Long Time No Write

September 21, 2008

It's been a long time since I wrote in my blog...
For those of you that actually read it, I'm sorry.

The last time I wrote I had just sold my house and got my drivers licence.

And I soon found it very useful to have the drivers licence because I started driving the car to the hospital 5 days a week for 6 weeks to do physical therapy. I never found a chiropractor but did find "li liao" which means physical therapy. The therapy I did was basically traction on my neck for 20 minutes followed by 40 minutes of electrical shock stimulation to the muscles on my shoulders. I can kind of understand the purpose of the traction - Pull the neck straight and allow the bones to move back to the correct place. And maybe the pinched nerves move out of the way. But I asked several times what the purpose of the 40 minutes of electrical muscle stimulation was supposed to be doing. My impatient american way of thinking told me it was useless and a waste of time. But this is chinese medicine - which takes time, and I should be patient and give it a chance.

And, after about 5-6 weeks I was actually feeling a lot better. I asked, what should i do now and they sold me a little do-it-yourself pulley thing that you are supposed to be able to use at home. It was pretty useless and really uncomfortable. It really hurt my jaw and I figured even if it helped my neck, I was going to start having jaw problems, and that is not a good solution. So I basically stopped doing anything for a couple of months. And of course by the beginning of August my headaches and neck aches were back. So I am back to doing the therapy again.

On May 8th, my friend and little sister, Qiufeng moved to Ningbo. It was a rainy spring morning and she had spent a long 27 hours on the train to get to Ningbo. Shenglong asked me if I knew any good engineers with experience that would like to come work for the company and I said that I knew at least one. I knew that Qiufeng was not so happy at her job in SGMW (the GM joint venture in Liuzhou where I worked during my first year in china). I knew she was thinking about changing jobs so I asked her if she wanted to come to Ningbo.

I really needed a translator and asked if she would be interested, but she said she wasn't so confident in her english skills and didn't want to be my translator. So I said we also needed assembly engineers and I knew that she had some experience, so I told her she should apply as an assembly engineer.
She did start as an assembly engineer but after a few weeks, Shenglong couldn't find another translator so they forced her to be my translator. It has been a bad experience for her and she hates the job. I think I am a hard boss to work for. I have a lot of pressure and it is difficult for me to communicat with my team and my suppliers and sometimes I am in a bad mood. I expect a lot from people as I do from myself. I think she is doing a great job and I tell her that often, but she doesn't believe me. She thinks she is disappointing me or she should do better. She knows it isn't my fault. I have a lot of pressure and an impossible job to do, so she tries her best to help me get the job done and I appreciate it very much.

When she first came to Ningbo, she decided that she wanted to live with me, so she has actually been sleeping on a thin mattress on my floor in the living room for the past 4 months. But at the end of this month, I will be moving to our company appartment building which is right next door to our new factory. And she has decided that she doesn't want to live with me any more. She will find another apartment to live in so we will not be together 24 hours a day and maybe it will help our friendship. I hope so.

Maybe we both need some private time so that we can make an effort to do fun things together again like we did when we were in Liuzhou. We have had a few fun adventures together riding our bikes and hiking with friends and jogging in the park and taking long walks to the city center. I hope we will do more fun things soon. We want to go camping, so i hope in a week or so we can do that together. We have already chosen a spot and I have a tent and 2 sleeping bags, so we are all set. Just need a nice weekend and good weather.

I feel very sad that I asked her to come here. Even if she didn't love her job at SGMW she liked it much more than working at Shenglong. I am sorry i caused her to leave Liuzhou. But even though it has been hard on our friendship for her to be my assistant, I know our friendship will survive and be stronger than ever someday.

Summer in China is really hot. We live near the sea now and there is more wind here, but even though we are much further north than Liuzhou where I was the last 2 summers, it was still a really hot summer. So, nobody does much in summer in china. It is too hot to go outside. I have hardly ridden my bike since i got the car in April. Since we are starting to get a few cool days mixed in with the extremely hot ones, maybe Qiufeng and I can ride our bikes together again soon and have bicycle adventures like we used to do in Liuzhou and her early days in Ningbo in the late spring.

I had a trip back home in July for the 2nd annual Pinkerton Family Reunion and to do some shopping. Chinese people are all very skinny and generally shorter than americans. It is too difficult for me to go shopping in china. So I spent $1000 in america on new clothes. The really funny thing is that half the stuff i bought was made in china. Only one thing was made in USA and one in Canada. All the rest were from Indonesia, ShriLanka, Vietnam, some from south America,... Made in America is very hard to find these days. I also tried to catch up with friends while I was back in Michigan but the time was so short. I got to see some but not all.

I did go to an island not far from here with my friends Tracy and Donna and Qiufeng. It is called TaoHuaDao which means peach flower island.

















It is really beautiful and we stayed with Tracy's friend who's husband works in the government on the island. Life on the island is really peaceful and relaxed.


I drove the car and we took a ferry to the island and back.


We saw a chinese submarine while waiting for the ferry. Cool! I never saw a submarine in the sea before.




My friends Qiufeng and Clock and I also went to HuangShan (Yellow Mountain) on the opening day of the Olympic Ceremony, 080808. It was a long drive and my neck was killing me by the time we got there. We watched the opening ceremony in the hotel and it was amazing. My favorite part was the 2008 drummers performing in perfect harmony. But the whole ceremony was totally amazing.

China had an amazing team (1099 athletes) and their results were fantastic. 51 gold medals and more than 100 medals total. It really seemed like they wanted gold or nothing. The olympics were a great sense of pride for China and they have reason to be proud. The olympics were a great success and their athletes performed very well. China is a developing country, but it is developing fast. They hosted a very professional and successful olympics for the whole world to enjoy.














The next day we went to the mountain. We took a cable car to the top of the mountain and then walked around on the top all day. It was a little overcast that day which made the scenery not so spectacular, but it helped keep it a little cooler. It was still really hot though and crowded which made it a little disappointing.


Clock taught me some new chinese words. "Tai
yong ji le!" means too crowded. And "Tai chao le!" means too noisy. I really hate the tour groups in china. The tour guides have megaphones so their group can all hear them. When there are about 20 of these pushy tour groups in any one place on the mountain top all blaring away at the same time, it is very annoying.

As you can see, it was very crowded and steep.

Instead of taking the cable car down the mountain we walked down. It was a very long walk and my legs hardly worked when we got to the bottom.

On the way home Clock taught me more chinese. He is a good and patient teacher. I enjoy studying with him. At the same time that he teaches me chinese he also learns some new english words. It was a very fun way to make the long drive go by faster.

Other than those couple of trips, my summer hasn't been too exciting.

In my next post I will update you on my job.

That's all for now... 88
(the way to say 8 in chinese is ba. So 88 is baba which sounds like byebye).