Tuesday/ iced coffee please

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

Directions at one of the T-junctions on the way to the office in our shuttle bus. We go left here, to Da Peng village.

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

Shumai is a traditional Chinese dumpling  served in dim sum*; it’s essentially a pork and mushroom dumpling. It’s steamed in a wooden basket like the one on my plate.
*Dim sum is the collective name for a southern Chinese cuisine which involves a wide range of light dishes served alongside Chinese tea.

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.

Angels and a sparse crowd on the main beach in Dameisha. It’s hard to see where the sea meets the sky in the hazy distance. The Sheraton hotel is close by and has its own stretch of sand just for its guests.

 

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

This beautiful flower and mandarin tree arrangement is at the entrance of our offices, in anticipation of the start of the Chinese New Year.
I believe the mandarins will be put to good use (eaten) afterwards, and not be discarded.

 

Thursday/ at Hong Kong airport

No, I did not eat too much Chinese food while I was here! .. the photo is a reflection from a polished work of art at the 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.

Here’s a red bean milkshake that I had at the Silver Dragon restaurant in Hong Kong  on Saturday (very nice !).

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.

Let’s see: orange, strawberry, starfruit (carambola) on top, and the white fruit with the pink skin and the little black seeds in, is dragon fruit (pitaya).

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.

Entrance to the Walmart Supercenter at 2001 Xiangmei Road in the Futian District in Shenzhen. The Chinese characters say Wò’ērmǎ (‘Walmart’) Shopping Plaza 沃尔玛购物广场 Wò’ērmǎ gòuwù guǎngchǎng.
Hazeline shampoo for lovely luscious black hair. The Chinese characters at the bottom says something like ‘Say goodbye to tangled hair’.
Dragon flies on this vest. I could not tell if the fabric is silk; I assume it is.
Cutie-pie characters are built into these humidifiers. That’s a tiger on the far left, since 2010 is the Year of the Tiger.
The signage on the aisles offer a little language lesson for both English and Chinese speakers.
Instant noodles 方便面 (say Fāng biàn miàn) and Chinese noodles 中式面条 (say Zhōng shì miàn tiáo).
Coffee 咖啡 (say Kā fēi) and tea , which has its standalone character 茶 (say Chá).
Alright. The tagline translation is cute ‘The Respectable of Choice’, and that is why I took the picture of this organic boxed milk. But later on I looked Guiyi online. Guiyi is a town further up along the coast from Shenzhen in Guangdong province, and until recently at least, Guiyu was best known in the global environmentalist community for its reception of all kinds of electronic waste, resulting in terrible pollution levels in its surrounding air, water and soil. So is it possible to produce pure and organic dairy products there?
The little guy on the lid is licking his lips for this product, which I suspect is hot or spicey. The characters at the bottom say ‘Famous brand foods from Sichuan province’ 四川省名牌食品 (say Sìchuān shěng míng pái shí pǐn). Sichuan province in southwestern China is famous for Sichuan peppercorns with their tingling, numbing effect on the tongue.
Ah, fruity chew candy from my childhood in South Africa (sugus), and chewing gums from Wrigley company, where I had done work for all of 2005 in Chicago. All of this in a traditional bowl held by two happy little tigers that represent the Year of the Tiger.
Two whole chickens (completely all of the chicken, that is), for ¥ 9 which is the equivalent of US$ 1.37.
These are freshwater eels, I believe.
These are durian, in some Asian countries called the “king of fruits“. The durian grows on trees and is distinctive for its large size, strong odor, and thorn-covered skin. The strong odor has prompted authorities in Singapore to ban eating durian in many outdoor spaces throughout Singapore and to prohibit it on public transport.

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.