Day 8

This morning was our first morning in Shanghai.  Our hotel offers a complimentary breakfast included in the price of the room, so there is no spending money at McDonalds, or buying breakfast foods from a supermarket.  The buffet is very nice; there is a good mix of both Chinese and Western dishes (it is quite strange still to have sweet boiled lettuce in the morning though).  After breakfast this morning we visited SMIC in Shanghai.  I did the company briefing for this one.  They are a semiconductor fabrication company, relatively new (founded in 2001) and growing quickly.  Recently (last 2 months) they switched CEO's, so this is a bit of a unique time for them.  Dr. Chang, the founder and a Christian stepped down, and Dr. Wang succeeded him.  Many in the company are Christians, including those that talked to us, however Dr. Wang is not.  The company is not officially "Christian" but the atmosphere is certainly suggestive of Christian ideals and behavior.  SMIC is quite impressive really.  They have created a housing community for their workers, complete with a K-12 school, restaurants, stores and other necessities.  It's really quite the place, and a good environment to work in.  We didn't get to tour the plant, because the area they usually let visitors see was unavailable.  I was really disappointed at that, because it would have been awesome to see the inside of a semiconductor foundry.  The discussion really didn't get very technical for us engineers, we had questions that we couldn't ask the PR guy or the assistant, but the business aspect of the company was still interesting.

We got lunch from a place that was kind of like a worker's mess hall.  The food was ok, but it was rather low quality.  The meat had all sorts of bones in it, some of the "meat" was just breaded bone, but it filled us up alright.  There was a weird dish that looked, tasted and felt like little cubes of fat.  I didn't partake much of that.  It was horrible.  It's always nice to sit next to the one guy on the trip who doesn't like vegetables.  It's really mystifying, but it's great because you can have his food.  He says he takes a multivitamin, but I'm betting he gets scurvy at some point in his life.

After lunch we visited Comnex, a manufacturer of LED systems.  They build solutions primarily in the signals industry (lights for cars and buses); in fact there most profitable products are the signals for U.S. school buses.  When we first arrived they brought us to their showroom, which had four walls full of blinking, bright LED lights.  They have quite a variety.  We then toured the various stages of production for any given solution, from pretesting components to final product assembly and testing.  They use both automated and manual methods, because like I said before the labor in China is cheap (why pay for an expensive robot, when people will do the job?).  Emma and Ellen were our guides to the plant and Fe? explained much of the process to us.  He was only two years out of school with a bachelor's degree, but was a very important part of the company.  He went to school and learned about almost everything that the company does, he is a very good fit.  Arriving at Comnex, we noticed a sign welcoming Distinguished Guests from Calvin College; we never did meet them though.  The people at Comnex were very gracious, and provided for us very well.  Nearly every company we have visited has fed us well, and the excellent snacks at Comnex were no exception.  I really enjoyed my time there, and at the end they even gave us parting gifts of mugs for each of us.

After arriving at the hotel in the evening we set out for a late dinner.  I went with the Jens, VanDrunens, Ben, Joe and Amanda.  We decided on a hotpot place.  You order what's pretty much a bowl of soup, then meat and vegetables, which you put in the bowl to cook, in that order.  The bowl is heated by a small stove-like apparatus, and when the meat has cooked sufficiently, you pick it out, and dip the food in a sauce which you can pick.  You pick the sauce much in the same fashion that you might at Mongolian Barbeque in Grand Rapids, just by adding a mixture of them to a small bowl.  The meal was excellent, and afterwards we shared tea and kiwi milkshakes for dessert.  Ben and Joe shared a kiwi one, as well as the Jens; Amanda and I had a tea shake, and so did the VanDrunens.  It was pretty good, kind of strange to taste green tea ice cream though.

The rest of the party went back to the hotel after dinner, but Joe and I decided to walk around a bit.  The night before, I and another group of guys had gone to the river, so Joe and I chose to walk the other way.  As soon as we were free of the street vendors things got much quieter and more peaceful.  We walked for an hour or so, just taking in the sights and some pictures.  Joe had said earlier in the trip that his family had been missionaries in Nicaragua and he knew some Spanish; I asked him if we could speak in Spanish for the rest of the evening, so we did.  It was good practice for the both of us, and quite a bit of fun to try and work around things we could not remember how to say.  Plus, we doubted many Chinese knew Spanish (not so useful in Asia).  Shanghai is quite beautiful at night and there are many lights.  I wish we had more self-directed learning sometimes; the company meetings, though interesting, take up quite a bit of time.

We have another big day tomorrow, visiting two GM sites.  Goodnight from temperatures that are finally reasonable and not bone chilling.  And by the way, the last picture is of some Wall-E-like fire hydrants.