I cannot drink warm coffee or tea now that it’s high summer .. too darn hot outside, and sometimes inside when we get here and the air conditioning had not been left on overnight in the office. Nescafe make a nice little gulp-size iced coffee, so I keep some of those in the refrigerator at home.
Monday/ soccer and cereal from South Africa
My early morning ProNutro cereal as well as my soccer* come from South Africa. The honey and banana are my favorite add-ins. Yum.
*The poor North Koreans are not in the same league as Portugal – and I see a steady sifting rain is coming down in Green Point stadium in Cape Town, much the same as it does in Seattle in winter time.
Between the soccer, the remaining jet lag and conference calls to China, I am not having much luck getting into a regular sleeping pattern here! And on top of all that Wimbledon coverage on ESPN2 at 7.00 am in the morning starts today as well – and I see Federer is two sets down in his opening match against Alejandro Falla (Columbia). Uh-oh.
Thursday/ all-hands meeting
Thursday – so, mercifully, the week is drawing to a close. We have an all- hands meeting this afternoon which is a break for me: I get to just sit and listen, and not stand up front, trying to control a raucous discussion with a room full of 20 people.
I’m going to Hong Kong with three colleagues from work, so we will see how that works out. I suspect my way of exploring the city is very different from theirs. I will join them for a big dinner at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, but it’s good to explore the offerings from local restaurants, or just eat in the hotel where they also offer a good variety of Asian cuisine. Also, I tend to steer clear of the big touristy places, and just walk around on my own. I work with great people, but I already spent 12 hours every day this week with you. On the weekends, I need some ‘me’ time :).
Sunday/ breakfast at the Sheraton
A few of us treated ourselves to a buffet breakfast at the Sheraton Hotel close by – expensive by Dameisha meal standards – but still very affordable at $20.
I just had some scrambled egg, toast and some shumai. (Gobbled up the first one of the two little dumplings in my bowl before I took the picture).
We went to the Dameisha beach afterwards. Some people were out on the beach, but it’s only slowly warming up. Highs today reached only 60 ºF (15 ºC), with the sun is struggling to come out. We may go to a resort close by where we live this afternoon with a cable car that runs up the mountains with a panoramic view.
Saturday night/ rough translation
Here’s the cute translation into English, from the back of the coconut coffee bag. (Would have posted it yesterday, but had to wait until I got home so that I could take a high-resolution picture). Note the creative breaks in the words T-his (wow) and su-mmer, and – the taste will be better when it is hot drink in winter. Gotcha! :).
Saturday/ coffee, with coconut
Saturday morning and hey! we saw the sun shine this morning on the way in to work with the bus. We got a little reprieve and left the apartments at 7 am instead of at 6.30 am.
The local Daya Bay team is mostly back on site – they were out all week, but work today and tomorrow. One of them brought in coconut-flavored instant coffee for us (picture of bag that contains packets). The US team has the day off tomorrow, thankfully. A really busy schedule of system design workshops start on Monday. I am facilitating the discussions for my team. We spent this week getting the all our ducks in a row, and I think we are ready. I am sure we will find out !
Tuesday/ flowers & mandarins
Thursday/ at Hong Kong airport
My flight has been delayed by 6 hours, but that’s OK. It is so nice to be able to go home for a week. Wednesday night, we stayed at the upmarket Marriott Hong Kong Sky City hotel, close to the airport last night.
My colleagues, carnivorous Americans that they are, couldn’t wait to sink their teeth into a cheeseburger in the hotel’s restaurant. They talked about it with some of our Chinese colleagues already as we were leaving Daya Bay. The conversation went as follows : ‘You should not kill animals and eat them, you should eat vegetables’. Response : ‘Oh, we kill the animals to save the vegetables!’. Oh boy : ).
I had plans of my own : grabbed a sandwich in the hotel lobby and went out to explore the city with the help of the MTR subway system. I will post a few night-time pictures of Hong Kong when I get home. Night time there offers spectacular cityscapes. At one point the train went through an out-worldly forest of 50 story-high apartment buildings. The airport is out on Lantau island west of Hong Kong island, and it takes a while to get to Kowloon or Hong Kong and so it was already 10pm by the time I got there, and most of the stores were closing. I should be able to come back to Hong Kong several times, though.
Tuesday/ work, dinner
Hey, Tuesday is one day closer to Thursday. By now the bus ride in to work offers few surprises, but I still see many more ‘out of place things’ than perhaps I would see in the USA on the way to work : a kid that seems way too young to be bicycling on his own on the busy road; an electrical control panel door left open on the side of a building, a driver doing a risky move.
We had dinner last night at a new (for us) little restaurant close to our apartments, and the food was excellent: pork on a bone with Szechuan spices (I’m still careful to bite too big into food with these), eggplant strips with garlic, noodles in a broth (got to have those!) and TsingTao beer. The tab? A scant 43 yuan ($6) each. I’m told the cleaning lady for our apartment gets $6 for two hours’ work.
On a Saturday morning we can walk down towards the beach and buy a delicious omelet-like breakfast on the sidewalk by the beach for 50 American cents. The radiant heater-fan combination in our apartment was all of $12 at Walmart. Of course, a cheap currency helps exports (as my dad told us many times at the dinner table when we were kids!), but it also makes the money in the Great Piggy Bank of China (by some estimates it was $4.3 trillion in 2009) worth a lot less.
Wednesday/ birthday cake!
The birthday cake for a team member was very nice! A very light cake with frosting and lots of fruit.
By the way : dessert for a Chinese meal is usually a fruit platter with melon and cantaloupe and the like, in lieu of ice cream, pie or pastries.
Sunday/ McDonalds
We walked down to the beach where the area’s McDonalds is. (There is also a KFC but no Starbucks).
My McDonalds breakfast consisted of orange juice, hash browns and a spicy grilled chicken McMuffin.
The Dameisha area has some very nice beaches, but it’s quiet at the moment since it’s winter and not tourist season.
Some of the buildings are really run-down or even deserted, others are brand new. One gets the impression everywhere that construction happens in spasms and not always well-planned.
Saturday/ Walmart in Shenzhen
Well – what can I say? I was Alice, and Walmart was a wonderland of Chinese culture and department store marketing of food, houseware, electronics and clothing. There we were, 15 of us dropped off with a little bus, looking for household items and food for our apartments in Dameisha. And did we load up that bus!
Walmart being what it is, the choices were cheap and enormous – and of course, they had Kraft branded food products and Coke & Pepsi, but there were still some surprises. Dinner plates were hard to find. Chinese food is served up in bowls. T-shirts were not plentiful at all.
The food was the most fascinating, from the ‘wet area’ where one could catch one’s own super-fresh seafood (yes, right there in the store, the way the staff did at the restaurant the other night), to teas of all kinds, milk tea, a limited selection of good coffee, candy, but relatively few chocolate products, noodles of all kinds, root vegetables, fresh ginger, eggplant and durian.
Thursday/ team dinner
The team went to a nice restaurant and boy! did we have a sampling of diverse dishes. The picture shows our dinner (fish, jumbo shrimp) being ‘caught’ in the wet area which has many, many more seafood items than just lobster, to choose from, for one’s dinner plate. Project manager Jeff was given the honor of eating the eye of the fish. He was completely game! LOL
The fishy stuff aside, the signature dish of the restaurant is pigeon (a nice gamey taste, a little like duck). They also had lamb ribs, which I suspect might be hard to find in Chinese restaurants. Other items were green beans, spicy cucumber, soup, a warm corn ‘smoothie’ (nice), oolong tea and Tsingtao beer (a standard pale lager, very nice).
Thursday/ another lunch
Chicken with bok choy (Chinese cabbage), and green beans with red chili peppers.
That’s rice bread in the bowl with a dash of soy sauce, and the white grape juice has bits of grape in it.
I wanted to take a picture of the pig’s ear strips on the plate of the guy sitting next to me, but did not. That would have been rude.
Wednesday/ lunch in the cafeteria
I’m just back from the cafeteria where we had our first lunch, and what an experience! I ended up with (clockwise on the photo) steamed rice, beef and beans, spicy chicken and green peppers, bean sprouts-corn-red chili peppers (do not bite!), orange juice drink. All were delicious. No forks or spoons to (ch)eat with. I will have to learn to use chopsticks.