Day 13 (3)

Day 13 (2)

Day 13

We were able to sleep in this morning and only got up at 8:30am.  We are provided one morning of breakfast during our two mornings here and Marshall and I planned on using it this morning.  Unfortunately the breakfast ended at 9:00am and we didn't know that.  We hit the streets to find some food instead.  There were many street vendors, and we found a shop that had fried egg with pepperoni on it, which you put into a crispy bread shell.  The man put some spicy sauce on it too.  It was a very interesting and tasty meal.

After breakfast we all headed to the tomb of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.  His life's work was to unify China, and though he didn't succeed in his lifetime, he is honored both by communists and nationalists for his efforts.  The grounds, which are really a national park, are expansive and include his mausoleum, a museum, several scenic areas including a Ming dynasty tomb site and plenty of shops.  All around are rolling hills filled with trees and mountains too.  It reminded me of Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains quite a bit: both the smoky look and the similar topography.  The mausoleum is quite the monument.  The path to it slopes upwards the whole way until you arrive at the stairs.  There are three different structures with similar blue roofs on the way up, punctuated by flights of stairs.  Then finally there is a massive set of stairs, which some of the guys raced up, which leads to the mausoleum site and rear gardens.  There is a large statue of the doctor and behind it in a circular room with a high ceiling, no pictures allowed, is the actual tomb/box/sarcophagus.  We headed down the many flights of stairs to go to the museum.  Our allotted time to see the whole complex was two hours, which wasn't nearly enough.  We saw plenty though still.  On the way to the bottom, Kurt and I were stopped by a young lady for a picture (this time I actually got a picture on my camera as well).

Moments after that though, my favorite part of the trip came.  A little boy was descending the steps with his parents and when they walked in front of the bench we were on, his mother encouraged him to say the A, B, C's for us.  He counted to ten (kind of) a few times and sang the A, B, C song for us.  He might have been the cutest little kid I have seen so far.  There are quite a number of them though, in China.  I was able to quickly turn on my camera when he started, so I have video of the whole thing, in HD!  That excited me most.  It would be prohibitive to post the video on the blog, but I'll probably put it on YouTube when I get back in the States and link to it from the blog (as well as the other videos I've taken).  The boy had on a shirt that said something to the effect of, "The giraffe openned[sic] the forest to the party!"  He and his parents were pretty cool (the mum spoke English pretty well).

When we had completed our descent to the main level, we hopped aboard a choo-choo train like shuttle to go to the museum.  However, the train took us to the entrance of the park then left us.  Amanda, Tim and Kurt took a car-ride with some guy that was at the bottom (taxi maybe?) to get to the museum, but since we only had 30 minutes left the rest of us decided to wait for another shuttle that would take us to the top.  We waited for the group to assemble, and then headed back to the hotel in the bus.  I forgot to mention earlier, but we're staying in a traditional Chinese inn.  It's a very interesting place with larger halls and corridors indoors.  Though it's not open to the outside in most places, there are enough openings to make the inside part (except for the rooms) quite chilly because it's not heated.

Back at the hotel, a group of us assembled to find some lunch and visit a Confucian temple/teaching site nearby.  Yang, Nana, Luke, Brennan, Sarah, Will, Anna, Julie and I found a restaurant that served a dumpling with pork inside.  Most of the rest of the group had eaten it before on the trip, but it was new to me, and like most foods it tasted very good.  We also had some tofu and ham strips.  Don't think tofu slabs, but more like spaghetti tofu.  Not bad at all.  After our lunch we hit the Confucian temple.

The temple required ¥30 to get in, but it was worth it.  In the past it had been a center of Confucian study and place of worship.  While we were there, a woman was even praying in one of the main buildings.  There were two traditionally styled buildings in the complex with large amounts of jade art and pictures made in jade.  The architecture in places like this, and the Forbidden City, is always very beautiful and I can't get enough of it.  It's all very intricate and ornate.

There was an elementary school right next door, so we watched them for a bit having recess.  Basketball is pretty popular there and there were a number of kids playing it.

We walked around the city for a while after that.  Luke and I had gotten separated from Brennan and Yang, so we just kind of wandered.  There was a food market nearby, so we went to check that out.  It was quite the place, full of every kind of food and things that shouldn't be eaten.  There were pig snouts and tails, whole ducks with respective parts, nuts and candies of all kinds.  Strangely, there were many infomercial-like booths around.  It was like a trade-fair with mops and dusters being shown along-side window washing kits and massive chunks of unidentifiable meat.  After our market foray we headed back to the hotel for some journaling, reading and writing before dinner.

Guests joined us for dinner tonight.  Professor Si's younger brother, his wife and their two year-old son ate with the engineers and predominately women's tables, respectively.  The third table was staffed by Professor VanDrunen and consisted of mostly the other guys in the group.  As an engineering student I sat with Mr. Si, along with the other engineering students, Prof. Jen and Yang for translation.  He spoke some English, and I'm sure his writing and reading are excellent, but largely we needed Yang to translate.  At some points our discussion became a little too technical for Yang's Chinese (though he's native there are words he doesn't know, just like in English there are words we don't know), but he did a fine job overall.  Mr. Si is our Professor Si's younger brother; he is a mechanical/electrical engineer, working for ZTE a telecom company in China (we will visit them tomorrow).  He has a master's degree and did his thesis on the mechanics of robotics (that was the general translation).  It was a nice dinner and despite the language barrier we were able to ask some pretty decent questions.  Yang even learned a bit about 3 and 4G networks (third and fourth generation wireless networks) in China.

After dinner there was a playful chicken fight on the sidewalk between Tim and Julie, and Kurt and Marshall.  A bunch of Chinese people gathered around to watch, it was quite funny.  Before that Julie (the smallest) carried Tim (the largest) on her back; it was pretty impressive.  Then some of us called a taxi and headed to a part of the old city wall.  We went to a part that the Japanese had fought to take when they massacred and raped the city in the years before WWII.  Though we arrived a bit late, the people in the gatehouse agreed to let us in for an extended period of time at reduced cost.  It was dark, but there was still plenty to see, and photos to take.  We explored a bit in the dark and took plenty of pictures.  Part of the way through, I realized that the manual setting I had been using for longer exposures was still set to manual focus from earlier when Cedric was using it.  I don't think it affected many pictures, and I changed it to autofocus right away, so the rest of them were a bit sharper.  We called another taxi to take us back to the hotel after taking a few pictures by the river.

There was an internet café nearby that someone wanted to use, so we dropped them off before going inside the hotel to play Rook then go to bed.  Again, astonishingly, I did very poorly at it.  Amanda was my partner and we won only one round.  We only played five rounds then separated to get our stuff packed in order to be ready for checkout in the morning.  That's pretty much all she wrote.  Tomorrow brings a company meeting (ZTE) and then a train to Hangzhou, where we will stay until Monday.  I think we will have free internet access there, so there might be quite a few blog posts where there had been none for a few days.  Sorry about that.

Good night from Nanjing.

Day 12

Today brought two more company visits: with Kotoni, a shoe manufacturer, and Bristol Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical giant.  We had to arise early in order to check out and be on the road with enough time to get to Kotoni.  It turned out that it was mostly unnecessary to leave that early (we arrived an hour early) but you never know with Shanghai traffic.  The shoe manufacturing facility was very interesting.  They do much of the work by hand, aided in part by machines.  We met with Ernie, an Italian shoemaker/designer and with the son of the company owner, Chris Liao.  Kotoni makes shoes for a variety of companies and lines, including Dockers, some other cheaper brands as well as some like Kenneth Cole and other lines priced at $300+.  For the most part, the shoes are made via assembly line with hand stitching and assembly.  Machines were used only for jobs like pressing the bottom of the shoe on, and for material cutting.  Another old Italian shoe designer showed us around the factory.  Both of the Italians had previously made their own lines of shoes in Italy, and the older one had even owned his own factory.  They knew quite a bit about shoes.  Actually, whenever we walked past, everyone would be looking at our shoes; they are definitely shoe people there.  My Dockers say 'Made in China' so it's possible that they were made at the plant we visited today.  My shoes aren't made of 100% nice leather with a leather insole, which is what they specialize with here, so mine might have been made elsewhere.

Bristol Myers Squibb provided us with food in their worker's cafeteria.  They were very good to us and had a nice conference room setting.  I had been looking forward to BMS for pretty much the entire trip because it relates so closely to Chemical Engineering.  Unfortunately the place we visited was a packaging facility that didn't actually make the drugs or have a local R&D lab.  We met with a Hong Li, a non-scientist.  It was interesting to hear about the business aspects of the pharmaceutical industry in China, and BMS's role, however I left a bit disappointed.  I asked a couple of questions about the process, "How many chemical reactions does a typical drug go through before it's finished?" and "What suppliers do you get your raw materials from?"  He really couldn't answer either of them for me.  I realize that he was not involved in either the development or the process, but I still wasn't satisfied by his general supply chain answer.  He couldn't even give me an order of magnitude (1, 10, 100…) for the number of reactions a typical drug goes through.  I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the visit, but in general, most of the places we've been to have been much on the business side in presentation content.  Business is very intricately tied to engineering, so I'm definitely still able to learn a lot.  Probably a lot more than I expected to about business, which has been good.

We caught our train at 6:20pm after the meeting.  We were plenty on-time this time, which was good.  It was only two hours long and the time went quickly.  In Nanjing we left the airport and saw a musical fountain and hotel mounted laser system.  Nanjing is much smaller than both Shanghai and Beijing.  The district that our hotel is in is older with smaller shops and less of a night life.  Our room looks over a river though, which is quite beautiful.  We took a walk this evening and saw some shops.  There are quite a few along the waterfront and we had a good time taking pictures and that sort of thing.

It was a long day, so I'm going to get some sleep now.  Tomorrow we visit Sun Yat Sen's tomb and have some self-directed time.  Night, night.

Day 11

Church this morning was at Hengshan Church, which means 'eternal mountain' in Chinese.  We had our headphones again, and the English section where we sat was in the balcony.  The back balcony extended along the sides of the sanctuary as well, so the second level could hold quite a few people.  After church a man came up to us, I was standing next to Tim who is 2.07 m tall, and remarked in very broken English about Tim's height.  That is becoming a very common conversation starter for pretty much anyone Tim meets.  We talked a bit, but his English was very difficult to understand because it was mixed with Chinese.

For lunch we found a food court near our hotel.  In Chinese food courts there is pretty much no place to sit and eat because of all the people.  There is a cashier that you order from, but it's all in Chinese, with only barcodes to identify the foods.  We had to order with the cards that were by the sample plates because it would have been impossible otherwise.  When we finally ordered and got our food there was still no place to stand, so we walked around a bit looking and finally found a place, standing in the middle of the busy, crowded room, along a column with a small ledge for the trays.

The dishes the food was on were large and made of metal, insulated by a chunk of wood; they were not to be picked up and held for long.  Three of us ordered the same thing, some pork with vegetables, but Will had noodles.  Our dishes came with a bowl of rice that we could place some food on to bring to our mouths.  No such luck for Will.  That might have been the most awkward meal to eat ever.  He had to bend down and grab noodles, with chopsticks, each time he wanted to eat anything.  We're getting good with the little buggers now, but not that good.  Lunch was good, and afterwards we went back to the hotel for a bit of writing and reading for our journals.

Now I know you're not supposed to venture out into the unknown alone, but that's exactly what I did.  You can tell that since I'm writing this that everything turned out ok, so don't worry about that.  Marshall was feeling pretty tired, so he wanted to rest and pack his clothes for our travel tomorrow.  Initially at about 1:15pm, I set out to find English corner in People's Park.  That's where you can go to speak in English with others in order to practice.  I didn't really know where it was, but I set out anyway.  There are many nice parks nearby, so I went through one and took some pictures.  From that park, I could see the People's Park, so I headed on over there.  On my way there I heard some English: "Hallo, excuse me, how are you doing?"  I turned around, and there were three Chinese, a guy and two girls.  I started walking and talking with them; I can't remember what it was about, but we just made the normal chitchat.  We talked about where we were from, what we were doing in Shanghai, that sort of thing.  Eventually they asked me where I was going, and I said nowhere, just looking for English corner.  They were going to a tea presentation.  You go and taste several types of teas, and there is a lady who tells you about the history of the tea.  When I asked about price, they said it was free, so I decided to go with them, suspecting a scam, being very cautious.  We walked for a bit and then entered what looked like an old mall and went upstairs.  We went through a glass door, then into a small room with an ornate wooden table, made out of the root structure on a tree.  It was varnished and very smooth.  We sat on small benches and eventually the lady came in.  She spoke only Chinese, but they translated a bit for me.  Right away there was a menu, and boy was I surprised at the prices--that there actually were prices.  There were many teas, but they cost money.  Apparently there was also a sitting fee that everyone had to pay, just for being there.  I kind of stammered some things about wanting to speak English and going to the English corner, and telling them that I had no money, but I did stay and had one kind of tea with them.  I guess I thought they tricked me into coming and spending money trying teas, when they had said it was free.  So after trying one tea, a ginseng tea, I made it clear that I would only be having that one tea, and then I would leave.  They wanted to stay, but they had the lady give me a bill for the tea.  I cost me 79 RMB for the tea and sitting fee.  That's pretty close to $12 that I was not planning on spending.  I didn't want to be impolite, but I also didn't want to stay and have more tea, and even still I wasn't sure if it was a scam or not, so I just left.  The tea was fantastic though I will admit; it was sweet in the throat and smelled wonderful.  The smell and taste stayed with me and in my sinuses for quite a while.  I'm have no idea if it was a scam or not, but the people were very nice and I did enjoy talking with them.

I made my way back from the tea place, to the park where I had been.  Kind of aimlessly, I wandered through it, taking some pictures and just looking at the people.  There were large groups of men gambling and playing cards along a small pond.  People were playing games, including badminton sans net, as well as just sitting around talking.  The park was very beautiful and had trees, rocks and water everywhere.  I came across a very large gathering of older people with signs in Chinese.  They were all talking with each other and showing pictures.  I knew from our GM meeting (we talked about much more than just cars there) that they were parents trying to find dates and arranged marriages for their children.  People I talked to later said that it is a new thing, for the parents to find mates for their younger, working children.  They were in Chinese, but they showed birth date, height, weight and interests that they had, usually accompanied by the salary that they earn.  Apparently it's not too common; there were many people there though.

I kept walking for a bit, taking pictures and just looking around at everything and everyone.  Inadvertently I found a sort of lover's lane.  It was a small stone path leading up to some rock outcroppings that I thought looked cool.  I left there pretty hastily.

Eventually I found English park.  There was a very tell tale sign: Cedric's dreadlocked head.  There were some other Calvin students there talking, so I walked up slowly, just kind of looking around.  A Chinese man came up to me and asked me if I spoke English.  I replied, "Yes" and he asked me where I was from.  We kind of kept talking for a while, just the two of us, until some other people walked up, and formed a circle.  That's what English corner is, people form groups and just talk about things.  As the American, native English speaker, I was the center of attention.  The talk went from me back to the Chinese, then to me and back and forth and back and forth.  I think I talked there for several hours.  There were men and women, young and old.  At the beginning a child came up a said hi.  I really wanted to talk to him, but the man I was talking to would not stop, so the boy walked back to his parents eventually.  We talked about so many things.  Usually when a person first came to the group, they would ask me about why I was in China and for how long, and then they would ask what I am studying.  I brought up my Chinese sister and uncle, and they were very interested in that.  At one point one of the men who spoke the best English said, "So she's just a banana."  I asked him what he meant by that, and he said yellow on the outside like the Chinese and white on the inside.  Katie however is not just a banana; she's a very beautiful one-of-a-kind banana.  I really enjoyed talking with so many people; it was very new to me and very exciting.  They came from all walks of life, and two of them were even chemists working in the pharmaceutical industry in Shanghai.  There were some very interesting personalities there: an economics professor, a small soft spoken lady, a taller well spoken man, a loud boisterous skinny man, two young girls an old GM factory manager and some young professionals.  When I left, there were four Chinese left, and at one point there had been probably 12 gathered around me.  I could not have enjoyed this afternoon more.  A little after four o'clock I told the rest of them that I had to go for dinner.  I didn't know what time it was, but I didn't want to check my watch and risk being impolite.  Though it was four, and I could have kept talking I decided to head back and see what Marshall was up to.

On the way back, two more Chinese walked up beside me and started talking to me.  They wondered if I was Russian, but I said, no, that I was American.  They apparently were in Shanghai on holiday also.  We only talked very briefly, but the tall man and short woman were very nice to me.  It's really great to be able to talk to people there and not have them sell you things.  It really is.  After leaving them, I headed for the underpass that would take me to East Nanjing road.  Right before I crossed the street, four students said hi to me.  I said hi back and kept walking, but then turned and decided to talk to them for a bit.  They were from a Qingdao, right along the Yellow Sea, between Shanghai and Beijing.  They were university students.  There were a brother and younger sister, and what I assume were friends who were a couple.  The couple was studying English as well as the older brother was also studying economics.  The younger sister was studying traditional Chinese medicine.  We talked for a bit about what we were doing in Shanghai.  The four of them were visiting the sibling's older sister who worked there.  Like most of the other Chinese I've met, they were nothing but hospitable.  They mentioned that tea show like the first group did.  That kind of made me think the tea house thing was a scam because both groups had gotten my attention and not me theirs.  However, I asked Yang over dinner and he said that it was actually a real thing, and even more common and cheaper in the south where he was from.

My final Chinese contact on the way back to the hotel was a young woman who accosted me briefly.  She started out very similarly to the others, then called me handsome, which made me immediately suspect that something was up, because let's be honest…  She asked if I would like her to accompany me for the day.  Luckily I politely declined, citing a dinner I had to be at, which really was an honest excuse.  I learned an important lesson today: trust no one who calls you handsome.

Our group had dinner in the hotel's private room.  There were three guests: a couple who was teaching English in China (one Calvin grad) and a business man who helped businesses move to China to access the market here.  There were some good conversations with two interesting different perspectives about living and working in China.

Tomorrow will be busy as we have to check out early and be ready for a business meeting.  Bristol Myers Squibb is the second company and probably the most interesting for me.  It will certainly be the most relevant in light of my internship in Germany this summer.

Good night.  By the way, I don't have time to proof read these much, so sorry about any errors in grammar or spelling.  I am trying to limit stream-of-consciousness writing though, attempting to follow some kind of chronological order.  Also, sorry for the long post, but it was an exciting day.

Day 10

This morning we had some breakfast in the hotel, and then went to a tailor/fabric market.  I had been taken for a ride in the last market, so this time I was going to haggle much better.  I bought a wool coat for myself with my birthday money, and some other things for the family.  I got much better deals this time and am pretty happy with my buys.  I also got a set of six chopsticks; I'm growing quite fond of using them, so I'll have to try and continue to use them in the States.  Haggling is really quite fun; some of the prices they give you are ridiculous and it feels pretty good to get them to go lots cheaper.  For instance, the lady I bought chopsticks from today offered them for ¥140, which is about $20.  They were nice, but not worth near that much.  I got her down to ¥40 by walking away and insisting on the price (more like $5.70).  Like I said, I've paid too much in the past, but I think I did ok today.  After we got some buys, we headed back to the street to go home.  There was a lady making, tortilla/egg/vegetable things that folded like omelets, for ¥4; they were really tasty.  Street vendors make some of the best food around here, and it's usually pretty cheap.  You would pay a lot more than $0.56 for the thing I had, back home.

We took the subway back to our hotel.  The subway in Shanghai is priced based on your destination, which is different than Beijing, which was ¥2 no matter where you went.  It's pricier in Shanghai, but still very much the cheapest way to travel.  When we arrived at East Nanjing Street, where our hotel is located, we emerged into some of the biggest crowds that I have seen since arriving in the Middle Kingdom.  There were people everywhere, much closer to my expectations of the place.

At about 2pm, Will, Marshall and I decided to go to the Yu Garden.  Instead of taking the metro, we walked, taking a very circuitous route.  We got to see quite a bit of the city and the many, many people that are here.  For some reason there seems to be more people than usual in Shanghai today.  Probably because it is a Saturday.  We walked along the river for a bit before cutting in and going through a small park in the middle of the city.  To get there we walked right through a construction zone and no one paid any mind to us or the other Chinese on their way through.  That reminds me, on the way to the market, we saw an apartment complex being ripped down, not 20 feet from the road, by a front end loader.  It was kind of ridiculous.

Eventually we made it to the garden, through a packed skinny alley complex featuring the traditional roof style and structure.  It had been repurposed to hold many vendors and stores.  The garden set us back ¥30 but it was entirely worth it.  The buildings had been restored, and had been some sort of large house/palace in the past.  It was full of beautiful stones, stonework, plants, pools with fish, trees and even a random orange cat.  The place was quite expansive, and apparently we bought our ticket, and entered at the exit; we kind of went against the flow for about half of the time.  There were many Europeans.  We haven't met many Americans yet, most white people speak other languages, that I've seen (there was a large delegation of French people at the fabric market this morning, many of whom were not haggling, and getting taken to town by the Chinese prices).  There were even small water falls in the garden and it was full of pulchritudinous old pagoda-like buildings with the old style roofing.  We spent quite a bit of time there before walking back to our hotel by another way.  This time we took a very indirect route, and I had no idea where we were until we hit Nanjing road.  Marshall had the map and apparently he knew where we were the whole time.  Before going all the way back, we grabbed a bite to eat at Yoshinoya again.  This time they gave us disposable wooden chopsticks, quite a bummer.  At this point we were pretty close to the hotel.  I was taking a picture, and Marshall and Will walked off far enough that I couldn't find them.  I assumed they went to the hotel, so I went back myself, but the room was empty.  They got back a bit later, and apparently they had gotten stopped by some Chinese who wanted to talk to them, which is usually pretty great, unless they're saying, "DVDs, watch, bag?"  This time however, they talked for a while about normal stuff, then when they thought they were in the scam-clear, out came the infamous, "We're art students, would you like to buy our art?"  That actually happens quite often; Marshall and I even had it in the Forbidden City.  Hopefully we can talk to some Chinese strings free tomorrow though at English corner.  We'll see.

Tonight we went to an acrobat show in the Ritz Carlton, where the U.S. presidents stay when they visit Shanghai.  It was incredible.  They were balancing plates on their noses and doing all sorts of contortions while balancing on their hands and feet.  Jumping and rolling and spinning were all done in many different ways and extremely amazingly each time.  A magician did some card tricks, and there was a very humorous knife throwing skit.  A bunch of the women used sticks connected by a string to do pretty amazing things with hourglass shaped objects, spinning, catching and throwing them.  There were a couple of pair performances; the two spun around on ropes that were lifted up and down at various points.  It was like they were flying sometimes.  The last act involved many instances of persons being catapulted into the air using a teeter-totter like apparatus.  They landed on each other's shoulders and at one point there were three people standing on the man on the bottom.  Each performer was in the absolute best condition a person could be, from the men to the women.  The ladies probably weighed around 100 lbs, but I bet they could each lift several times more weight than I can.  I could not be more impressed by their performance; had they allowed taping or pictures I would have taken full advantage of my camera.  I suppose I could have snuck a few, but the effort they put into their acts made me reconsider.

Altogether it was a very full day today.  Tomorrow we meet for worship at 10am and have the rest of the day for self-directed learning.  It should be a blast.  Buenas noches.

Day 9 (2)