Terry's China Adventure

Back at Ford (May 2009)

2009-05-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

Back at Ford!!

WOW! I just realized that it's been almost 9 months since I updated my blog.

A lot has happened since then. So much happened at work in Shenglong between September and April. In the end, I quit and have a new job and now live in a new city in China. I also had a long holiday in my home town, Murphysboro Illinois at Christmas. The US has a new president, my brother became Commander of the USS Tuscon submarine, and the world is in financial crisis. ... just to name a few of the changes in those 9 months.

Let me catch you up a little on my life... Since just about the only thing I did in that time was work, lets start there.....

When I last wrote, my company and project team had just moved into our new factory and all of our machines were starting to be delivered. That started the most frustrating and difficult 9 months of my life. I guess in hindsite, some of that frustration should be blamed on the economic situation in America and the fallout to the rest of the world economies. Getting things done in our factory was so difficult. It seemed that everything was a battle. Especially if it cost money.

The company had just spent a lot of money building a new factory and office building, and then customers started cancelling orders and cashflow came to a stand still. Because of the language barrier and having my head stuck into getting our equipment ready for prototype builds and capability, I didn't realize how bad things were for the company. In November they layed off about 1/4 of workforce and went to a 3 day work week. My team had to keep working though, usually 7 days a week but still only paid for 3 with the promise of time off later. It was a common way to handle the economic crisis in China. I heard many people saying their companies were doing the same thing. And many many companies went out of business completely.

There were many other things that made the job so frustrating. I won't go into the details. Needless to say, by Christmas, I was totally worn out and frustrated. Luckily I had a long holiday during Christmas to go home and see my Mom. I wanted to spend the Christmas time with her last year - long time since i was home for Christmas. Since the Chinese Spring Festival (2 week holiday) and Chinese New Year was just at the end of January this year, I was able to stay at home for about 5 weeks total. I was able to spend lots of time with my mom and other family. The weather was pretty good. We only had snow for about a week.

Even though I was supposedly on vacation, my team was still working and they still needed my help. So I had to call into conference calls early in the morning and late in the evening. I had lots of data to analyse, and lots of emails to read. It wasn't the most relaxing holiday, but it was good to be able to spend so much time with my family. It also gave me lots of time to think.

I had already decided before Christmas that I was going to quit in the new year. In March we had our first big test called PPAP where we had to make about 400 pumps using our production equipment and processes and send them to the Ford factory where the transmissions will be built. They had to be basically perfect. My plan was to quit after that PPAP build. I had started talking to some other companies in October, but told them that I would not be available until after March. Before Christmas, I was considering 3 or 4 different jobs. In the end, I decided to work for Ford again.

The main reason I decided to take the Ford job is because I really needed to change my life. I was working too much and it was affecting my health. I gained quite a bit of weight and I got almost no exercise. I had almost no free time and did nothing besides work. It was just too difficult for me being the only foreigner working in a small chinese company trying to help, and in the end trying to force them to change their way of doing business in order to meet their American customer's very high expectations.

As I said in my last post, it is impossible to do in a year what Ford has spent the last 30 years or more learning and developing. I am very proud of my team. They learned a lot in the year and a half that I worked there. They made huge improvements between our first and last prototype builds. But they still have a long way to go and I'm sorry that I couldn't stay there to help them finish the job. It was time for me to go. I really needed to change my life.

The company was shocked and disappointed that I wanted to leave, but in the end I think they all understand. The chinese always say "health is the most important thing". So in the end, they accepted that this was the best thing for my life. And they were very supportive. They paid me for all of the unpaid overtime from Nov-Feb. They helped me move to Nanjing. They had several dinner parties to say goodbye. They even gave me a "Life Time Achievement Award"!!

It was sad saying goodbye. The people on my team really are like my family. I realized that I became very chinese when I was working at that company. Even though most of the people on my team spoke good english and almost all of my work was done in english, I was still constantly surrounded by chinese people and chinese customs and chinese ways. My boss often said "you are really chinese now". I only ate chinese food. I'm an expert with chopsticks now. I take my showers at night like the chinese, I wore 5 layers of clothes all winter because the company wouldn't use the heat. Because I knew that all I was going to do during PPAP was work, I even moved to the company apartment just outside the factory gate and every morning joined the rest of the management team for morning exercises and short jog around the factory. At one point, I realized that there are lots of foreigners in Ningbo, but I didn't have a single friend in Ningbo that wasn't chinese. That was when i realized I was too chinese, too isolated from my own culture.

Anyway, I really care about my friends at Shenglong and my other friends in Ningbo. I hope that we will all stay friends forever.

So, I started my new job April 13th. I'm now the Assembly Manager for a program to make some new engines in Nanjing China. Ford already has a factory here making their 2.0L and 2.3L I4 engines and also a Mazda engine. We'll be modifying the machining and assembly lines to make some new versions of the I4 engine. It's both exciting and comfortable being back in the Ford family again. I don't actually work directly for Ford but the Joint Venture company called CFME. It's a joint venture between 3 car companies: Changan (a Chinese car manufacturer), Ford and Mazda (obviously). CFME means Changan Ford Mazda Engine.

Our team is interesting. Our leader is a chinese guy who worked in america for a long time. He and other chinese guys I've met that maybe studied in America and got their first job in America then moved back to China actually seem more comfortable speaking english than their mother tongue because they learned about making cars in english and sometimes they don't know the chinese technical words when they come back to China. When these guys try to explain something in chinese sometimes they use more english words than chinese words, so it's pretty easy for me to understand what they are saying.

The program planning director who hired me is an american guy who's married to a chinese woman. He's been here in Nanjing for about 5 years and many other places in Asia Pacific before that - my dream job!! My boss is from Mexico. His wife will move here with him. She's really nice and speaks good english. There are 2 more engineers from Michigan. One was born in Taiwan but move to the US when he was in grade school. In Taiwan as everywhere in China, they have their own language, so his mandarin is not perfect, and he also needs to learn the chinese technical words. Actually I have been teaching him some chinese. It's really funny for an american to teach a chinese person to speak chinese. But he learns it much faster than I do. The other guy was born in India and also moved the the US when he was in grade school. He has spent several years living in Japan and Turkey. Both are single guys and both are more american than I am at this point. There is also a finance guy who is american but has worked in Japan and has recently been working in England with his wife and 6 year old twins. There are several chinese guys who also worked in america but now work for Ford of China, another american who just married a chinese woman and a guy from South Africa. We are quite an international team.

I'm still getting used to work. It's very different than being the only foreigner in a small chinese company. It feels very much like the GM joint venture job I had before. It's more of a culture shock for me this time than when I first came to China. Even though working in Shenglong was really frustrating, they were like family and they were really welcoming and accomodating to me. Everybody liked practicing their english with me and wanted to be my friend. Now i feel a little like a fish out of water. I'm not chinese, but I'm not a typical foreigner either. I think I just need some time for them to get used to me. I hope they will be my friends too when we get to know each other better. They will come to trust me and see that I am different than the foreigners they've met before.

One thing that is very different about this job is the Mazda (Japanese) influence. There are many japanese people working in the factory and the whole plant and all the processes and equipment were designed by Mazda. They even sent the whole chinese team to Japan for 6 months to study the Mazda ways of making engines.

There's a big debate about "Face Time" going on right now. They seem to want us to stay at work late so they can see our faces to make them think they are getting their money's worth out of us. But our new team believes that work/life balance is most important. Later we are going to be working a lot. Right now we are not so busy. We want to get settled into our new lives and get some exercise and do some work at home after dinner if need be.

I rented a really great apartment near the city center. It's on the 10th floor and overlooks a small lake. There's a walking/jogging path around the lake and every morning and night there are many old people exercising there. The apartment was just redecorated in an american or european style. Most of the furnishings came from IKEA. I also have satellite TV again, with quite a few english stations. I can watch the news every day and some movies too.

Anyway, I am just trying to enjoy my new life and enjoy not working all the time. I think this is enough for now. I will write more about my new life soon.

(the chinese say this because the pronunciation of 8 is ba, so 88 is baba which sounds like byebye)

Working for a Chinese Company

2008-09-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

Working for a Chinese Company

I came to work for Ningbo ShengLong Automotive Parts Company in October 2007. It has probably been the hardest 11 months of my life, but it has also been my best job ever.

I want to explain my experience here without giving away any secrets of my company or our customer. So I will keep the information general and explain my opinions and feelings about the experience. Sorry, there won't be any pictures. But i hope you find the story interesting and thought provoking anyway. I hope that what I write will not anger my employer or customer. Maybe I should save this story for later, but I feel I need to tell my story.

Shenglong is a small company in Ningbo China. Ningbo is a very improtant export city. There are a lot of companies here that make products for export. And a lot of companies that are distributors for Chinese export products. Shenglong is a privately owned company with 4 groups. I work for the automotive group.

They hired me because they needed somebody that could help them meet their customer's needs. They won their first big contract to make a high volume transmission oil pump for Ford Motor Company in America. Ford, like all companies wants to cut costs. Just a note,... they should know they get what they pay for... Ford has offices in Asia with local people who can help them purchase and work with asian manufacturing companies. Shenglong made a big commitment to this Ford Transmission Oil Pump. They are even building a whole new factory for it.

Shenglong hired a retired Ford Transmission Oilpump design engineer in America to be their technical expert for the project. But when the Ford team made their first trip to China to visit Shenglong, they got nervous about Shenglong's ability to pull off such a big and important project. They encouraged Shenglong to hire somebody from the west to work in China that could help them manage this first project. One of the Ford people on that trip was a friend of mine. He knew that I was in china and was looking for a new job. And he gave them my name.

Actually it was almost a perfect fit. They hired me as launch manager. Actually, when i was doing my career planning during my last 3-4 years at Ford, Launch Manager was my 10 year goal job. But there was very little chance that I was ever going to be given that kind of opportunity at Ford during a time of cutbacks and reducing labor force. I was a good and hard working engineer but almost all of my experience was in Engine Assembly. It was in Ford's interest to keep me in Engine Assembly. There were many many good engineers working at Ford and many of them had a better, broader experience than I did. They weren't going to let me be a program leader, much less program manager or launch manager.

Many people at Ford have the same problem. But most of them either want to or need to stay in Michigan or at least in the USA. I really feel bad for many of my Ford friends in Michigan. Ford keeps cutting jobs, so everybody's job is getting harder. I'm sure there are basically NO opportunities for advancement. And even if they want to take one of the packages and leave Ford there are almost no other jobs in southeast Michigan in the auto industry or other supporting industries. And if they find a job in another part of the country they will definitely take a huge loss if they want to sell their house. I went through that whole nightmare myself over the past 2 years. It is a very hard time in Michigan now.

Anyway, back to my story... I say it was almost a perfect fit because I know Ford and what Ford expects from their suppliers. I speak english and am eagerly learning chinese. I have been able to help them a lot to bridge the communication gap in our 3 times a week engineering conference calls. I have good assembly experience, but I don't have much machining experience. Ford instantly saw that as a weakness and encouraged Shenglong to also hire somebody with machining experience. We looked at hiring some retired Ford transmission machining guys, but none of them were interested in coming to live in china like me. And in the end Ford came and reviewed our machining plans and met our machining engineers and they were convinced that we could handle it.

Surprisingly, I think the most valuable skill I have brought to this job is my quality mindset. Before I came here I didn't think I had a strong quality background. Assembly engineers don't have to measure parts nearly as much as machining engineers. So gaging was not my strong point. But my Six Sigma background did teach me the value of data and making decisions based on data. And I understand how important it is to have capable processes.

After I had been here for 1 month we started building our first prototypes. It took us 6 months to build about 250 pumps, and we had plenty of quality problems during that time. I and the whole team learned a lot about quality during that time. I learned a lot about gaging and realized that the design of our gages for mass production was probably the most important thing that I could focus on.

They asked me to teach Six Sigma classes to my team and others from the company. I was happy to teach them and for about 2 months I spent all of my free time developing training presentations and teaching classes 2 nights a week but most of them didn't try to use their six sigma skills so it was basically a waste of my time. Now we are about to start our second prototype build phase and then prove capability for Mass Production. Now they have to use these skills to prove the processes capable. And Ford is demanding to see the data. So, I hope that I can finally inspire and teach them the value of these useful skills.

I don't really remember it, but i am told that in the 70's america was flooded with "Jap Junk" - cheap and poor quality products from Japan. But, that is not the case with japanese products today. They are among the best quality products in the world. If Chinese manufacturing can have the same kind of improvement as Japanese manufacturing, American industry really has a lot to worry about. Anyway, I am happy to be learning more about quality. I think it is a skill that will serve me well in my future career. If I want to stay in China, I am sure I could spend the rest of my career in China as a quality engineer. I'm not saying that is what I want to do, just that there is a need and it will be here for a while.

We had so many problems during the first prototype build and we were pushed so hard to produce enough parts each week that the time slipped by very quickly and we started our mass production planning too late. There was also a commercial issue - basically Shenglong wouldn't make any investment in the mass production facilities until they officially got an order from Ford which was very late coming. So, we ordered the equipment that we need to build the mass production pumps for Ford too late and now we are behind schedule on equipment installation.

Now we are right in the middle of pre-acceptance for our new equipment. That is where we go to the companies who are making the machines and test the machines to make sure they meet our requirements and can hold the tolerances that Ford requires on the drawings for the pump. I have done this many times for assembly equipment, but it is a new challenge for me for machining and gaging. I'm enjoying learning about machining and gaging, and even though I am no expert, I don't think they could do this without me.

The whole process has been a huge learning experience for me. I am used to the Ford way. And I have had to learn that it is impossible to do in a year what Ford has spent the last 30 years or more learning and developing. Ford gives their suppliers about 300 pages of specifications based on years manufacturing process development, and experience with what works and doesn't work. They tell the supplier exactly how they want the machines built and what parts they are allowed to use and it makes the machines very expensive.

Shenglong on the other hand buys much less expensive, off-the-shelf CNC machines and a few special designed machines and gives their suppliers almost no specifications. Just a part drawing or process sheet telling them what dimensions and tolerances they are responsible for and a cycle time. They were supposed to tell the suppliers the acceptance criteria (every dimension has to be capable to 1.67 Cpk - sorry for the technical stuff). But I am finding that many of the suppliers either didn't know that this was a requirement or had no idea what it would mean to prove it to us before shipping the machines. So it is a struggle to get the machines delivered on time.

Oh yeah, and color is important to some people because face is important in china and we want our line to be beautiful and all the machines should look the same. But we also failed to tell some of the suppliers what color we wanted our machines, so who knows, maybe they will paint them themselves when they get a chance.

Maybe the biggest struggle is the cultural barrier with regards to supplier management. At Ford, managing the equipment suppliers and the order is the process engineer's responsibility. Instead of doing real engineering, Ford relies on the supplier to be responsible for the design and the process engineers are really just project managers. They have to make sure their supplier is on-time, under budget and meets all of Ford's requirements (part print dimensions and the 300+ pages of technical specifications on how to build the machines).

But in Shenglong, they split the responsibility up between lots of people, technichal department (process engineers), manufacturing department (like facilities engineering and equipment purchasing put together - which is a very strange combination) and the finance and commercial department are also involved. But, NOBODY thinks it is necessary to call the suppliers and check on their status and timing.

They all really think that after you give the supplier the order, the supplier will just deliver exactly what you want on the promised date. You don't need to call them or have any status reviews. After telling they needed to have at least a bi-weekly status review with each supplier for a month or so and getting no results, I started scheduling the meetings and forcing them to attend, but they still thought the meetings were useless. And when I still couldn't get them to do it, I just asked my assistant to call the suppliers directly. She hates it because the suppliers also have a bad attitude about having to answer our questions, but it has to be done. And of course EVERY SINGLE SUPPLIER HAS LET US DOWN!!! Every single supplier has been late or in some way not met our expectations.

I won't go into details, but it is a real struggle and cultural and professional learning experience. I am sooooo tired of hearing the translated words "They say they will do their best" which does not mean that it will get done on time or like you want.

We still have a lot of work to do to get ready for our prototype build and mass production. And I need to keep pushing harder and harder if we are to be successful. My first chinese little brother and best friend Ray recently taught me about red face and black face in china. It's a little like good cop / bad cop. He said that all teams have at least one person who is red face and one person who is black face. Red face is nice and everybody likes him or her. Red face helps everybody and wants every body to be happy and like their job, etc. If you have a problem, Red face will say nice words to you and make you feel better and help you fixes your personal problems. My boss Joan is Red face. I think Red face is the way most Chinese people like to manage. Don't push people too hard. Actually Joan is a very good manager. Even though she is usually red face, she can also be tough and demanding and push the big bosses to get things done.

Black face is the person who has to be the bad guy. Who has to make people do things they don't want to do and enforce the rules and make them meet deadlines. I have been forced to become black face on my team and it is not a job I like. But I have to do it or we will fail. I am constantly telling my team and our suppliers that they aren't doing enough or they are too late, they need to do more, need to work overtime, need to finish on time... Black face goes totally against my preferred management style, but the chinese "ok is good enough" or "doing our best" mentality isn't going to meet our American customer's expectations.

Though my team knows i love them and I think they love and respect me to, they will follow the chinese boss's wishes before mine. They have to. I am a lone warrior and though I may be fighting for the right cause, I may be fighting a losing battle. I often feel that I work for Ford, not Shenglong. It is a difficult and often lonely line to walk.

Last thoughts for today...maybe I should save this for later but I am going to say it. Shenglong is a growing company - but they are growing too fast. They have successfully won a lot of new contracts in the past 2 years. My opinion is that they should quote a higher price and hire more people so they don't have too much work and can better meet their customer's demands. And their employees can have a better quality of life. But this is china and they can hire labor at a very low wage and ask them to work very long hours. If the people don't want the job there are many others that will work for the same low pay.

This is always a very difficult ethical question about working in a developing country. They pay me a fair american wage which is much higher than my chinese counterparts and even my bosses. In return, I am helping them to learn from the west and become a better company. There is a lot they can learn from me if they are willing to change their way of thinking.

My daily dilemna is: Chinese people are the nicest and hardest working people I have ever met in my life. I love the people on my team. They have become my family in China. I care about them very much and I want to help them. But what is the best way to help them? I think it is to lead them to success. And to teach them how to become better. I hate some of this company's HR policies, and though we from the west would say they are not fair, they are probably no different than any other small chinese company. So, how can I best help the people I love? Is it best for me to work hard for the company and help my team succeed or quit in some feeble protest for human rights... I don't think my quitting will help the people I love. But my job is to successfully launch this product. And try as i may, I cannot force the company to hire more people. I am forced to be black face. I constantly have to ask my team to work harder or we will not meet our customer's requirements. In that way, I am becoming part of the problem that I hate.

And finally, a note on the American economy... Wake up America!
Even if American wages are cut in half, it will be a long time before China's labor rates (and other developing country's) will catch up to American wages. So if Americans are willing to put up with the poor, but ever improving, quality of chinese and other developing country imports, they will continue to lose more and more jobs.

Some people may think that I am a traitor to be here helping china to improve. But I know I was lucky to be born in America - a free and rich and powerful country. I get bored and frustrated with the "America is the center of the world" mentality and I know i can't change it, and I don't feel like i fit in america anymore. I have a world view, a restless soul. So I went in search of the place i fit in this world.

I think that everybody on this planet should have an equal chance at happiness and a good life. And I do not feel guilty about wanting to help these wonderful, warm, hard working people build a better life for themselves. That is going to happen whether I am her helping them or not.

I came to China in search of adventure and personal growth. I wanted to learn about the eastern way of thinking and I was surprised to find that I fit here. There is something about the ancient chinese way of thinking that feels very right to me. I feel like there is something that China has to teach me. I am here to learn something important from China. And I am learning every day.

I hope you are too. Maybe my story helps in some small way.

That is all for now. I hope I did not upset anybody by my thoughts and opinions written here. I just wanted to tell my story so far.

Long Time No Write

2008-09-19T17:10:00.001-07:00

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).

Extreme Sports - China style!

2008-04-30T03:25:00.000-07:00

Extreme Sports - China style!

It's been an eventful week, on Tuesday April 22, it was my brother's birthday. He turned 39 (sorry Gary) and like every year we will be the same age for the next month and a half until I turn 21 again. Then on Wednesday April 23 while I was sleeping I sold my house FINALLY!!! And on Thursday, April 24 I got my chinese drivers license. And on Friday I borrowed the company car for the weekend and managed to get a parking ticket and apparently 3 points on my driving record. :( Not fair. Friday and Saturday nights I drove into the city to have dinner and do some shopping, etc. And Sunday I picked up 3 friends and we drove out into the country to a park in the mountains and had a wonderful day in the fresh warm spring air.

So how does a foreigner go about getting a chinese drivers license? It is very easy actually. You just need to go to an official place to translate your passport and foreign drivers license into chinese, then take a physical which is a joke and some pictures and get an official paper showing your address in china and get a book with about 200 questions and the correct answers in english. Read the book - takes a couple of hours, memorize the answers - most of which are pretty logical but some are kind of puzzling - such as:

48. The person concerned should assume tatal responsibility if:
A. escapes from the acene of a traffic accident
B. breaks traffic law
C. causes deaths or injuries
Answer is A

84. When moving the dangerous narcose or asphyxia wounded persons:

A. Should use the latericumbent lying posture

B. Should use the supine lying posture

C. Should use the prostration posture
Answer is C

37. One who has taken a little state-controlled psychotropic drugs or stupefacient may drive motor vehicles. T/F (F)

65. One can take a few fireworks and firecrackers when taking a taxi. T/F (F)

80. When carrying the dangerous goods, don't overload, don't mix the people with dangerous goods, and don't mix the dangerous goods with other goods. T/F (T)

87. The professional morality is not important for a driver but only good driving skills. T/F (F)

Anyway, the whole process took me 2 consecutive afternoons and cost a total of about 200RMB (<$30). Got most of the red tape done the first day and got the book. Read the question once, took the computerized english exam the next afternoon and passed with 100% score.

And my reward is this shiny new chinese drivers license. I was a little disappointed - one of my friends who has her license told me that when she got it 3 or 4 years ago they made her put a chinese name on it. But I had to put my english name on mine.

Now the fun begins.... Driving in china.

Luckily I've been a passenger, pedestrian and bicycle rider in china for almost 2 years. Because otherwise I wouldn't stand a chance of driving on the chinese streets. Actually once you come to realize that your fellow drivers will do the most illogical thing possible and the bicycles, three wheel delivery carts, electric scooters, motor cycles and pedestrians are going to come at you from any direction at any time and often all at the same time, and they will definitely run red lights and go the wrong direction down the street and cross traffic whenever they want whether you are coming at them at high speed or not, it isn't so bad.

If you have ever been here you know that the horn is the most important part of the car! And I think they should make foreigners take a class on how to use it Chinese style. It is your way of communicating with all the people you share the road with. Usually to let them know you are there and not to pull out in front of you. Most good drivers in china never take their hand off the horn. That is what I need to learn.

The car my company has allotted for me to use on evenings and weekends is a fairly old VW Jetta with a manual transmission. After working for Ford and having the benefit of the A-Plan discount, it's been a long time since I drove an old car like this. The clutch friction point is WAY out which I'm not used to yet, so there is quite a lot of engine revving going on. It doesn't run very well when it has been sitting for a few hours. And reverse is up and to the left of 1st gear. The trick to getting it into reverse is you have to push the whole shifter down very hard and then pull it toward yourself and shift forward. And 5th gear is very difficult to get into too.

So, about my first ticket. I have been living in my apartment building for 6 months now and every night my boss's husband parks his car on the street in front of our buildings. And he's never got a parking ticket from parking there. But, the first night I park there I get a ticket the next day. Why me? I'm still not sure, but it seems that maybe it is technically illegal to park on the street. At night there isn't enough parking off the street so people park there at night but during the day maybe you have to move the car because the police can come by during the day and give you a ticket which apparently is what happened to me on my very first day. Everybody agrees that I was very unlucky!

On Friday, I rode my bike to work but took the car home for the weekend. I didn't want to leave my bike at work all weekend, so on Saturday I left the car parked on the street and took the bus to work so I could ride my bike home.

Really bad luck because that day the police gave out tickets! No signs posted saying parking not allowed. Even if there were, I wouldn't be able to read them. Apparently that will be 150RMB (>$20) and 2-3 points on my license which really isn't fair. We're only allowed 12 points a year. I don't have a chance!

Actually, before I came to this company there was another foreigner, Bill that worked here. He didn't tell me this, but apparently he got about 10 tickets a month of one sort or another. Of course it didn't take him long to use up his points. But so that he could keep driving, he would pay somebody else to say they were driving the car at that time since it belongs to the company. He would pay 100RMB per point, plus the price of the tickets, so that's probably about 4000-5000 RMB (well over $500) per month.

How many more rules are there like this that I don't know about. So far I found out there are 2 bridges in the city center that have even odd day rules. Even numbered licence plates can use them on even dates, odd numbered plates can use them on odd dates. There are cameras on the bridges that take your picture and send you a ticket if you use them on the wrong date. And there is another bridge that can be used by anybody anytime. And there are several other bridges with no rules so I guess they can also be used by anybody anytime.

And there are several traffic lights or streets where you are not allowed to make a left or a right turn. They are camera controlled as well. Speaking of right turns, it seems that right turn on red is allowed at certain lights but I'm not really sure which ones. Of course there are lots of speed cameras and traffic light cameras. Cameras everywhere - Big Brother Is Definitely Watching You in China! So, my boss's husband bought a nifty camera detector which announces active cameras as you approach them. It also apparently tells you in chinese what speed the camera is set to take pictures at. Pretty cool! But of course these cool devices are illegal.

In summary, Driving in China is definitely not for the faint of heart. It's an EXTREME SPORT!!!

What a Headache!!!

2008-04-24T15:35:00.001-07:00

What is causing these HEADACHES and how do I make them go away?

When did the headaches start?

Hard to say.

I spent the summer of 2007 in Liuzhou, studying and travelling and exercising every day and I was very healthy. Then I started working in Ningbo at the end of October and I stopped exercising completely since all I did was work 7 days a week, 10-15 hours a day.

... I just remember thinking, as soon as we get these pumps shipped on Christmas day I can have a day off. But of course we had to work 7 days a week the next week to get the next batch out and the week after that and the week after that....

And in January Ray came to visit and I wasn't feeling so well. It occurred to me that I had had headaches every afternoon for about 2 weeks. And it continued for about a month. And I often felt car sick in the car or bus. Then I went back to Liuzhou for the spring festival and I felt really sick again and spent most of a day in bed. So, finally, my first experience with a chinese hospital was in Liuzhou on New Years day. But they didn't find anything wrong with me. I came back to Ningbo and had more tests . . . blood tests and CT scans,The CT Scan was cool. Can see the inside of the brain. Luckily no problems inside my brain. The little balls at the top of this picture are my eyeballs. And the dark holes on the sides are the insides of my ears. :)

Then my company's general manager said that his father is a traditional Chinese Medicine doctor and he could do accupuncture for me. I am very curious about chinese medicine and i have seen accupuncture many times on TV, so I was very interested in trying it. So I did. Actually, the doctor seemed more nervous about it than I was. He put one needle in my hand and twisted it around until it hurt really bad. Then he did the same thing with a needle he stuck in the base of my scull. But then I don't know what happened because I passed out. I found out later that he was really nervous that chinese bodies and american bodies aren't the same and he might not know the right place to stick the needle. So NEEDLE-LESS to say I won't be trying accupunctuire again soon!

But that doctor did suggest that I had 2 more tests done at the hospital. An ultrasound of the blood vessels in my head and neck and an MRI of my neck. I thought that my brain might be pregnant for a minute, the ultrasound made the same swooshing noises like a baby's heart beat. Just joking. But the doctors looked at the MRI and said there was a big problem with my neck. But of course nobody could explain to me in english what that problem was and how I could get the headaches to go away. They just said, this problem won't go away easily.

So, since I got all this news just a couple of days before I was scheduled to go to America on a business trip, I decided to take the MRI film with me and find somebody in america that could tell me what it meant in english.

First, I went to my eye doctor in Michigan to make sure that my eyes weren't the cause of the problem, but they weren't. Then I went to a chiropractor and found out what the MRI had uncovered. Of course she wanted to do more X-Rays, but finally I know that I have some bones out of position in my neck and pinched nerves and the start of arthritis in my neck and my neck isn't as curved as it should be. Lots of problems with my neck apparently.

But, the headaches are tension headaches caused by really tense muscles in my neck and shoulders. This is partially caused by the bones out of alignment and pinched nerves, but more by my computer. Laptops are bad for ergonomics. Either the screen is too low making you bend your neck or the keyboard is too high making you tense your shoulders constantly.

The chiropractor said that she would recommend I go to a chiropractor 3 days a week for 6 weeks to get the bones back in the right place and fix the pinched nerves. But the arthritis or pointy fronts on the bones can't be fixed. I just need to do lots of things to try to slow down the arthritis so it doesn't get worse while I'm still young.

So I came back and was super busy for 2 weeks hosting some Ford customers and explaining all of our problems and how we plan to fix them in the future. And so far I haven't yet found a chiropractor here, but I have found a great massage place where the masseur told me, without having seen my x-rays the exact bones in my neck that were out of place. So I figure if he can feel my problem with his hands, he can help me fix it.

Unfortunately I am finding thought that the massage makes me feel great the night i have it but my neck hurts again the next day. So, I think massage really only relaxes the tight muscles unfortunately. I don't think he is helping the bone problems much at all. I will try to find a chiropractor and see if that helps more. But maybe work less, get more exercise and enjoy life more will do just as much good. I'm trying to do that too.

But at least I know what was causing the headaches and the massages do seem to be making the headaches less frequent...

My Second Chinese New Year in China

2008-02-16T04:34:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year 2008 - The Year of the Rat

Finally, a holiday. The weather in China for the 2 weeks prior to the Chinese New Year record breaking. Huge snow storms brought the country to a stop. The timing was really bad as the the Chinese New Year is the traditional time for everybody in China to go home to be with their family. The worlds largest annual human migration. Trains were impossible to get tickets on. Buses weren't running because roads were all closed. Many airports were being closed. It was chaos.

The weather and customs made our lives hell at work. We were waiting for some parts to be shipped from Canada to Ningbo and they got stuck in customs in Shanghai for a week. We were waiting for other parts which couldn't be shipped because of the weather. We had to ship our pumps prior to Feb.3rd by 6pm or they wouldn't clear customs. We finally got the parts at 9pm on the 2nd and some of our people worked 30 hours straight to finish the pumps. We were all pitching in to build pumps, carry parts to be gaged, package and prepare for shipping... Those guys are our Heros!!!

So finally I started my holiday. Flew from Ningbo to Shanghai, spent the night then flew to Liuzhou. I stayed with my little sister Qiufeng.

The first night I went to my friend Ken's bar and met up with a couple of friends.

And my little brother invited me to his family's New Year's eve dinner. We went to the Temple again this year to pray for good luck and health in the new year.

I had a headache and Ray's family had me trying all kinds of Chinese cures including this one which is to eat the pig's brain 猪脑 with a dried root called tian ma 天麻. Actually, I felt better afterward.

Fireworks by the river. There were 4 big shows in Liuzhou this year and where we were standing we could see 3 of them at the same time. Cool!!!

Next we travelled about 5 hours south west of Liuzhou to our friend Rose's home town Baise. This is her parent's house. They live in a housing complex built by a factory for the factory workers. This small village has 10,000 people - more than my home town of Murphysboro Illionois.

Rose's boyfriend is Mike who owns the Wooden Shoe bar in Liuzhou. During the spring festival Mike moved back to Holland to go make some money for a while to try to pay off the loan he has for the bar. Anyway, Ray, A Zhu and I wanted to say goodbye to him, so that was our main reason for going to Baise.

We had some great meals cooked by Dong who is from Sichuan province. We had a bonfire every night and of course Mike bought lots of beer and fireworks.

The next day we did some site seeing in Baise. It is a historic city in southern China because Deng XiaoPing and his army set up their base there. We visited a house where they lived and some monuments and museums on the top of the mountain.

We had barbeque everything for lunch. Chicken feet and stomach, beef, pig penis, toufu,...

Baise also has a huge copper drum which is a replica of a Zhuang drum. Very big drum.

My next stop was Nanjing. I flew from Nanning to Nanchang to Nanjing. I stayed in a 5 star hotel right near the Confucious Temple. The area was really crowded and it was really cold in Nanjing.

The river is lit up beautifully at night.

My boss and (good friend) Joan was my host in Nanjing. She invited me to her house. I met her 14 year old daughter Louise and her 8 year old neice Shirley and her sister in law and parents. It was a nice time.

We did a lot of shopping for small things we really didn't need. But it was fun.

For the first time I saw the unborn chickens being sold on the street to eat. This is about the only food I have come across so far in China that I do not want to try. They are eggs just before hatching. Baby chicks that are just about to be born.

My next stop was Yangzhou about 1 and a half hour drive from Nanjing. I was invited by one of the young engineers on my team, Wang Yong Nian. He was a great tour guide. We walked around a lot on the first day touring a big lake called Shouxi lake which means narrow west lake.

This is Wang Yong Nian and I at the park.

For breakfast on the last day of my vacation we went to a famous local restaurant where they sell local foods. One was tang bao (soup dumplings). It was the first time I ever drank the soup of the soup dumplings using a cute little straw. Later that day we took a bus for 6 hours back to Ningbo.

So, now the holiday is over and it is back to work. Hopefully things will go a little more smoothly in the new year.

新年快乐！

Xin Nian Kuai Le！

Happy Western New Year 2008

2008-02-16T03:33:00.000-08:00

Happy Western New Year

After working for more than a month straight we did get a few days off at the Western New Year. I went out and bought myself a Christmas present. I bought a new Mountain Bike.

It is a beautiful bright blue Giant hardtail mountain bike.

My first 'Giant' Adventure 31.5Km - loop around the city
Of course it's too cold to ride it right now and I work every day so I don't have any time to ride anyway, but I have ridden it twice so far.

My second 'Giant' Adventure 37km to Dong Qian Lake

On the last day of the year Norman and I decided to climb a local mountain (Fu Quan Shan) which means luck mountain.

It was a fun day. We wanted to take a bus and they only run about once an hour, so we walked to the bus stop and waited. But when the bus finally came by we were standing at the wrong bus stop so the bus wouldn't stop. So we ended up walking about 5 km to get to the mountain and then climbed the mountain. It was a very cold day too.

But the mountain was a lot of fun. It is a Tea mountain. Tea trees (more like shrubs) cover the mountain. First time I ever went to a tea mountain. It was really cold but a beautiful and sunny day.

Here's a picture of my new apartment. I live on the 8th floor in a small apartment but it's just what I need.

I live in the building on the left and my boss lives next door in the second tall building just to the right.

A Working Christmas in China

2008-01-01T06:08:00.000-08:00

A Working Christmas in China

Well, it's now February 15th and I've been in Ningbo for 3 months and 3 weeks now but it feels like about a year. I've never worked so much in my life but I've also never had a job that was more suited to my abilities and personality.

Our company is making a new transmission oil pump for Ford. When I came here 3 months ago they were just getting ready go start building the first prototype pumps. We bought off and received two CNC machines - one lathe and one machining center for milling, drilling and tapping. Then we started machining the two parts that we make for the pump. We also bought 3 press machines to assemble the pumps and some simple leak test machines. After we received all of the components we build our first pump on Dec. 14th. It was a big event for the team and everybody was very happy and proud.

In these past 3 months the people in this photo have become my new family in Ningbo. We work very long days starting every day at 8am and often ending at 10 or 11pm. We have meetings with our customer Ford at least 2-3 nights a week and also have meetings with our US subsidiary in Michigan. And we have worked almost every day from the beginning of December to Chinese New Year holiday starting Feb 4th. We were all very tired and ready for the 10 day spring festival and chinese new year.

The woman to my left in the photo is my boss and our program manager Joan Chen. To my right is Jennifer Chen our project manager. I am the Launch Manager. The chinese have a saying "three women one stage". Kind of means "three women do everthing". Actually there are many other great people involved in the team. The general manager of the factory is the man in the leather coat to my left. He is very friendly and supportive of our program. As Joan says, we are the VIP team. We have the full support of the company to make this program a success.

Shenglong makes many spare parts for the auto industry and some low volume production. We make many different engine oil pumps and cast and machine some aluminum parts and we machine some camshafts as well. But this program is the first large mass production product we will export to a large foreign customer like Ford. They have a few people with some good experience but nobody knows Ford's requirements very well. That's why they hired me.

Our first pumps to ship to Ford were due to be shipped on Christmas Day. It was tough but we got 4 pumps shipped by Christmas. Everybody felt bad that I had to work during Christmas so they bought me some gifts and we also had a Christmas Eve dinner to celebrate our first shipment.

Of course after Christmas Eve dinner we ended up at KTV - China's favorite entertainment activity.

I keep telling them that I can't sing and they really love torturing me by making me do it anyway. This evening I sang Jingle Bells at least 4 times. It seemed to be the only thing they could find on the list. Haha

Ningbo City and Making Friends

2007-12-01T21:44:00.000-08:00

Ningbo, Zhejiang Province

Ningbo is a modern chinese city important for its exports. Not a lot of history here or big fancy buildings, but it seems clean and convenient. My first weekend in Ningbo, I went to the bookstore and bought a map with the bus routes on it. I couldn't find one in English so I bought a chinese map. It is good practice for me to try to read the signs in chinese and find out where I am on the map. I took a bus to the city center and walked around for a few hours. It was a nice adventure.

Surprisingly, even though the population and wealth of Ningbo are much greater than Liuzhou. It's not as brightly lit up at night. Liuzhou and many other chinese cities decorate every tall building with neon lights (actually LEDs I think) that flash and change colors until late at night. It's like a competition to see which building can be the brightest and most colorful.

Ningbo doesn't have this. I don't know why. Ningbo's also a very quiet city at night. Everybody says that Ningbo people just like to go home and count their money. Liuzhou had a much more lively nightlife.

I live in Yinzhou which is a new industrial area. There are many many new apartment buildings being built here and many many companies and factories. The picture below was taken from my first apartment which the company rented for me. I didn't like the apartment, so after 3 days there I asked the company to find me a new one and my place is nearby but much nicer. It is next door to my bosses apartment so I can ride to work with her and her husband who also works at our company.

In this picture you can see peasant vegetable gardens in the foreground which is about all that is left of the farm land that this new city used to be. You can also see many new apartments in the background which are not yet finished. The low building on the far left is a new very western style shopping mall called Wan Da Square - which is kind of a chain shopping center. They always have a big WalMart and cinema and many restaurants and other mall stores.

New Friends

Besides my work friends, Ray has 6 friends from college who live and work in Ningbo. So far I have met 5 of them.

First I met Tracy who has been very welcoming and a great tour guide. She showed me around Tian Yi GuangChang (the city center square) and introduced me to some local snacks. We also went to a park where I met Donna who is another one of Ray's college class mates and Tracy's roommate. We met some of Tracy's middle school friends and sat at a coffee house for a while then we all went to a movie - my first in a Chinese cinema. Luckily it had english subtitles. I really enjoyed it.

The next weekend I walked to the city center (about 1 hour) and went with Tracy and some of her friends to an international food expo. The next day we went to an ancient temple called Tian Tong Si which is about 1700 years old. Amazing! It took us a couple of hours to get there by 3 public buses. We had to stand most of the way because it was so crowded. When we got there, we met two more of Ray's classmates Norman and Tommy. I had heard a lot about Norman from Ray. They are good friends and are alot alike.

After visiting the temple, we climbed a mountain next to it. It was a nice autumn day and the view from the top was really nice.

We all took the bus back to Tracy's house and bought fish in the market and Donna cooked for us all. She is a very good cook and likes to cook seafood. We were all exhausted and took the last bus home.
This weekend we had dinner at a Chongqing hot pot restaurant and I met yet another of their classmates, Jack, and his wife.
After dinner I invited them to my apartment which was nearby. I had told Norman that I would teach him how to bake Chocolate Chip Cookies. He did a good job and we all enjoyed his cookies. I sent all the leftovers home with them. Chinese people do not bake food. Their food is always steamed, fried or boiled. So they are not familiar with ovens. I have a small toaster oven which I inherited from my former boss when he moved back to America. It is a treasure to have so that I can bake cookies and brownies. The ingredients are difficult to find as well, but I did manage to find brownie and cookie mixes on my recent trip to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and the Philipines.

Local Snacks

One of my favorite things about China is trying all the different foods. And Ningbo has lots of local foods, like all chinese cities. The street above is near the city center (Tian Yi Square) to the right is an interesting old building with lots of little shops, and to the left is a snack street with lots of local food.

Very colorful drinks.

Because Ningbo is near the sea, there is lots of really yummy sea food to eat here. Our company cafeteria has seafood just about every day. :)

I miss spicy food and Luosifen in particular, but I will have it every time I go back to Liuzhou. And I am sure I will eventually find some good spicy restaurants near where I live. So I will survive.

Ningbo - New Job, New Home, New Friends

2007-12-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

New life in Ningbo

Well, after 4 months with no contract in China, I finally got a new job. I'm now working in a city called Ningbo(宁波). It is in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, near the east coast of China. Ningbo has the second largest port in China after Shanghai. It is a very important export city.

The company I am working for is called Shenglong Automotive Parts Company Ltd. (圣龙汽车零部件有限公司). Here is their website: http://www.sheng-long.com/en/index.asp In the past, they have produced spare parts for automotive companies and currently make many engine oil pumps and some camshafts.

The reason they hired me was that they have their first big contract with Ford Motor Company to produce more than 400,000 transmission oil pumps a year for one of Ford's new truck programs. And they don't have a lot of experience with high volume production. They also wanted to hire somebody who could help them understand Ford and Ford's requirements and help with communication between China and America. One of my old bosses at Ford knew that I was in China and looking for a job and he suggested that they talk to me.

Even though I am making less money than I did in my last job here in China, Shenglong has made me feel very welcome. I really like the program manager and our team. They work very hard and very long hours but they have fun and enjoy their work. To me the people you work with are the single most important factor in liking what you do. I would much rather spend 12-14 hours a day working on a team like this than 8 hours a day with people who did not trust or appreciate me and where I did not enjoy what I was doing every day. The environment here reminds me of the job i had in Wales - my very favorite job ever.

The first weekend I was at the company they had a team building event for the technical department. It was a lot of fun and a good way to get to know the team members. It was amazingly similar to some of the team building I have done in America. Fall back into the arms of your colleagues, spider web or electric fence exercise, climb a pole and jump out to grab a trapeze bar with your colleagues holding a safety rope, human elevator lift the whole team one by one up a 12 foot wall. It was a lot of fun and taught us all a lot of teamwork skills.

We are in the process of building our first prototype parts which are due at a Ford transmission plant in Ohio in the US on January 2. We need to ship on Christmas day. And we have a lot of work to do by that time. We will likely be working every day till Christmas. But then I think we will have a big party. :)

And then my job really begins. I am launch manager for the program, responsible for leading the team to specify and purchase all the equipment for mass production and launching the process. We are building a new building which should be finished early next year. So, I will get even busier in the new year. It is going to be an excitng year. I'm really looking forward to it.

So, the new adventure has begun...

Chinese National Holiday 2007

2007-10-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

国庆节 Guó Qìng Jié

Chinese National Day Festival

Well, it definitely feels like I have been in China for over a year now. I've experienced the same chinese holiday twice. And already I'm feeling much more chinese. Last year Joel, Jami, Steven and I fought the crowds of chinese at Shengtang mountain, Longsheng rice terraces and Yongshuo. But this year I knew not to try to be a tourist during the national holiday. I spent most of the week in Liuzhou and then went to visit my little sister's village.

A week or two before the holiday Ken, who used to be Joel's and my driver opened a bar. It is called C-Vista. He says he named it after Microsoft Windows new operating system. Hahaha. Ken credits Joel with giving him the idea to open a bar. Before he left to return to America, Joel said to Ken one night "you should figure out what you want to do with your life Ken". And so he opened a bar. Fish (on the left of the picture) and I went to Ken's bar on the opening night. And Ken (right of the picture) calls me all the time asking me to come visit his bar. Having a foreigner in his bar is apparently good for business. :)

I have some Chinese friends that are English teachers in high schools and they asked me to go to their classes and talk to the students. It is good listening comprehension practice for the students. First I went to Warren's classes - two classes at #3 middle school (really it's a high school). The students were kind of shy but they were very excited to have a foreigner in their classroom. Then I visited Andrew's classes. He teaches at Liuzhou High School, the best high school in the city. It is very modern and looks like a college campus.

Chinese high school life is very different than American high school life. At some schools like Liuzhou High School most of the students live in dormitories at the school. They start class at about 8am and finish at about 10pm. In the afternoon they have a break for a couple of hours to rest or sleep. There are usually about 60 students in a class and they sit in the same classroom all day - the teachers come to them. Since the chinese are only allowed to have one child, the classmates become like a family. I'm amazed at how many people stay in close contact with their classmates from elementary, middle, high school and college or university. They spread out all over the country but whenever they or their friends like myself go to a city, they always know somebody in that city who can help you or show you around. The Chinese guanxi (relationships) network is so fascinating. I will have to write about it sometime in detail.

When Ray came home for the national holiday we went to his former high school too. One of his high school friends is a teacher there now. Ray suggested I bring some American dove chocolate to the class and hand out to the students if they asked questions. Of course this was a very popular suggestion and these students were not so shy. They were very friendly and welcoming.
One day my little brother (Ray) and my little sister (Qiufeng) and I went to Long Tan park. The park is now free as are most parks in Liuzhou. We climbed to the very top of one of the mountains on the sceret path I discovered last year. It was nice to sit on top of the world and talk and enjoy the scenery. Ray got his hair all cut off the day before so he now thinks he is really Michael from Prison Break. :)

We all rode on the pirate's ship. Ray wouldn't take his hands off the bar in front of him. Haha :) I know that's losing face, but come on!!! This one is small compared to the one Qiufeng and I rode on at Merryland (the mini-disney world near Guilin). That one would give Ray a heart attack!!!

We all went to Ray's grandmother's house for lunch and my little sister got to meet my little brother's whole family.

Later that night we all met again for dinner at a new Sichuan hot pot which was just opened by Rays friend or cousin or something - he calls her his little sister. This sister/brother thing really is out of hand. Hot pot is really cool - basically a huge fondu pot full of boiling spicy oil. This place was kind of unique. It's a buffet. All the meat and other foods are out for you to pick what you want. And you can eat and dring as much food and beer and coke and other drinks you want for about $6 per person!!!

So, one more LaoWai (foreigner) bites the dust. Mike Hannigan from EDS went back to Canada/America. He's a great guy and everybody in Liuzhou will miss him. When I landed back in the China in August I asked Mike what was new and he casually said he got married the day before. WOW! His wife is Mindy ( in the right of this picture). So Mindy will go back to Canada soon too. They are working on the paperwork now. She will do great in Canada!

Ray and I went for a bicycle adventure in Liuzhou. We rented bikes and rode to a park south of Liuzhou. It is called a Luowei Sightseeing Agricultural Scenic Spot. I thought it would be a farm. But it was really a big orchard. They were having a Youzi festival. Youzi is a big sweet grapefruit. I like them very much. They are not bitter like an american grapefruit.

You could pick your own youzi and eat as many as you want - just couldn't take them with you.

They also had these walkways covered in vines with all kinds of gourds hanging from them. Very cool. :)

After the park we rode back to Liuzhou to eat Luosifen (local Liuzhou noodles in a soup made from snails). We both love Luosifen. Now we will both really miss it since I too am leaving Liuzhou too.

After lunch we rode our bikes to the Liuzhou zoo. They don't have a lot of animals but they have some shows - lions and tigers riding on horses, monkeys balancing upside down on goats horns while they walk tight ropes, bears riding bicycles and jumping rope, sea lions playing basket ball,... funny stuff. More like a circus than a zoo. And they had holstein cows and ostriches or emus and camels and deer and other animals all in a big pen with a raised walkway above it. Pretty cool. And the FATTEST bear I have ever seen!!! But maybe the most popular attraction at the zoo that day was the lao wai (me). Ray said maybe they had a cage for me. :)

The next day I was even more of a curiosity to the locals. I went with Qiufeng to her home town a small village southeast of Liuzhou about 5 hours by bus. She said that I was the first foreigner ever to go to her village. Of course there was lots of staring and talking in their local language (not mandarin chinese). Her father and mother are farmers. They grow rice (that's rice in the foreground of this picture) and other vegetables and fruits.

Qiufeng's family.

We walked across the rice fields, visited the village elementary school and then climbed a small mountain. Good view from the top but still the haze. Many people say it is smog in Liuzhou but I think there are not many factories around her home town. I think it is very much caused by the weather and humidity too.

We all got a ride on the family motorcycles to back from the mountain.

This is the family in her cousin's small doctor's office which is below his house. He studied medicine from a master. They have a big house in the village. That is where we lived. In the countryside like this, people are allowed to have more than one child to help with the farming. Her cousin has two boys. There are 4 children in Qiufeng's family. She has two sisters and a brother.

We found a Luosifen restaurant in PingNan the nearest big town. It wasn't as good as Liuzhou luosifen but it was fun to find it so far away from Liuzhou.

So, I came back from the holiday and FINALLY I have a new job offer.

I will move to Ningbo a city near the sea south east of Shanghai. Ningbo is a major export city for china and that is why I am going there actually. Through one of my former Ford colleagues I got a contact at a company that is making a new part for Ford. They were interested in hiring somebody with Ford experience. So, I will now work directly for a Chinese company instead of being a contract employee. This is sure to be an interesting experience.

I will miss Liuzhou. I have many great friends here and my Chinese family. Ray's family has kind of adopted me and given me a chinese name. 帅伶俐 (Shuai Ling Li). Shuai is the family name and means handsome. Ling Li is my given name and means smart or clever. I like it much better than my first chinese name because it was given to me by my new adopted family. All of his aunts thought for a week or more what they should name me. It's not just a made up name that sounds good.

So, for now,I must say goodbye to Liuzhou.

I think it is a beautiful city filled with beautiful warm people. It will always be my hometown in China.

I will soon start the next stage of my China adventure. A new city, a new job, probably a new language (or at least a different local dialect).

Stay tuned...

Study Chinese for 2 months

2007-10-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

Studying Chinese

I have been in China for almost 15 months now. For the first 11 months I was working a lot and trying very hard to study chinese in my free time but I always felt tired when I finished work and wanted to get outdoors and do something. So I only made a little progress.

Then in June my contract ended unexpectedly and I suddenly had lots of free time. So, after travelling around China for a few weeks and then going back to America for a few weeks I returned to LiuZhou at the beginning of August and hired a private tutor to teach me chinese.

Her name is Wendy and she is a great teacher. She is very patient. I have had many friends try to help me learn and other teachers i have paid. They were very nice but it has been really cool to learn from a professional teacher. Also nice to have the time to concentrate on it full time and really make some progress.

When I was in Shanghai I found a box set of books and CD's called Interactive Chinese. It had 8 books and 16 CDs. The first book teaches Phoenetics and the basics of Chinese Characters. Then there are 3 text books containing a total of 62 lessons. There is a mock HSK proficiency test and 3 books for practice reading which are not all that useful actually. The box said that if you finish this course you should be able to pass the first level chinese language proficiency exam called HSK. Each lesson started with a new conversation. It introduced some new vocabulary and also had a grammar lesson.

For the first 3 weeks I studied for 3 hours in the morning with the teacher and then spent 5-8 hours in the evening reviewing what I just learned and all the previous material and prepared for the next day's class. I really want to learn to read and write chinese as well as speak chinese, so this was a big challenge since I was learning about 40 new words every day. After 3 weeks my head was so full of chinese words that I just couldn't learn anything new.

I took a week off and just tried to review and maintain what I had already learned. Then I decided that learning to write so many characters wasn't realistic and I stopped trying to write, but continued with reading and speaking. After 2 months I finished the 62 lessonsand I have a vocabulary of approximately 1500 words. I can definitely get by in normal conversation and chinese people are so surprised to hear me speak good chinese. My vocabulary is still pretty small but if I can get them to speak slowly to me I can do ok.

I haven't tried to take the practice tests yet but I have looked at them and they still look really hard. There are a lot of words I don't recognize. I have two books now (maybe 4 or 5 practice tests). I plan to keep reviewing my vocabulary and try one of the tests. See how well I can do on it. Then learn all of the new vocabulary that I find in it. Then try again... Hopefully I will eventually be ready to take the test. :)

I want to tell you a few things about the chinese language now.

Like everything in China, the chinese language is ancient and has a whole culture behind it.

Spoken Chinese

There are 1.3 billion people in China. The official language of china is Mandarin or Pŭtōnghuà. This is the language I am trying to learn. This language basically comes from Beijing, the capital. It is taught in the schools and should be understood by all chinese.

Haha!! Read on...

There are 56 nationalities in China. 92% of the people are of the Han nationality but there are 55 minorities as well. These minorities are like the American Indian tribes. They have their own language, customs, festivals, dance, music, crafts, foods, and traditional clothing. As well as the nationalities having different languages different regions or even different cities have their own dialects.

From city to city or city to countryside the people speak different dialects. People from the north can't understand the southern dialects. In some areas (in the South and East), you can cross a hill or a river from one village to the next, and the inhabitants will not be able to understand each other. The differences between the spoken languages of the South and the North are greater than those between Italian and Spanish.

These are the major dialects:

Pŭtōnghuà (Mandarin): the common language (over 1 billion speakers), based on Beijing dialect. The official language of China since 1913.
Wú: spoken in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces and in Shanghai and Hong Kong by about 77 million people. I should learn something about this language since I will be moving to Zhejiang province.
Yuè (Cantonese): spoken by about 66 million people in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces, and also Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and many other countries.

Mĭn Nán (Southern Min): parts of Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi.

Jìnyŭ: Shanxi province and also in Shanxi and Henan provinces by about 45 million people.

Hakka: south eastern China, parts of Taiwan

Xiāng (Hunanese): spoken by about 25 million people in Hunan, Sichuan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces.

the list goes on...

I live in the city of Liuzhou in the province (state) of Guangxi. Most people who were born here don't speak Mandarin in daily practice but a dialect called Liuzhou hua or (Liuzhou language). The nearest big city is Guilin (2 hours away) and they speak Guilin hua. They both share some words with Putonghua so I can understand a little. But in the capital of this province, Nanning, 2-1/2 hours away, they speak Cantonese which is very different.

Last weekend I went home with my friend. She is from a small village east of Nanning. In that area most people can speak Bai hua which is maybe like cantonese. But in her specific village of shuang ma they speak Shuang ma hua. I have to say I didn't understand them and they didn't understand me. :) Made me feel like maybe I was wasting my time with Mandarin. It is mind boggling!

Chinese Characters

However, there is one common written language which is pretty amazing. Hanzi is the name for the chinese characters. There are supposedly about 80,000 chinese characters. But only about 3000 are commonly used. Chinese characters are basically one syllable, and many words are made up of two or more chinese characters or syllables, like in english. So I may know 2000 words but only 500 or 600 characters.

Chinese characters are not phonetic. Just by looking at a character you do not know how to say it.

Pinyin (pronounced 'peen-een')

Pinyin is the english (or romanized) spelling of the chinese words. Pinyin is a phoenetic system that tells you how to say the Chinese words. Learning pinyin is the first step in learning chinese. Pinyin is pretty easy to learn. It is interesting that even chinese children learn Pinyin before they learn to write chinese characters.

The hardest thing about speaking chinese is tones. There are 5 tones.
1 neutral tone... high, not rising or falling
2 rising... like english uses for questions "huh?" rises at the end
3 falling... then rising like we would say "well..." when we are thinking
4 falling... like we would use when angry "damn!" or a command "stop!"
5 no tone... very short, not rising or falling

Here are a few examples:
English .........Character..... Pinyin ..........Note:
thing..............东西............... dōng xi ........netral tone and no tone, the characters mean 'east west'

thing............. 事情............... shì qing....... falling tone, no tone, a different word meaning 'thing'
to be............. 是................... shì................ falling
but................ 但是.............. dàn shì......... falling, falling
laboratory... 实验室.......... shí yàn shì... rising, falling, falling

The really confusing thing is there may be 80 thousand chinese characters but the english spelling pinyin for many are the same. My favorite example is the pinyin word shi. I gave a few examples above.

Shi can have 4 different tones, but in my 1300 page chinese dictionary there are 18 pages of the pinyin spelling 'shi' . 8 characters with neutral tone (but used in 108 words), 9 characters with rising tone (used in 208 words), 6 characters with falling-rising tone (used in 52 words), 28 characters with falling tone (246 words). That's over 600 'shi' words or words with a 'shi' character or syllable in them. When you hear somebody say 'shi' it could mean 600 different things!!!

Learning Chinese is a fascinating experience. I remember how proud I was when I first got here and made friends with some chinese people. They all spoke good english, but as I got a little more confident with Pinyin, I started sending them pinyin text messages. And they often didn't know what i was saying because the pinyin spelling can mean so many things.

So i had to learn the characters. And now i have to remember which of those 41 shi's is the right one. Shi is just one example - I have to do that with every word. And then I have to get the words in the right order because of course chinese grammar is not the same as english. I try to practice my chinese with my chinese friends but they want to help me and they always correct my many many mistakes. That just frustrates and depresses me. I actually get much more reward from talking to people who don't speak english. We may not be able to understand each other very well, but they can't do any better in english, they appreciate my efforts, and best of all, they can't correct me. HAHAHA

So, my goal for my next adventure in Ningbo, is to find some friends who don't speak good english to practice my chinese with. It shouldn't be that hard. I am surrounded by them. There are over a billion mandarin chinese speakers in this country. And maybe less than 5% of them speak better english than I speak chinese. I have a billion teachers!!! I just have to get over the fear of failure and talk!!!

Stay tuned... I am sure I will keep learning interesting things about this language, culture and people.

Pinkerton Family Reunion

2007-08-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

Pinkerton Family Reunion

On June 15th, I flew back to the US for the first time in a year. The reason for going at that particular time was to attend the first Pinkerton Family Reunion. I had several other things that also needed to be done, such as doing my 2006 taxes, weeding my garden, and doing something about selling my house.

After I'd been on the plane for about 2 hours (with 11 hours, a layover and another hour and a half flight to go), my throat started feeling sore. So, for the first week, I felt really bad, fighting a cold and jetlag at the same time. Every morning I would feel pretty refreshed for a few hours, but by 1 or 2pm my body was telling me I should be in bed. I stayed with my friends Sandy and Joe Vargo and they were great hosts. Their 3 kids are really growing and they ask mom and dad all the time "Is Aunt Terry sleeping now?" They know I'm on the other side of the world.

The second week I went to Southern Illinois for my family reunion. It was the first Pinkerton Family Reunion for my Dad's brothers and sister. 56 people turned up and I saw cousins I hadn't seen for over 25 years and two generations of cousins kids and cousins kids kids that I'd never met before.

It was perfect weather and we all had a great time. Many of us went to visit the old farm I grew up on and even the house our parents grew up in is still standing, being overgrown and covered by the forrest.

Then I went back to Michigan to the unenviable task of dealing with taxes and a house that I can't sell. I was seriously planning to default on my loan since I've had the house for sale for over a year, had already reduced the price $50,000 and received not a single serious offer. But, after talking to several lawyers, real estate agents and others knowledgable on the subject, I decided that it really is in my best interest, though extremely painful, to just keep reducing the price of my damned house till some sucker decides to buy it. I even attempted to talk to my bank again which is impossible. NEVER GET A MORTGAGE WITH A BIG BANK, ESPECIALLY CITY MORTGAGE. They're just a bunch of human reading machines reciting what is in front of their eyes. No hearts!! No brains!!! Do I sound bitter??? Sorry.

I attempted to satisfy all my cravings for non-chinese food. Had middle eastern food, mexican, greek, indian, and Thai as well as pizza and several good old American BBQ's. And lots of good ice cream and desserts. And I'm paying for that now! Hahaha...

I did get a little exercise while I was home. Went jogging around the old farm neighborhood with my cousin Joan from Chicago.

And went mountain biking with Allen my old biking buddy. The biking started out great until I was rudely introduced to a new log pile in the path. My front wheel stopped and I didn't. I went over the handlebars and landed on top of the logs with my bike on top of me - amazingly I didn't have a scratch! A few minutes later I figured out my bike speedometer was missing so we went back to find it. While we were looking for it, we heard a loud "Pseeeewwww" as a mysterious flat occurred on my front tire. We patched it twice unsuccessfully before I jogged my bike out of the park for about a mile. At least I got some exercise. And after that ordeal I don't miss mountain biking nearly as much as I did before.

I managed to catch up with lots of old friends and neighbors in Michigan and it was really great to see everybody.

Even though I don't have a job at the moment in China, I've come back in hopes of having another contract soon. I really love China and I'm not ready to give up and go home yet. I came here with the hope of being here 5 years or more. After just 3 years in the UK, I realized how much I changed and didn't like most of my belongings any more. I knew living in China would change me more, so this time I sold almost all my belongings. If I tried to move back to the US and start over now I know I would be very bored and depressed. I need the adventure and challenge that I get in China. And despite what some think of China, I believe everybody in the world deserves a chance for a good life, not just Americans. And I feel very lucky to have been born in a wealthy nation. I hope my western friends and family do too. I feel very welcomed and comfortable here. I think it is one of the safest and warmest places on earth.

Take care and God bless.

Love Terry

Xian to Beijing - Part 3 Beijing and Shanghai

2007-07-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

Beijing

(Capital of the largest country in the world)

I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to visit Beijing during a time that was not a chinese holiday (with millions and millions of chinese tourists) and also before the olympics next year. If you don't already know, the 2008 olympics will be held in Beijing and begin on 08-08-08 at 08:08pm. In preparation for the olympics, Beijing is one huge construction site and they have a ton of work to do in the next year.

My first day I rented a bicycle and rode to Tiananmen Square and the forbidden city. It is a really huge city, and as different from Shanghai as Washington DC is to New York or Hollywood. The streets are very wide and impressive. I also rode my bike to the olympic village which is one huge construction site. I saw the Bird's Nest - the building that will host the opening ceremony. And also the swimming building which is constructed to look like soap bubbles. There were quite a few tourists doing the same thing, holding their cameras over the construction fences to get a shot of the famous buildings under construction.

The next day I toured the forbidden city. It was STINKING HOT that day. I think I bought 5 bottles of water and had two popsicles. The front gate of the forbidden city (Gate of Heavenly Peace) has the famous huge painting of Chairman Mao hanging above it. The forbidden city is called that because for many years while it was home to several generations of Chinese emperors, it was forbidden for all but the royal court to enter.

Today it is a HUGE museum. There are many exhibits in the hundreds of buidings and temples and previous living quarters.

You need all day to visit it, especially if you like museums. I rather dislike them and went through them very quickly and it still took me 5-6 hours. You can get a guided tour which you probably need to arrange ahead of time, or you can rent the head phones which I found very confusing and annoying. It tries to guide you trough the buildings but I kept getting out of order and skipping things and back tracking to find the missed parts.

The walls are all an ochre red and the doorways were decorated with beautiful ceramic tiles.

My hostel was in the Hutong district (alleys of old one storey buildings), near the drum tower.

And when in Rome do as Romans. Or in this case Beijing eat as Beijing ren... eat Peking Duck.

Of course a highlight of any trip to Beijing is to walk on the Great Wall. I chose to visit a part of the wall called Simatai. Being a not-so-touristed section of the wall, it's also not-so-easy-to-get-to. I followed the directions in the Lonely Planet and took a local bus and was dropped off 70km from the wall. I then had to negotiate with the taxi drivers there to get to the wall. The new Lonely Planet has just been published and mine was about 3 years out of date. LP said it should cost 120RMB round trip. The taxi drivers wanted 120RMB each way. I managed to get them down to 160RMB round trip.

The views from the wall were spectacular and there were very few tourists there.

The steps were very steep in places. I walked all the way up and back down the mountain and along the wall. Most people took a cable car most of the way up the mountain to get to the wall and walked down.

It was thundering the whole time I was there and just as I finished the wall and was walking down the mountain it started pooring, so I ran down because I didn't have an umbrella or plastic bag to put my camera in.

The taxi driver and I had a great conversation, 100% in chinese. It was good practice for me. He was very good at speaking easy chinese to me. I think he listened to the vocabulary I could use and asked me questions at my language level. By the time he dropped me off, he said we were "hao pengyou" = good friends.

The last thing I did in Beijing was to tour some universities. My little sister Qiufeng's roommate's boyfriend (Yang Ming Yang) is a graduate student at one of the top universities in the country, Tsingtao University. He gave me a great tour of his university and Peking University as well as the nearby Beijing Language and Culture University.

A Shanghai Wedding

From Beijing, I headed back to Shanghai to join Ray at his cousin's wedding. The wedding was held in Jin Mao Tower, the tallest building in China (88 floors).

The top 30 floors are a Hyatt Hotel.

Ray and I decided to pass some time in Cloud 9 bar - the tallest bar in China. A very small beer cost me about 60RMB ($8). Concidering you can buy a beer twice the size for 4RMB in Liuzhou, that's expensive!!! Looking in the updated Lonely Planet, it only costs 50RMB to go to the 88th floor observation deck - better value since you get a full 360 degree view.

The wedding was very interesting for me. Ray's cousin owns an interior design firm in Shanghai and is very successful. The wedding was very expensive. I was the only foreigner there.

The bride wore a traditional wedding dress before the wedding and then a light green one when she walked down the aisle to say the vows, followed by a dark pink one for dinner and a traditional red dress at the end of the ceremony.

They had a huge layered cake which they cut for show but we never ate. After the wedding I saw them taking it apart. It was made of wood with a little cake and icing around the outside. The flower girls had wings like little angels. It was a really nice evening. I met many of Ray's relatives and they were very welcoming to me.

The next day, Ray and I saw a park where parents do matchmaking for their single children. I had seen this on TV, but never in person. They make a profile for their child and post it on the bushes for prospective mates parents to review.

Getting married and having your one baby by age 30 is very important and saves your parents "face". Big cultural difference from America. What do they think about the independent 39 year old single American woman who would rather travel around the world than sit at home and cook dinners for her bread winner?

Xian to Beijing - Part 2 Dunhuang to Xining

2007-07-10T23:48:00.000-07:00

Dunhuang - Gansu Province

Dunhuang is in the middle of the Gobi desert. I travelled there by sleeper train again - this time about 22 hours. The train was almost empty. Very quiet and comfortable. I woke up about 6:30am as usual and looked out the window to see the other-worldly landscape of the desert. Sand as far as you can see, but not flat and windblown like I expected, rather with craters and gulleys like dried rivers. There was a huge sand dune mountain running parallel to the railway line and snow capped mountains behind that.

The train line to Dunhuang is new. It's not on most maps. They haven't even finished the railway station yet. It's the first railway station I have seen in China that is not in the center of the city. It's about 10km outside of town and across the road from the small airport.

The two main reasons to come to Dunhuang are for the Mogao Caves and the giant sand dune which they call Mingsha Mountain .There wasn't a lot to do in Dunhuang unless you wanted to pay lots of money to go to the overly touristy Cresent Moon Lake and pay more money to do adventure sports like Jeep rides or quad bikes in the sand or camel rides or sand surfing, sledding, etc...

An eclectic crew of 4 foreigners (isreali, british, japanese & american) met on the streets of the sleepy desert town that day and decided to all go on a camel trek and camping in the desert.

This camel trek and camping in the Gobi desert was one of the highlights of my time in China so far. I have always wanted to ride a camel and camp in the desert but it wasn't something I ever thought I would do in China. Many people say they get really sore riding the camel. But I loved it. I found it really relaxing and almost fell asleep.

I love the camel's feet. I thought they would be like a horse's hoof, but they aren't. They are soft and hairy.

Camping in the desert was really fun. We climbed to the top of the sand dune to watch the sunset, then slept under the stars (actually it was cloudy like usual in china) so we slept under the clouds which were under the stars. It was so silent and black in the desert. So peaceful. When you camp in the gobi desert, you would never know you are actually in the country with the world's largest population.

I visited Mogao Caves too which I think was way over priced. There are hundreds of caves carved into the side of the sand mountain. Traders and rich merchants travelling along the silk road would sponsor a cave to be built and decorated with buddhist art (paintings on the walls, sculptures, etc. ) The third largest buddha statue in the world is here. It is 34.5m tall.

If you're really into Buddhist art, then maybe it's worth it, but if I had known how expensive it has gotten (100RMB = $13), I probably wouldn't have made the trip at all. But then I wouldn't have seen the desert and taken the really fun camel trekking trip. So I don't regret it.

Lanzhou - Gansu Province

From Dunhuang, I took another sleeper train (16 hours) back to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province. I was getting good at buying train tickets by myself by this point. As soon as I got to Lanzhou, I bought a ticket to go to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province which was about 3 hours away. I had about 4 hours to wait in Lanzhou, so I stored my luggage and set out to explore and find some lunch. Lanzhou is located on the Yellow River (Huang Jiang) which is really muddy.

I crossed the historic first bridge over the Yellow River, then visited the pretty temple (White Pagoda Hill) on the opposite side of the river. The temple was built on the side of the mountain and the view of the city and the river was great.

I also tried Lanzhou's famous beef noodles, yet another version of chinese noodles with lots of stuff to add to the soup and noodles. The picture above shows how it is delivered to you. You have to add all the little plates to the bowl of noodles (peeling the boiled egg first of course).

Xining - Qinghai Province

My first meal in Xining was, you guessed it,....... noodles again. :) This time they were called Kuan Gan Ban. There are so much variety in chinese noodles though that I don't get bored. Always fun to try something new and compare. My favorites are still Liuzhou Luosifen and the dry noodles I had in Chengdu next to Ray's apartment.

About 80km from Xining, I visited Xinghai Hu, the largest lake in China. It was really beautiful.

Very blue water reflecting the blue blue sky. It is so nice to see blue sky in Chinan again. :)

Snow capped mountains in the distance, tibetan tents, yaks, and over priced entrance fees to cheezy tourist attractions.

A fellow traveller, Anthon, and I paid 5 RMB to a local farmer to let us walk down to the lake avoiding the 100RMB cheezy tourist trap theme park. It was nice and peaceful.

I had a surprise when the pre-packaged Yak meat I bought in town ended up looking like a dog bone. It was a fun day.

The next day I took a tour to a small tibetan lamasery (temple) in the mountains. It used to be a huge complex of monestaries. But aparently, the head Lama was instrumental in Mongolia breaking away from China and the Chinese government destroyed much of the city. A few of the temples have been rebuilt.

It is now home to the controversial 15th Dalai Lama, a 7 year old boy. My tour guide knew some of the monks and was able to get me in to meet him. He is a very serious little boy. He now belongs to the tibetan people and is not allowed to see his family. It is his destiny to rule a country in turmoil.

I was impressed with one of his children's books which had pictures and the corresponding Tibetan, Chinese and English words.

What I was told was that the Chinese government and the current lamas (religious leaders) of tibet chose this boy to be the next leader of Tibet. He is supposed to take the place of the current 14th Dalai Lama who has been in exile in India since 1959 when China took over Tibet by force (when he was 23 years old).

They searched all over Tibet and reviewed hundreds of children. China wants to take part in the 15th Dalai Lama's education so that when he becomes the leader of tibet, he will feel like he is not only a Tibetan but also chinese and help to bring Tibet peacefully under Chinese rule. It is yet to be seen if the Tibetan people will accept this leader because the tibetans believe that the spirit of the current Dalai Lama will transfer to his successor at death. Interesting!

I also did some shopping for yak meat (not on a bone) and climbed another hillside temple. This one was a taoist temple. At the bottom of the hill is a huge market of construction materials. It is like a huge outdoor Home Depot or Lowes.

From Xining, I travelled by train to Beijing (25 hours). See "Xian to Beijing - Part 3 Beijing"

Xian to Beijing - Part 1 Xian

2007-07-10T20:12:00.001-07:00

Xian

Since my contract was cancelled, I had some free time. So I decided to travel a little and see some of more of China. I have always wanted to see Xian. So I headed there in search of the Terracotta Warriors.

Visiting the terracotta warriors is a little frustrating because there are so many tour groups and it's so crowded. But it is cool to see them. Glad I did it.

Xian is a cool city. Lots to do. There is a city wall all around the city and there are an old bell tower and drum tower and the city is all lit up at night.

There is a big muslim district in Xian. There is a nice muslim Great Mosque. Other than the prayer mats on the floor in the main temple, I would have never known that it was a muslim temple and not a buddhist temple or taoist or something.

The food is delicious and interesting and there is a lot of really good souvenir shopping. And a market where they sell dried fruit which is really good and really cheap too. Qiufeng's best friend Ju Ying is a graduate student in Xian. She was a good guide and we toured the warriors together and had some nice meals in the Muslim Quarter. She also helped me a lot when I had to go shopping for a new camera.

Xian was a cool place even if the crowds at the terracotta warriors are a bit annoying. The one bad experience in Xian was being pickpocketted. My new camera was stolen right out of my camera bag while I was walking in an underground walkway. I think it was a little kid. As I was shopping for a new one, many people told me there are many thieves in Xian. Many stories of theft.

From Xian, I decided to go to Dunhuang. There was a direct sleeper train all the way there, 22 hours. Very convenient. Very comfortable. See Part 2 Dunhuang.

My Happy Birthday in CHINA!!!

2007-06-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

June 11th, 2007 - My first Birthday in China

I had 3 birthday parties and 4 birthday cakes for my birthday here in China. It was a really fun birthday.

Party #1 - My Little Sister and chinese friends

It started Sunday night with my little sister, Qiufeng and her friends, all young engineers at SGMW.

PAC party - Birthday cake #2

PAC always buys a birthday cake for each person's birthday. Look close, the chinese take the "tomato is a fruit" thing seriously.

Party #3 - with the gang from the Wooden Shoe

Dinner at Old Chengdu. I love spicy food, so Mike made reservations at a Sichuan restaurant. The food was really great. Spicy beef, chicken, hui guo rou, pork fat, ribs, really spicy, really good. The others liked it too, but most don't like spicy food quite as much as I do. :)

The next stop was the Wooden Shoe. Confetti and 2 more cakes and beer of course.

Rose gave me a hoola hoop for my birthday. It was a great laugh at the party.

Everybody had to try it. All the girls (except me) could do it. Most made it look really darn easy. Only one guy could do it. Michael from Finland.

Cake #4 from Ken. And one of my gifts - a pair of swimming goggles. Funny picture.

A great day!! Good thing it doesn't happen every day.

Yunnan Provence (June 2007) - Part 3 Zhongdian, Dali and Back to Kunming

2007-06-10T21:02:00.001-07:00

Yunnan Provence - Part 3

Zhongdian, Dali and Back to Kunming

Zhongdian (Shangrila) - A Tibetan Town in Northwest Yunnan

Back in Qiaotou, we stopped back in at the "Gorged Tiger" Cafe run by Margo, an Austrailan woman who is extremely helpful with information and anything you might need to do the hike. She has been in China for 11 years. Eight of us left Qiaotou by taxi van, headed to Zhongdian. It was myself and a spanish girl who had only been in China for a month but seemed to speak chinese as well as I do after 10 months. We were the negotiators and translators for the other 6 people (my 3 dutch friends, another dutch guy (I swear the dutch are invading china) a canadian and an isreali girl who was feeling sick.

The van driver didn't know how to drive very well and had managed to destroy his clutch. We really didn't think we were going to make it over the mountain. The views of the snow capped mountains were beautiful and the farmland along the way.

After we crossed the mountain, the scenery changed. The villages we passed were tibetan style and the houses were very distinctly different.

There were Yaks grazing and big wooden frames in the fields used for drying barley. This area was definitely the highlight of the trip for me.

In Zhongdian, we found Kevin's Trekker Inn, a hotel recommended by Margo. It was clean and cheap, had hot showers, internet and was in a good location. And Kevin and his wife spoke excellent english and were very helpful. They have lots of information about places to go in the area. I think I want to go back there someday and take some of those other trips into tibet or sichuan. Kevin had some fantastic photos!!!

After showers we all felt human again and headed into the old town to find some dinner. We got side tracked by the local dancing in the square.
Several of us tried it ourselves and it was a lot of fun. Kind of like line dancing in huge concentric circles. There must have been at least 200 people there all having a lot of fun. After that some of us went to a tibetan restaurant for dinner. Our favorite was the Yak momo which is a baozi or dumpling served with a really nice curry sauce.

The next day myself and 3 of the dutch went to the 600 year old tibetan monestary on the outside of town.

It was fairly expensive considering it was completely under construction and you aren't supposed to take any pictures. We did anyway because they couldn't be bothered to have any literature or signs or guides in English to tell us not to and the chinese were taking pictures even though there were signs in chinese supposedly telling them not to.

We saw young monks washing laundry. The tibetan people make a hard butter out of yak milk. One of the uses of yak butter is to burn in candles in the monestary. The tibetan monestaries are very brightly painted. Very beautiful.

It was a beautiful day and since we were at a height of 3200 meters, it felt like you could touch the clouds. At that altitude, it was hard climbing the steps. Little oxygen made your legs feel very sluggish and made breathing hard. We saw a lot of chinese people using oxygen cans.

After lunch, two of us rented mountain bikes and had a little adventure in the tibetan grassland villages. We came to a place where they were building a new house. They were very friendly and I talked to them a little in chinese. They invited us to take pictures and go see how they were building the house. It was fascinating!!!

The houses are made of earth (dirt). They build a frame of vertical posts and then horizontal boxing that they pore dirt into and pound it with big wooden mallets.

Zhongdian will soon be a major tourist center like Lijiang and Dali. There is construction everywhere and you can see that in a couple of years it's going to be something like Las Vegas or Disneyland.

I said goodbye to my new friends and bought a night bus ticket to Dali. This bus was not so comfortable as the first night bus. It was rickety and noisy and smelly and the roads were really bumpy. I bought the latest bus ticket (7:30pm) but it still go to Dali at 3am. You are allowed to sleep on the bus till about 9:00 or whenever you want to go. At about 5:30 or 6am a man on the next bus decided to start unloading chicken cages off the top of the bus next to ours. He would just drop them off the back of the bus which was extremely loud and impossible to sleep through!!!

Dali - Bai minority and old town

Dali is an old city with a city wall (at least some of the city walls still exist). The 4 city gates, North gate, South, East and West are all still standing as well as many ancient buildings in the old city.

The local people are called bai people. Their custom is for the younger women to wear very brightly colored clothing and the older married women to wear blue and black. I am not sure what minority the older woman with the really bright clothing holding a baby was from. Her dress was very unique but colorful and interesting.

I got very little sleep on the bus so I was very tired in Dali. I found a hotel and went out explore a little. Took the bus to the three pagodas but only took pictures from the parking lot. Too expensive!!!

I went back to Kunming and visited a little more with Vivian and her boyfriend. They were very good hosts. Yang han and I went to a Sichuan restaurant for dinner in an old ming dynasty restaurant with the tables in an outdoor courtyard with bamboo growing in the middle and little paths and small chinese bridges. It was really atmospheric.

The next morning we had Cross-Bridge Rice Noodles again.

We also visited a park and international food pavillion where we did some tea tasting and buying. While I was trying to pack all the gifts and souvenirs into the new bag I had to buy because I bought so much, the zipper broke and Yang Han had to get it fixed for me. Haha

Vivian had to work late both nights. She works 7 days a week, often from 8am to 9:30pm. I am sure she is very good at her job, but they take advantage. They should hire more teachers!

After dinner we had to rush to the train station so I could take the night train back to Liuzhou. It was a very memorable journey. It started raining really hard and we couldn't find a taxi. Vivian had to run about 10 blocks in the pooring rain. We were totally soaked. The train ride home was very comfortable and uneventful. I had some conversations with my neighbor in chinese which was nice. This trip was very good for me. It helped my confidence speaking chinese, buying tickets on my own and generally to know that I can get along in china by myself.

I had an awesome trip and since I don't have a contract now after June 14th, I plan to do a lot more travelling in the next month and then go to the US for my family reunion. Xian and Beijing are my next major destinations, along with all the famous mountains in China (Tai shan, Hua Shan, Huang Shan, and the two Heng Shans). Ray also suggests another tibetan area called Xia He and my friend Scott recommends Changbaisan (on border with North Korea). And the Lonely planet recommends a lot more places as well.

Thank you to Ray's Dad and Vivian and Yang Han and Liu Yang and Han Huan and all the nice people I met along the way.

Let the adventure continue...

Yunnan Provence (June 2007) - Part 2 Tiger Leaping Gorge

2007-06-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Yunnan Provence - Part 2 Tiger Leaping Gorge

My main reason for wanting to go to Yunnan Provence was to go hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is a hike in the mountains along the side of the Yangze River in the far west of China. This is the second time I have been to the Yangze River. I went to the Three Gorges between Chongqing and Wuhan at Christmas. The reason I wanted to go there is because I had heard that they had just finished building the Three Gorges Dam (San Xia Da Ba), the largest dam in the world. And the water level would rise 165 meters by 2008, so I wanted to go see it before it disappeared forever, but I was too late. The water had already risen 155 meters and only had 10 meters to go.

Well, they have plans to do the same thing in Yunnan provence in Tiger Leaping Gorge and supposedly they have already started blasting. We heard some blasts when we were there, but never saw any real dam construction works. At least I got to see this gorge before it becomes a huge lake.

At the bus station, I met Paul and Sarah who are from Wales. We had a great time talking about Wales and reminiscing. They have been in China studying Chinese for 3 years. They are preparing to do some mission work eventually in minority villages. They are really nice people. I hope to keep in touch with them. After trying to study chinese on my own time and struggling with it for 10 months, it was good to talk to somebody who has done it seriously and heard that they go through some of the same headaches and struggles. It was also great hearing about some of the work they are doing for the villages. They have lots of friends doing the same kind of thing here in China. Maybe I will do something like that someday. I often think that making engines isn't what I was really put on this earth to do. Nice to meet people who seem to have found their life's work and are enjoying it.

We also hiked with three dutch people Olaf, Efan and Sane. Along the way we hiked with and stayed at the sam hotel were 4 more dutch people, some americans, british, canadians, spanish, and french people, as well as 45 singaporean high school students and a big australian family. Even a few chinese people!!

It was a really sunny hot day and the trail was very dusty and dry. I had gotten sunburned the day before and stupidly didn't bring any shirts with sleeves. As they say, "when in Rome, do as Romans". The chinese who have naturally dark skin want to be as white as possible so the women always walk around with umbrellas in the sunshine. To us it looks kind of funny, but they probably think we foreigners are silly for wearing sunglasses and wanting to get a tan. Anyway, I borrowed an umbrella from Sara and hiked like that for half a day. The chinese probably thought "Finally, a foreigner with some common sense!!" Hahaha.

We stopped at the "loo (british for toilet) with a view" and it really did have an awesome view. This is a view of the loo and the view from the loo.

But once you get to the top, it is a great view and only a short, easy walk down hill to the Tea Horse guest house which is where we spent the night. The view of the snow capped mountain (Jade Dragon Mountain) on the other side of the river was really awesome.

We were all hot and dusty and tired. Look at Sarah's feet!!!

There was an australian grandpa there who claimed to be a mountain climber and said he had climbed Mt.Everest. He told us it that nobody had ever climbed Jade Dragon Mountain which is about 5600 meters high.

He said and that it would take a month to climb and that you would have to move slowly up the mountain setting one camp, then the next day moving no more than 300 meters higher to set your next camp.

We all thought a month was a bit of an exaggeration and that became the joke for the rest of the trip. Everytime we said how beautiful the mountain was, somebody would say "but it will take a month to climb it and the last 80 meters can take you 4 hours. It's very painful..." haha

Because the Singaporean high school kids got to the guest house before us, there were only 3 rooms left when we go there, which meant that Olaf and I had to share a room (twin beds). We were so tired that we all slept really well on the top of the mountain.

The next day's hiking was much easier, all down hill and we took it at a really leisurely pace, stopping often next to a beautiful view or waterfall and soaking in the views and serenity.

We stopped hiking at Tina's Guest house at about lunch time. Had a long break for a couple of hours and took our hiking shoes and socks off for a while and enjoyed the sound of the river some cold drinks and food and a Olaf and Paul serenaded us with a guitar.

After that we took a van back to the start of the trail. We heard about some landslides, but there were two huge ones.

We aren't really sure if they were natural or man-made, but we had to pay 3 different taxi drivers to shuttle us back and forth. That 20 mile taxi ride cost us two times what the two and a half hour bus ride cost the morning before.

After a Short stop at Maro's "Gorged Tiger" Cafe, we were off to Zhongdian (Shangrila). See: Yunnan Provence (June 2007) - Part 3 Zhongdian, Dali and Back to Kunming

Yunnan Provence (June 2007) - Part 1 Kunming to Lijiang

2007-06-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

Nine Days in Yunnan Provence (Southwest China) - Part 1 Kunming and Lijiang

Because my first contract has been cancelled here in China and I had worked a lot of overtime and had vacation still coming to me, I was able to take a week off work to explore a bit more of China. I headed out for a week of adventure in the extreme south west of china, Yunnan Provence. This area is really beautiful and inhabited by many minority tribes. China has over 50 minority tribes. These people live in their own villages and mainly speak their own ancient languages. They have many unique customs, costumes, celebrations, food, song and dance, etc... Seeing these minority cultures is really special. They will disappear soon as China becomes more modern.

I have been living in china for 10 months and trying to learn to speak chinese. It's time I start speaking chinese. I wanted to have a true adventure in China and prove to myself that I could do it on my own. I still had a lot of help from friends, but I'm getting more and more independent.

From train window. Water buffalo in a rice paddy

I set off on my adventure by train from Liuzhou to Kunming. Ray's dad helped with the sleeper train tickets again. Apparently it can be pretty hard to buy the sleeper tickets. I haven't tried that on my own yet. The train was pretty comfortable and even though it was delayed 2 hours, 17 hours went by pretty fast.

In Kunming, I was met by Liu Yang (a friend of a friend of my friend Qiufeng) and later by Vivian or Wang Hiayan (Ray's friend from college). Liu Yang and his friend Han Huan showed me around their college and Kunming for a few hours. It was a nice introduction to Kunming. Then we had dinner with Vivian and her boyfriend Yang Han. We had "Cross-bridge rice noodles" which are famous in Kunming. Every city or region in china has it's own version of noodles. I have had som really really good ones. I think my favorite are still the spicy snail noodles in Liuzhou. But Ray took me for some dry noodles with beef in Chengdu and I really like those too and in Liuzhou you can get Gan lao fen which is dry noodles. I like those a lot too.

After dinner I caught a night bus to Lijiang. It was my first time on a night bus. I had heard nightmare stories about night buses, but this first one was pretty comfortable. Night buses have no seats, just three rows of narrow beds with one by each window and one in the middle of the bus. Two levels high. This bus had television and my neighbor was a nice student from Hong Kong. Her english name is Carrie (from the TV series Sex in the City). We talked quite a bit and ended up going to the same hotel in LiJiang and sharing a room and going hiking together the next day. Nice girl.

Lijiang is becoming a very touristy city. Especially at night. It has cobble streets and lovely old houses with beautiful roofs. Walking around the old town in the morning, I was approached by a tour guide and convinced to go hiking in the mountains nearby to see local "Yi minority" villages.

Carrie and I went together. The scenery was beautiful. A big lake, a mountain with snow on top, and wild flowers (azaelias and rhododendrons grow wild here). It was a very sunny hot day for hiking and I got a sunburn. But it was really nice to see the villages and how the people live.

We had tea with them and the women of one village made us potatoes which they cook by throwing into the fire.

An old Yi woman working in her potatoe field.

Potatoes are a staple of their diet. You see potatoe farms everywhere on the mountain.

I the second village we met a really lovely old man who was 76 years old but looked like 100. He had very dark skin probably from working very hard in the sun all his life. He had a great smile and didn't mind us sitting in his house and having tea with him and telling us about his family and life on the mountain. And in the next village we met an old woman wearing the traditional black hat and clothing. She also had the traditional tatoos on her arms (first picture in this blog post).

These are some of the village houses. The first one is a traditional Yi house on top of the mountain. The second is a mud brick Naxi house in the village at the base of the mountain.

In one village on top of the mountain we saw some small children. They were playing in a shed. They were all dirty and grubby. They were a little afraid of strangers, but allowed us to take pictures of them. Heigene is not great in these minority villages. They often don't have toilets or running water and many humanitarian aid groups go to these villages to help them understand things they can do to reduce illness and death from disease and give them a better quality of life.

On the way down the mountain, we met about 20 school children. The children go to school on Sunday and live there all week. Then they come back up the mountain on Friday to live with their families. Some of the children have to walk 5 hours to and from school. It was Sunday evening and they were headed back to school at the bottom of the mountain in another village which is actually a different minority "Naxi zu". The children seemed very happy to be going to school.

Their school looks pretty modern and clean compared to the living conditions in their villages. It was good to see a few older children still studying. There were 2 older boys and an older girl all probably high school age. I tried to talk to them in Potong hua (mandarin Chinese) but most of them did not understand me. Our guide said that they only speak their local language. No teachers want to go to these villages to teach mandarin.

In the evening, I strolled around the touristy streets of Lijiang thinking about the differences to what I had seen in the mountain villages that day.

There are many bars in Lijiang. There is one street with a small stream running down the middle of two rows of bars. The drinkers in one bar sit on the balcony drinking and singing and competing with the drinkers across the street to see who can be the noisiest! Not my cup of cha (tea), but an insight into chinese life none-the-less.

The next day I headed to Qiaotou to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge. - See Part 2

Nanjing

2007-05-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

Nanjing means South Capital

(Beijing means North Capital).

Nanjing was twice the capital of China. First in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and again as the capital of the People's Republic of China in the early part of the 20th century.

There is a highway tunnel under this lake. We drove through it when we came back to the train station the last day in Nanjing. Apparently they built it just to be different. Pretty cool.

Ray and I took the bullet train from Kunshan to Nanjing, two hours. It was very comfortable and fast. We met up with 4 of his friends - two from Liuzhou, two from college. His birthday was on the 5th of May, so he had lots of friends around for his big day.

Nanjing has many nice sites to visit, but it isn't really a touristy city. The first day that we toured around, we hardly saw any foreigners. It seemed I might be the only ET in Nanjing.

Ray and his friend Charles hadn't seen each other since college 3 years ago.

We visited a Chairman Mao museum and saw lots of buttons worn by the chinese people during his rein. Also many statues and pictures of Mao.

Nanjing had a 33km long city wall which was the longest city wall ever construced according to Lonely Planet. Most of the wall is still standing. Zhonghua gate had 4 rows of gates and could house 3000 soldiers.

Of course we had a nice meal in the evening. In Nanjing, they seem to really like duck. It was very tasty.

We also had big bone soup which I had in Liuzhou as well. The object is to suck the bone marrow out of the center of the bone using a straw. It's tasty!

I got up early one morning and went for a walk along the outside of the city wall which is all park area. I watched many people doing Tai Chi, playing badminton, and old men congregating to listen to their singing birds.

May 5th was Ray's 25th Birthday. It was a beautiful day and he got to spend it with many friends. We joined thousands and thousands of people who climbed ZiJin Shan to go to the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum.

We waited for a long time and put up with lots of pushy, rude chinese people to get the honor of seeing his casket. Sun Yat Sen is known as the father of modern China.

It was a beautiful day for walking around and site seeing.

One of Ray's friends is also from Liuzhou like Ray and told us that there was a Luosefen (spicy snail soup noodles) restaurant in Nanjing. Ray loves Luosefen (me too) and he really misses it. So he was really looking forward to eating it for his birthday. Unfortunately when we got there we found that it was closed. The owners had gone back to Liuzhou for the holiday. Damn!

So instead, we had Duck Blood Noodles and Duck neck. It was good. As a treat we also had Vanilla Coke. Wow that was good!

Ray and his friends thought this sign was really funny. It says that it is an honor to stop at the red traffic light. Apparently the government says that there are 12 honors and 12 dis-honors. I didn't get them all but they are things like: honor your country, honor your parents, it's an honor to learn science, etc... stopping at red lights isn't on the official government list.

All vacations must come to an end, and so did this one. I had quite a trip home from Nanjing. Train one day, bus and plane the next day and bus again on the third day. Of course i could have just flown from Nanjing and taken a taxi all in one day but that would have been too easy. I need the practice of getting around on my own in China. I just may get a chance to do a lot more of it here soon.

Stay tuned.

Shanghai - Old and New

2007-05-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

Old and New Shanghai

During the Chinese Labor holiday, I spent a couple of days in Shanghai with friends. During this trip I saw lots old things and lots of new things standing side by side.

Shanghai has a river running down the middle of it, the Huangpu River. Along the west side of the river is a famous street called the Bund.

Qiufeng and Xiaolong on the Bund, Shanghai. Pearl Tower in the background.

On the west side of the river is Pu Xi, the old city. In Pu Xi, you see a lot of old city with the new city rising in the background.

On the west side of the river is Pu Dong, the new side of the city. In 1990, PuDong was just boggy farmland providing vegetables to Shanghai markets. Now it is a growing city of sky scrapers. There are still a lot of old buildings in the city. And the background for these old buildings is the sky scrapers of the new city.

Looking down an old street in Pu Xi you can see Pearl Tower across the river in Pu Dong.

Everywhere you look in Shanghai you see old and new mixed together.

We went to the Nanjing Walking Street which is the main shopping area of Shanghai city center.

It was packed with people day and night. Lots of the neon China is famous for.

Domestic life in Shanghai. Drying laundry in Shanghai.

There is a trendy new shopping and dining area in Pu Xi called Xin Tian Di which means "new sky and earth".

This is a museum in Xin Tian Di. Looks very cool at night.

We even saw a super skinny Spider Man in Xin Tian Di.

We went to the Kia X-Games Asia 2007. It included BMX, Skate boarding, In-line skating, rock climbing, motor cross, a concert and other events.

Ray has scoped out all the Dairy Queens in every city he has every been to.

He got me to try a Green Tea and Chocolate Blizzard. There are some things about China I may never get used to. Green Tea ice cream is just wierd.

In Shanghai, you will see a traditional Chinese Tea House selling the same green tea that has been drank in China for centuries. And, just across the street, you might see Dairy Queen selling Green Tea ice cream. The old and the new are everywhere around you in Shanghai.

Qi Bao (七宝）Snack Street - Shanghai

2007-05-18T07:58:00.001-07:00

Qi Bao Snack Street in Shanghai was a fantastic memory of the Chinese holiday.

I really got a taste of Chinese people on holiday. Chinese people are a dichotomy. They are some of the nicest, kindest, most friendly and helpful people I have ever met in my life and they can also be the rudest when they are in crowds. Why do they think they need to push and shove and cut in line? I got to stand in lots of lines during the holiday and got to experience lots of rude and pushy people. They were really driving me crazy.

Qi Bao Snack Street was really cool. So many cool foods that I had never seen or tried before. My friends and I tried lots of fun snacks. And there are many more that I didn't try. I would love to go back again some day and try some more.

Big spicy shrimp or langostine (lobsters without claws). I had these a couple of times during the holiday. Ray and I both really like spicy food. So these were just right.
Candied fruit on skewers.

Any kind of a bird on a stick! Didn't try these yet, but I will, someday... Chicken feet and other bird parts wrapped in banana leaves and other things.

More Chicken Feet. I really don't understand the Chinese obsession with Chicken feet. I've tried them several times, and they can spice them so that they taste pretty good, but it's just skin. And if you think about where those feet have been,... I don't get it! They have this thing with human feet being dirty and disgusting. I kind of get it with the squat toilets and dirty streets and all that. I just recently learned that it is a huge insult to cross your legs and point your foot at or show the bottom of your foot to another person. But do they think chicken's feet are cleaner than human feet?
While we're on the topic of chickens, these are apparently chickens baked in clay or mud. Didn't try this yet either. How long ago were they put in the mud and stuck in the fire to burn. I'm sure the red paper is for luck.
I think this was pork. The chinese eat every part of every animal. Usually it's cooked, but this didn't looked cooked. This window wasn't too crowded but I definitely saw people eating this stuff.

Just another people shot. A day in the life of a foreigner in china. Blonde highlights kind of stick out in a crowd like this. I feel like ET in a crowd.

A beautiful river and old chinese architecture.

Look at all the people on the bridge. Being on that bridge was like being at a rock concert.

When you are in China on a national holiday, you will experience some amazing sights.

I will definitely check out any snack street I come across in my future travels thru China.

A Train Ride in China

2007-05-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

My First Long Haul Train Ride In China

(April 29th - May 7th, 2007)

Travelling in China during a holiday weekend is quite an experience.

There are only two 1-week holidays in China and it seems that most Chinese want to travel during these two weeks. Many chinese work at least 6 days a week and long days without overtime pay or weekends or holidays. So, when they do get a chance to have a holiday, they want to do something fun.

All the transportation routes are packed, and getting tickets can be a nightmare. They schedule extra trains and buses. There are crowds everywhere. I wanted to experience the real china, so I decided to take the train to Shanghai with my friend Qiufeng. I'd heard nightmare stories about the trains, but I wanted to experience it for myself. It wasn't so bad.

At first we were only able to get a hard seat ticket for 24 hours. That would have been torture, but it could be even worse. Some people can only get "standing tickets" which means you don't have a seat at all. You have to stand or sit on the floor or your luggage or stand in the aisles...for 24 hours!!! My friend's Dad works for the train station and helped us get sleeper tickets. There are different levels of sleeper tickets. Cabins with 2 or 4 beds and hard sleepers are with about 60 beds in one cabin.

That's where we ended up. In the hard sleepers there are 3 levels, bottom bunk is the most desirable. No climbing and you can sit up in bed and look out the window. No privacy, but quite convenient. Middle bunks are ok and in the top bunks where we were, you can't really sit up straight.

One interesting thing about the train is that the toilets on the train are the easiest squat toilets to use in China. As my friend Mike pointed out. The secret to squat toilets is "three point stance". In other words, the easiest way to do it is to hold onto or lean on something. Anyway, in the toilets or "closet pots" on the train, they give you a handy handle to hold onto.

But we survived with the help of a good book and lots of junk food.

It was the start of a good chinese adventure.

Wuling vans - Built in Liuzhou China

2007-04-20T06:33:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting article that was in the Detroit Free Press yesterday.
It's about the Wuling minivans that are built here in Liuzhou China.
This joint venture between GM, Shanghai Automotive and Wuling motors is where I'm working.
I'm working in the new engine factory mentioned in the article.

This article shows clearly the auto situation in China.
1% of chinese people own a car.
4/5 car buyers buying their first car.
car costs $3500 but that is 1-1/2 year's salary.
As the pro and anti-UAW guys debate in the comments at the bottom, 1-1/2 year's salary for a UAW might be $75K to $150K.
Says something about why the US auto industry is struggling.
It's definitely an education and an adventure being here.
There are probably other articles in other newspapers like this.
If you see some interesting ones, send them my way.

I'm copying this article into my blog because if I put a link here it may disappear after a while.

Link to Freepress:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007704190420

Article text:

Why this funky cheap ride is worth a fortune to GM
April 19, 2007
BY KATIE MERX
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
LIUZHOU, China -- Yes, the Wuling Sunshine is bigger than a breadbox.
General Motors Corp. and its Chinese joint venture partners count on big sales of relatively tiny vehicles -- especially the mini-minivans dubbed breadboxes -- assembled in southern China to further spur the Wuling brand's growth and profits in the world's fastest-growing vehicle market.

In Liuzhou, an industrial city of 1.6 million more than 1,200 miles southwest of Shanghai near the Vietnam border, GM, together with its partners Shanghai Automotive and Liuzhou Wuling Motor Co., builds spartan minivans and pickups sold under the Wuling badge. Elsewhere in China, Wuling manufactures the Chevy Spark.
The most popular Wuling vehicles are the mini minivans -- the Sunshine, the New Sunshine and the recently launched, so-called luxury Wuling Hongtu -- it builds in Liuzhou. Categorized as mini commercial vehicles, or small work trucks, their prices start at $3,500 and they get better than 40 miles to the gallon in the city.
A high-end Hongtu with a 1.5-liter engine can sell for as much as $6,800 with all the bells and whistles, including an optional air bag.
"We think we are providing to the customer a transportation tool that is low-cost, multipurpose -- and they are pretty good quality and can be used under tough conditions," said James Hu, director of mini commercial vehicle marketing at Wuling.
The Chinese call the vans breadboxes, because of their simple box-like appearance.
The vans are incredibly popular. Last year, the Wuling brand sold 420,140 vehicles to capture 37.3% of the mini commercial vehicle market, up from the 30.6% of the market it held in 2005 when it sold 310,288 mini commercial vehicles.
Its next-closest competitor, domestic automaker Chang An, holds about 15% of the market, Hu said.
In fact, the mid-level Wuling minivan -- the Sunshine -- was the best-selling vehicle in all of China last year, with sales of 292,400, Hu said.
In the first three months of this year, Wuling's market share in the mini commercial segment rose to 46.6 million.
Hu and Shanghai GM Wuling Vice President and CFO Thomas Drumgoole declined to comment on full-year expectations. But others at the automaker have speculated that the mini vehicle maker will sell about 500,000 vehicles this year. Drumgoole said his objective for 2010 is to hold more than 35% of the segment.
Tim Dunne, director of Asia-Pacific Market Intelligence for J.D. Power and Associates, said the Wuling vehicles are very popular in the countryside.
"They're utilitarian," Dunne said. "You can move six to eight people around with them. You can use them as work vehicles. They're cheap to buy and cheap to repair."
And in a market where the vast majority of buyers will pay cash and use the vehicles for hauling goods or business associates during the week and for carrying family -- parents, in-laws and children -- on the weekend, those are all attractive attributes, GM executives and analysts agree.
Hu said the average age of Wuling buyers is under 40 with a high school education. Four out of five are first-time car buyers. And their average monthly income is under 1,500 yuan -- about $200 -- meaning the cheapest Wuling model costs a year and a half of income.
Because personal vehicle ownership in this vast, nominally communist nation is basically only 7 years old -- and based primarily in the more properous coastal regions -- 80% of vehicle sales across the board have been to first-time buyers.
It's quite a contrast to the United States, where most adults own vehicles. In China, less than 1% of the population owns vehicles.
So Wuling focuses on growing sales in rural villages and small towns of China, where it sees massive opportunities for growth in the sales of its tiny vehicles. On China's scale, Wuling defines villages as locations with populations of 5,000 to 10,000. It defines as a small town any city with a population of 200,000 to 500,000.
The model for Wuling is "low-cost and high-value production," Wuling President Shen Yang said Wednesday through a translator.
GM executives say that, while it is credited with bringing engineering expertise to the partnership, Wuling has taught GM how to balance the use of automation with human labor to protect the slim margins typical of small cars.
While adding little automation over the last four years, Shen said, Wuling has reduced the number of labor hours it takes to build a vehicle by 37% and cut its costs per vehicle by nearly 60%.
Most of the assembly of Wuling vehicles is not automated, to keep costs down.
Shanghai GM Wuling executives said the total cost of labor including benefits is less than $4 per hour per person in Liuzhou, where the company employs about 10,000 workers.
Five hundred of those workers are at the new Liuzhou engine plant, which plans to launch production in August building up to 250,000 engines for the mini vehicles. Said GM China President Kevin Wale: "Our aim is to stay ahead in this critical market for General Motors by offering local consumers the products and services that they want, when they want them."
And Wuling sees itself filling a big role on the modest end of consumer desires.
Said Shen, through his interpreter: "We have words in our vision to be the best small and mini vehicle maker in the Chinese market."

End of article

I was particularly amused by these comments to the article:

cranial

Lets bring them over and sell them at Sams club. They would be a big hit here. Just think, a car you could buy new every year if you wanted to. If GM could only build the rest of the cars they sell here over there, everyone could afford a new car. And we could take our hard earned money to a real bank instead of the uaw job bank. Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 1:31 pm

dadcss

A few lines from the article that stood out to me. …the cheapest Wuling model costs a year and a half of income. …their prices start at $3,500… …Wuling has taught GM how to… If Wuling has taught GM anything it’s how to sell an ugly vehicle to the masses for 1.5 years wages. I put that at $150K in UAW wages. Let’s hold our breath and see how many are still on the road at 50K miles.

chuckram

dadcss; Where the hell are you living?? A year and a half salary for a UAW worker is about right IF, you are a die maker, electrician, or tool maker. A flunky on the assembly line does not make anywhere near that much money in such a short amount of time. I worked at Chrysler for 37 years and the most I made working on the line was $48,000. Even if you accepted every minute of over time, you would have a hard time coming out with 150,000 in a year and a half. I mean, get serious will you. You anti union people sound just like the anti gun people. Mostly BULL SH*T. And you all try to make it sound so true and official. I think you should join the Brady group and see if you can either help them do away with all our gun rights or maybe you can convince them the UAW has something to do with the number of guns out in the general public. Then the whole bunch of you can do a lot more damage to the unions in this country. Then again, maybe you should just STFU. You don't know what your talking about anyway. Pea brained idiot.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did. :)

A short fast trip around China

2007-04-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

A short fast trip around China

This week I had an opportunity to visit a few new cities in China.
It was a whirlwind tour, but I managed to visit 3 provinces that I hadn't yet been to.

Shanghai (I'd been there before)

This is Pearl Tower. A TV tower in Shanghai. You can get great views from the top of it. It is located in the new part of Shanghai called Pudong. The views of the city and river are pretty spectacular.

Wuhu (Anhui Province)

Wuhu is straight west of Shanghai in Anhui provence.

It seems to be a fast growing city. Lots of construction going on.

Guangzhou (Guangdong Province)

Guangzhou is one of the largest cities in China. Lonely planet says 3.4 million, but I was told somewhere around 10 million. Like all cities in china, it is a topic of great debate and depends largely on where you draw the line. Some people say Shanghai is the largest city in China (population 10-20 million). Others say Chongqing (population 40 million???). Who knows really?

Baiyun shan (white cloud mountain) is located on the northwest part of the city and has great views of the city. Well the day I was there you got a great view of smog. Everything was pretty white. The thing to do is walk up the mountain and back down, but the people I went with decided to take the cable car up and the electric car down.

As I was starting to feel pretty sick, I didn't complain. In Guangzhou I got my 2nd case of bad tummy in the 8 months I have been in China. Both times while travelling which really is not fun.

Hainan island - Haikou and Sanya (Hainan Province)

Hainan is a large island Province and is southern most part of China. It is very hot! They grow lots of tropical fruit there, Ye zi (coconut), Bo luo (pineapple), Xiang jiao (bananas), Man gua (mango), Mu gua (papaya) and jackfruit (funny looking big fruit that I don't know the chinese name for).

This was our hotel in Sanya. Very nice. The highlight was the hot spring with the fish in it. It was so cool. You sit in the warm water and these little fish came and bit you. Their little mouths were so small it didn't hurt. Actually it kind of tickled. They liked feet most of all. You could imagine that they were cleaning you or something. It was very relaxing actually. I tried to concentrate on each little fish biting me. Maybe I should try accupuncture. Why not?

Then we went to the beach and swam in the ocean. The water was a little cool at first but it was hot in Hainan and after a while it felt really good to get in the water to cool off. My friends proceeded to bury themselves in the sand.

A box of fun!

2007-04-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my friend Ray sent me a care package. It included some John Deere brochures, a Lonely Planet Nepal book, 4 seasons of 24 on CD and some Cherry Poptarts.
What a sweetie he is!

The John Deere brochures were because he works for a company called Sany which is a manufacturer and distributor of heavy earth moving equipment. When he told me that they were a John Deere distributor in China, I told him my family are crazy about John Deere tractors and would love to see some brochures with chinese writing on them. So he remembered and sent me some.

The Lonely Planet is because we are planning to travel to Nepal together later this year. It will be his first time leaving China. He is the perfect travel partner and I'm really looking forward to taking this trip with him.

All the young Chinese people are hooked on American TV series like Prison Break, 24, Desparate Housewives and Lost. I never watched any of these shows and my friends are giving them all to me, so I will be hooked on TV now! :)

And best of all are the Poptarts. He told me he bought me something that would make me feel "childish" by which he meant young again. And it totally did. They are really good. What a treat!

Thanks Ray!

Yangshuo - April Fools Day 2007

2007-04-03T06:23:00.000-07:00

As Corey says, the Karst hills around Liuzhou are beautiful, and the hills around around Guilin are even more beautiful, but the hills around Yangshuo are the most beautiful of all. You are surrounded by them. There are so many of them. On April Fools day Corey and I took a boat trip from Guilin to Yangshuo. This boat trip cost us 230 RMB or about US$30 but that was only because Corey bought my ticket. If I had bought it as a foreigner it would have cost me 500 RMB. I was the only foreigner on our boat and there was no english guide, but that was ok. Corey said he didn't listen to what they were saying anyway.

There is always a string of boats doing this trip on the weekends. My friend Ray taught me the phrase "ren hai ren shan" which literally means "people sea, people mountain" and they say it when it is really crowded. As many people as the sea is wide and the mountain is high. That is what the boat trips to Yangshuo are like every day. Look there is a snake of boats going down the river.

The weather was beautiful and the temperature was perfect. With the new sunglasses that I bought the day before, I was all set to enjoy the views as we cruised down the river. The cruise takes about 4 hours.
Along the river you can see some villages and see the people who live by the river. They live in such a beautiful place. I wonder if they appreciate it or just take it for granted and think everybody in the world has such a beautiful home.

The karst hills are so beautiful and go as far as you can see in every direction.

The river is the Li Jiang (Li river)This is the top of our boat. It was very pleasant sitting here watching the scenery go by.West Street in Yangshuo. There are many foriegners who vist Yangshuo and go shopping on West Street. Corey did lots of shopping for his wife and kids.

I tried smelly douf (smelly tofu) on the street side cooked by these two women. It doesn't smell very good, but it actually tastes pretty good when they put some spices on it.

Apparently Chairman Mao really liked smelly douf. We actually have something in common??? I love buying stuff on the streets like this and trying new things. It is fun trying to talk to the locals. Corey did most of the talking this time, but it was still fun. They were asking him how to say smelly tofu in english and lah jiao which is hot chilly peppers.

After that, we went to Moon Hill which is a famous hill in Yangshuo. It has a huge hole in the hill. I had been there with Joel before, but since I lost all my pictures when I destroyed my hard drive, it was a good chance to replace some of them.

We walked up and stood in the hole, then went to a viewing point where we saw this cute little old lady fanning some sweaty germans. She has such a cute smile. When you get to Moon hill, there are about 20 little old ladies that follow you up the mountain wanting to sell you water for twice the normal price or want to be your guide. I tried to tell them we didn't need water or a guide. But Corey just bought water from them and told them they could go back down the hill and didn't have to follow us all the way up.

We climbed right to the top. We were on top of the moon! And we sat there talking and enjoying the views. Corey called his family members in China to tell them he was in such a beautiful place and I sent text messages to my friends Mike, Scott and Ray. It was a pleasant end to a pleasant weekend.

Guilin and Yangshuo

2007-04-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I needed to get away from Liuzhou and have some fun...

So, Corey and I decided to go to Guilin.

Corey is a new PAC engineer. He is Chinese but has lived in the US for 12 years. Believe it or not, he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale Illinois - just 10 miles from my home town. The world is so small. To come half way around the world to meet a Saluki.

Corey just started a month ago. We have both been working really hard on the new program and needed a break.

We took a bus to Guilin on Saturday morning and met Scott who I recently met at the Wooden Shoe. Scott and some of his teacher friends were planning to go to a big market in Guilin and shop for tea.

We joined them and had some lunch and did some tea tasting. We learned about the traditional tea ceremony and tried several kinds of Chinese tea. Green tea and Red tea.

Later we climbed a mountain called Diecai Shan and had really good views of Guilin. It was a really beautiful warm day and we enjoyed sitting on top of the mountain talking

At one point, Scott was really relieved to find the toilet. Can't you tell?

There was an aviary (big bird cage) and I made the mistake of buying the food to feed the birds. They attacked me and even sat on my head. :)

The beautiful red and gold bird is a Golden Pheasant. It is a really beautiful and brilliantly colored bird.

Corey made friends with the male peacock who was showing off for the girl peacocks.

Then we were hungry so we all went to a Korean restaurant where you cook all kinds of meat on a grill in the middle of your table. Scott doesn't eat much meat, so he was in heaven!

After that we had a really nice tour of Guilin by night. The Sun and Moon Pagodas are sitting in a lake. They are really beautiful at night. The Moon pagoda is made of wood and has 7 levels. The Sun pagoda is the tallest structure made from copper. To get to it you have to walk through a tunnel under the lake. It is 9 stories high plus one under the water. It is really beautiful.

We walked around the city and another lake at night, but Corey and I were really tired.

Scott let us sleep at his house. He has a really cool apartment in the countryside. It is much bigger than mine and he only pays 600 RMB per month which is about $75. What a bargain! But then again, he is a teacher and doesn't make so much money. But he really has his priorities straight. He has found his home for life in China and never wants to go back to America. I had a great time in Guilin.

The next day we took a boat to Yangshuo down the scenic Li Jiang (Li River)... Stay tuned...

Happy Birthday to the Wooden Shoe!!!

2007-03-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to the Wooden Shoe!!!

Today, March 18th was the one year anniversary of my friend Mike's bar, the Wooden Shoe in Liuzhou. Mike is from Holland. One year ago, he decided to open a dutch bar in Liuzhou. It was very brave of him because Liuzhou isn't a city that has many foreigners and most chinese people are not used to foreign food or beer. But the bar is doing well.

Last night I went to dinner with Mike and some of his friends and tried Big Bone soup and other new Chinese foods. Big Bone soup is cooked with big beef bones. You stick a straw into the inside of the bone and suck out the soup and juices. It is really very tasty.

We celebrated at midnight and again at 6pm which was the official 1 year openning. Contratulations Mike and Rose! We love the wooden shoe.

Here is a link to the wooden shoe's new website. It has a lot of information about Liuzhou and China and lots of links. Check it out.

http://www.woodenshoe.com.cn/

Joel spent most of his free time in the wooden shoe. This picture was taken on Joel's last night in the Shoe. Something is definitely missing now. We miss you Joel!

Terry's Adventures In China - Issue 6

2007-03-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

Xin Nian Kuai Le again!!!
Chinese New Year was February 18th - I know it was almost a month ago. It has been a hell of a month! More bad than good, but that's life.

A lot has happened since Christmas when I last wrote. I came back from the New Year holiday and didn't do much but work. At the end of January, my long time friend, room mate and colleague Joel decided to move back to the US. I decided to move into the city center where there is a bit more going on, so I spent a month searching for a new place to live. I moved into my new apartment just before the Chinese New Year. That was good timing because man do the chinese celebrate the new year. I have never seen so many fireworks in my life.

I spent the Chinese New Year and most of the week long spring festival in Liuzhou. My good friend Ray invited me to celebrate the holiday with him and his family. We went shopping for new clothes, a chinese new years eve tradition. Then took motorcycle taxis to his grandmother's house. We decorated the door for the new year, had a delicious, traditional New Years dinner, and set off fireworks along with the other 1.5 million people in this city. Just before midnight we went to the temple which was truely unforgettable - Monks chanting, people praying, huge fires, burning incense and non-stop FIRE CRACKERS at the stroke of midnight!!!

After we left the temple, there were thousands of people lined up to go to the temple and pray for a the new year. The next morning we climbed Ma'an Shan (horse saddle mountain?) to see the sunrise. There is another chinese tradition which is to pick up sticks on the mountain on Chinese new year which is supposed to bring you wealth for the coming year. I chose not to after seeing people tearing the branches off the few trees next to the path to get their sticks.

On New Years day, I bought a new mobile phone, the Nokia 5500 Sports phone - very cool! It plays music, has a camera and also keeps track of how long you exercise and how far you run or walk. So, the next day, I went for my longest run ever - 2 hours, 3 minutes, 45 seconds. The phone said I ran 20 km which should be about right about 12 miles.

Ray invited me to join him on a trip to the coast to visit some of his former work mates. We explored the fishing village his friend lives in, had a barbecue on the beach, more fireworks of course, watched the local fishermen bringing in a catch of giant jelly fish. They were about 3-4 feet in diameter. Very cool! We spent the next day on her family's fish farm floating in the sea. It was built of wood and even had a floating toilet which we all eventually tried out. We got to see how they raised many kinds of fish, mussels, crabs, etc... then we got to catch and eat them! :)

At the end of the day, I provided some entertainment by falling into the water. Wasn't very funny at the time, especially since I fell in with my new phone and I had no dry warm clothes to change into :( In the end, the phone was ok though :)

That was just the beginning of my trouble with electronics though. A week later, after working all weekend to prepare for a big meeting in Shanghai the following week, and then trying to update this blog, I spilled water on my laptop keyboard. I didn't know that you shouldn't shake a wet laptop to get the water out! So, I not only had to have my mother board, CPU and keyboard replaced, but my hard drive too. They're still trying to recover the data from the old hard drive, but as of now, I've lost all my files, pictures, addresses, etc... Lesson learned, backup your files!

Well, that kind of catches you up on what's been going on in my life, what about yours? Send me an email and let me know.

Till next time...

Terry's Adventures In China - Issue 5

2007-01-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

Xin nian kuai le! (Happy New Year)

Dear Friend's and Family,

I wish you all the best for 2007 (er ling ling qi in chinese). I stayed in China for Christmas and New Year.

China has their own calendar and the chinese new year is in February, but they do recognize the western Christmas and New Year and there were some decorations and a few christmas songs (then again the street sweeping machines play jingle bells and happy birthday all year round, so it could just be a coincidence). SGMW (the company where I am working) held a Christmas party. They asked us Laowai (foreigners) to sing some Christmas carols and do a skit. We were dressed as Santa, Mrs.Santa, Frosty, elves, reindeer, a christmas tree, toy soldiers, etc. We sang traditional christmas songs and even translated some into Chinese. It was a fun evening!

Well, issue 4 was at the beginning of November, so you would think I would have a lot to tell you. We can basically ignore November though because all I did was work. The weather was beautiful and warm and I continued my quest to climb every karst hill in Liuzhou. I also bought a new bicycle. It is really cute. It folds in half and would fit in a car or on a bus or in your office. It was expensive - it cost $40! Of course it only has one gear like most chinese bikes.

The weather in Liuzhou has gotten colder (today it is 13C about 55F, and it has gotten down to 7C or about 45F). In the southern half of China they do not have heating in the houses except for little wall mount air conditioners which kind of heat but not real well. Most people don't have these though, so they are very cold in winter, but they don't complain. They are used to it.

I worked a lot of hours in November and December, and thought I was going to be working at Christmas too, so I didn't plan to go home for Christmas. But our program had some last minute delays and I actually found that I could take some time off at Christmas, so I took 2 weeks to go travel a bit in China. I love spicy food, so I decided to go to Sichuan Provence. One of the few direct flights from LiuZhou goes to Chengdu, the Capital of Sichuan provence. I told some friends I was doing this and they said "we have a friend named Ray who lives in Chengdu, he will show you around. Well, Ray is about the sweetest man I have ever met.

I expected he would meet me in the city somewhere and take me for a tour, help me find a hotel, maybe recommend a few things to do in Sichuan. But, he met me at the airport, took me to his home, spent two days showing me the city, took me to some excellent Sichuan hot pot restaurants. We celebrated Christmas eve having a traditional American Christmas dinner. Ray studied English in college and speaks excellent english. He is a sales manager for a company that sells construction equipment - they are also John Deer reps in China.

He also loves to travel in China, so he arranged to have a business meeting in a city that he knew was very beautiful west of Sichuan called Kangding. On Christmas day he got us bus tickets and off we went. After 5 hours on the bus, we went through a long tunnel and came out on the other side of the mountain. It was amazing! The clouds and mist and fog that seem to be a fact of life in most Chinese cities were gone. The sky was blue and the views of the mountains were fantastic. It was cold, but the scenery was wonderful.

Kangding is inhabited by Tibetan people (near to Tibet but still in Sichuan) and the people are very different. They look different, wear different clothing and have different religion, food and customs.

We did some hiking one day and visited several tibetan monasteries. Saw prayer flags strung on the hill sides, dressed up in local dress to have our photos taken, relaxed in a hot spring, ate a tibetan meal and local barbecue. We also visited some lakes in the mountains and saw snow capped mountains. One of the lakes was covered in ice and made really erie noises when you threw rocks onto the ice. We visited a hot spring on the mountain where the water is 90C and they boil eggs and you eat them while you soak your feet in the water.

Ray found out he had a meeting in Chongqing, a city that I wanted to visit as well, so we took a night bus back, then a train to Chongqing. I believe Ford has a plant there but didn't try to find it. Ray set me up with his friend Nina and her friend Cindy who were also perfect hosts. Chongqing is a very hilly city and I'm told, the largest city in China with about 34 million people. It was very foggy and grey and rainy when I was there, but at night it is lit up beautifully with neon lights. It sits at the intersection of two larger rivers, the Jialing and the Chang jiang (or Yangzi river). The Yangzi river is very famous. According to the Lonely Planet travel guide, it is the longest river in China and the 3rd longest in the world. It has always been famous for the three gorges or steep mountains next to the river with a narrow opening through which the river flows. There is a 3-day cruise down the river which Nina helped me book. Thank you to Nina and Cindy for their help and friendship. I hope we meet again soon.

The three gorges river cruise is very scenic and now very historic because they have just finished building the world's largest dam downstream from the gorges. By 2009, the dam will raise the water level upstream by 175 meters. The dam was finished in 2006, so I wanted to go see the gorges, thinking that it would be the last time before the water levels rose and drowned all the villages and cities that had previously existed at the water's edge. But it was too late. The water has already raised 155 meters with only 20 meters to go. Many villages and temples and thousands of years of history have been drowned. 1.5 million people have been moved to higher ground.

It was the really the wrong time of year to visit as the boat was not heated and it was way too cold to be on deck enjoying the scenery. Many of us caught colds. It was foggy and my pictures didn't turn out very well, but software can do some amazing things, and I bought a book and DVD which shows it before the dam was built. We did stop a few times to visit local temples (many of which have been moved to higher ground) and to take side trips into the little three gorges and mini three gorges tributary rivers. I met some very nice people (chinese and foreigners) and we even celebrated new years eve with a hot pot meal and really good chinese traditional fireworks. Good memories!

I had a bit of an extra adventure at the end as my flight back to Chengdu was cancelled due to fog. I was miserable with a cold and tired. But Ray came to my rescue again helping me sort out a plan to go back to the nearest city an hour away, get a hotel, and take a bus the following day to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei provence, to fly back to Chengdu. Knowing I was sick and being the gentleman that he is, Ray carried my backpack across town to yet another hotpot meal he had arranged with his friends. After that we went to a dance club called MIX and I got to see the young and hip elite of Chengdu having fun chinese style. Not so different to an american club really - not that I go to many of them either.

The next day we all went skiing. I was the only person in our group of 6 that had ever been skiing before. It was quite a trip to get there several hours on buses and a long cable car ride. But finally we saw snow. We rented skis and snowboards and for some it was the first time they had seen snow.

After that, I had a day to rest and recuperate and a day to do some more touring of temples and shopping. Before I went on this trip, I had been on one city bus in Liuzhou. With Ray, I took many city buses every day, took intercity buses to other cities, took a train, car and minivan taxis, motorcycle taxis, and even bicycle taxis. I also have many new favorite Sichuan foods. He gave me many memories that I will never forget, and he made my first travel exerience in China incredibly easy and extremely fun. Thanks Ray!

I returned to Liuzhou and noticably warmer weather. Today the sun is even shining in Liuzhou which is rare. Tomorrow it is back to reality and work.

Leaving Ford in June was the hardest decision I've ever made - but only because I was afraid I would regret it. I hadn't really been happy at Ford since I returned from the UK in 1999 and had a strong desire to travel again. Seeing and experiencing Asia first hand was my dream. I am so happy that I took that step. I just got a note from a friend in the UK saying that my big step inspired him to make a life change of his own - that made my day! I know that others at Ford are facing big decisions about whether to leave or not. I hope that if you have dreams as well, you give serious thought to making them come true. Life is short. Live it to the fullest. Make your dreams come true.

Till next time.
Zai Jian
Terry Pinkerton
Liuzhou China

Terry's Advenures in China - Issue 4

2007-01-08T02:35:00.000-08:00

Wan shang hao (good evening)

I've moved to Gmail. So please add this address to your address book. I hope I haven't missed anybody when I set up my new distribution lists. If you want me to use a different address let me know.

I'm sorry I haven't written for a while. October has been a really busy month here in China. The last time I wrote, my friend's bicycle had just been stolen. I did give her money to buy a new one, the gift made her very happy. Actually, I have kind of adopted her as my little sister (mei mei). I'm her jie jie (big sister). She has just moved in with Joel and I this week to help us with interpreting. More on why we needed an interpreter later.

Joel's wife Jami came over for a month and we were just about to leave for Vietnam on our one week holiday when Joel found out that Jami's China visa was a single entry visa. That meant that if she went to Vietnam, she couldn't get back into China. So, we decided to stay in China for the holiday.
We went to the largest mountain in Guangxi province, Sheng Tang Shan.

It was really nice. Drove up a dirt road for several hours to get to the hotel. From there, it was a two hour climb up thousands of stone steps to the top of the mountain. Steven (our driver) and I got up at 4am and hiked up the mountain in the dark to get to the top for sunrise. It was amazing! We were up above the clouds and we felt as though we were sitting next to God! It was awe inspiring! There are some great pictures on my picasa website. Check it out.

After a couple days at Sheng Tang we went to a hot springs area. It was a very hot day, so we decided to get a hotel with a pool. The water looked very inviting. However, it was fed from the hot springs and not refreshing at all. When it got dark, it did get cool enough to go in the water and then it felt nice. Joel bought a deck of cards and we taught Steven to play "pitch". He caught on very quickly and enjoyed the game.

Next we headed north to an area in the mountains where they farm rice on terraces on the sides of the mountains. This area was very beautiful, even if a little touristy. It was harvest time, so I got to see how they cut the rice and dry it and remove it from the stalks. They work very hard to get a few grains of rice. I did some great hikes through terrace villages. The people were very friendly and the views were fantastic.

Finally, we went back to Yongshuo and did some shopping. I bought a really nice Mah Jongg set in a wooden box and some antique embroidery from the Miao tribes that I want to have framed. We took a tour on a boat on the river which was very nice and I rented a bicycle again and went on another little adventure. I met a farmer and he took me for a little tour of his village. My Chinese is getting a little better and we could hold a very simple conversation. China has many dialects, and I am learning Poutong Hua or Mandarin (the official language of China) and he speaks a local dialect called Guilin Hua. It was very rewarding to have even a simple conversation with a local. At one point, he was trying to convince me that I should backtrack to the big road (da lu) rather than keep riding down the small dirt road (xiao lu) and he started writing Chinese characters in the dusty road. I guess he thought if I could speak the language, I could read it. Reading Chinese is very difficult. It was a great interaction though – a memory I can keep forever.

Alas all vacations end and I went back to work to start my new job – actually the job I was hired for. I am PAC project leader for the second phase of the SGMW engine. It will be built in a city called Qingdao on the coast, north of Shanghai and south of Beijing. I may move there in 9 months or so. It's a real challenge for me, but it should be very interesting. At the moment, it's a ton of work, and have worked almost every day for 4 weeks.

Sadly, our friend and driver Steven has decided to move back to Shanghai. He has been in Liuzhou, away from his family for 2 years and he wanted to go back to be near them. Joel and I really like Steven and he has spoiled us over the past 3 months. We've had some really good times with him – trips, vacations, hiking, shopping, drinking, eating, playing mahjongg and many other things. We all have some great memories of this short time we've known each other.

Steven even gave me my Chinese name – Lin Li Ya. Lin is the family name, which came from my middle name Lynn. Li means beautiful and Ya means elegant. He and all my Chinese friends say it is a really great name. Steven calls me Doctor (like PhD) because he says I am really smart. So I wanted to give him a nickname. I decided to call him baba for daddy since he named me, but he doesn't like that name, especially since he is 4 years younger than me. We will miss him very much! His English skills were invaluable. He did so much more than just drive us around. That is why we have asked my friend Qiufeng to come live with us. She can help us get things done, read things for us and talk to the new driver for us. I'm sure I will learn Chinese a little faster now as I have to do more for myself.

So, the next adventure begins. A week ago, we hired a new car and driver. We met and negotiated with the owners of the car over Chinese dim sum which was great! Then we went to our favorite park one last time with Steven. They just opened a snow garden which is a huge refridgerated building with ice sculptures and a toboggan run and even sledding. I made Steven go sledding with me – he had never done that before, so it was a great last memory of Liuzhou. We also hiked up one of the mountains. It was a wonderful day!

Well, I think that about catches you up on my news from China. I hope you are all well. Love to hear from you. And don't forget to check out my photos and blog.

Zai jian,

Lin Li Ya 林丽雅

(Terry)

Terry's Adventures in China - Issue 3

2006-09-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

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.