venture between the Chinese government, GM and a Chinese auto maker called Wuling - the joint venture is called SGMW. The equipment is very modern and latest technology (CNC machining lines and palletized somewhat automated assembly line.) The equipment is mostly installed now and next week we will start the final prototype build which will be machined and assembled on line. Job 1 is August next year. They seem to have all the same issues that we had at Ford, so the job isn't too hard.

It is interesting communicating with the Chinese. Most of the engineers speak pretty good english. The operators speak none. We have several interpreters that help out with meetings and help us westerners get things done when speaking Chinese is reqiured. GM's standards seem very similar to Fords. The next few weeks will be a big learning curve for me - and them.

Outside of work I am finding it very interesting and fun as well. There are at least 20 expats working here from all over the world. We do a lot together after work, so I have spent the last two weeks meeting people and learning my way around town. The first weekend we went to a beautiful city called Guilin - about 2 hours away from Liuzhou. Like Liuzhou, Guilin is surrounded by beautiful limestone mountains and huge rocks sticking up from the ground, they are called Karsts. We visited a large cavern with stalagmites and stalagtites and colored lighting, etc. It was very nice. The park also had a zoo and in the zoo they had Chinese animals including Panda bears, funny looking monkeys and a tiger. I paid $2.50 to go sit on the tiger. He started growling as soon as I went into the cage and I started to think it wasn't such a good idea. But it was ok. His fur was not very soft at all.

This past weekend I went running along the river for about an hour and saw lots of people fishing. Fred (also working at SGMW) and I took a cable car up one of the Karst mountains which is perfectly situated right at the bottom of the horse-shoe river that Liuzhou is built on. There is a wonderful 360 degree view from the top. It is awesome! There are also some caves in that mountain. On Sunday we went to a local park which is surrounded by the Karst mountains. We climbed up one of the mountains to see the view, saw a bridge built in the architectural method of one of the local minority communities, rented paddle boats to tour around one of the lakes, and Joel and I paid to be put into 8-foot high plastic bubbles and pushed out onto the lake. Now I know what a hampster feels like. It was impossible to stand up on the water so we just kept falling over all the time. It was very hot inside the balls though and we were soaked when we got out. It was a fun day!

I think I am going to love it here. The weather is in the upper 90's, the humidity is about 100%, but they have air conditioners so it isn't too uncomfortable most of the time. If you venture outside you just have to sweat. And I love the food! In the south of China the food is supposed to be very spicy, but so far I haven't found anything too hot for my taste. I wanted ADVENTURE, and every day is an adventure! I hope to start my chinese lessons again this week. I also found out that there is a mountain bike club in town. So once I move into the apartment, I will buy a bicycle and try to join them for some riding in the beautiful scenery around Liuzhou. I can't wait to learn the language so I can make friends and be a little more independent.

By the way, there is an internet calling program called Skype http://www.skype.com/ which allows you make phone calls over the internet for free, or call landline and cell phones. A Skype call from China to a land line in the US is only 2 cents per minute. Sign up and we can talk to each other for free.

That is it for the first two weeks. I hope you are all well. Write when you get a chance. Take care.

Love Terry

Setting up my China Blog

Welcome to my blog. Don't know what I'm doing yet, but hopefully I'll figure it out and have some fun.

I'm an American who loves adventure and seeing how people from other parts of the world live and think. I've just moved to China to live and work for a while. I hope to chronicle my my adventures on this blog and communicate with my friends and meet new ones.

Stay tuned.