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.