Green tea is very popular among my Chinese colleagues here at work.
The mugs have lids on, to keep the tea hot a little longer.
Tuesday/ green tea mug
Monday’s done
Back at the apartment, Monday at work behind me. Today I saw an SAP screen in Chinese alongside the English version. The English is flawlessly lucid 
– and the Chinese unfathomably foreign! 
Here is how Chinese characters are entered into any system : a Chinese computer keyboard is very close to a Western style keyboard, but the user types in syllables or English phonetic equivalents of Chinese characters. Embedded software interprets the keystrokes and pops the Chinese character into the application. Even more fascinating is to see a Chinese person actually writing these squiggly spidery characters on a piece of paper or on the whiteboard. How did you ever learn to do that? I wanted to ask them. (Answer: 15 years of education, at home and in school).
Sunday/ Shenzhen shopping
Hey – I was not going to sit in the apartment in Dameisha today, so I got on the Sunday shopping van to Shenzhen with 3 other coworkers.
Pictures from top to bottom –
The store looks very respectable, but sells only knock-off watches. I’m sporting a classic sqaure ‘Cartier’ I’ve seen many times in print ads in Time magazine.. nice enough for $40, not? / Remember that the Chinese New Year is not yet here! (second week in Feb) so the signs for a happy 2010 are all still up / Roasted duck in a Carrefour store – very good, we bought some / The cute kid was playing with the live seafood in front of him : ), this is also in the Carrefour store (international French store chain, but they are not in the USA).
Saturday/ trip to Shenzhen
Five of us made another run into Shenzhen, and this time I saw a little more of the city than just Walmart. Shenzhen -with a population of 12 million already! – is by some measures still the world’s fastest growing city. There are brand-new buildings everywhere. I saw ‘digital malls’ as they are called, a little grungy inside, but crammed with 150 cell-phone and gadget sellers.
Pictures from top to bottom (remember that double-clicking should display the picture a little bigger, to take a closer look):
Clusters of high-rise apartment buildings are everywhere in the city/ Our driver parked his van in front of the Casablanca Bar/ Unfortunately sights like these of historic Chinese architecture are very rare in Shenzhen/ One of the main streets downtown, sporting a Starbucks, a McDonalds and Coca-cola billboards, all with an Asian twist. I love cultural west-meets-east confluences like these! / My favorite sighting of the day : a colorful Lenovo truck with a cute African zebra saying ‘Let’s open happy’ ! .. it’s almost certainly going to make me buy a Lenovo notebook next.
Friday/ end of the week, at last
♥ Gelukkige verjaarsdag, mammie! ♥ Happy birthday, mom! ♥
This picture is a scene from out of the bus window I took on the way back to the apartment after work. That’s a drug store on the right and the big old Buick emerging from the gate is the most popular luxury car in Chinese cities, I’m told – more so than Lexuses, Mercedeses and BMWs. There are plenty of mopeds, motorcycles and bicycles on the road as well, and the buses and cars honk at them to say ‘Get out of the way!’ or ‘I’m on your left!’ .. we’re all glad we don’t have to drive here !
We have scheduled trips to Shenzhen for this weekend again, so I will report back on that. Hopefully we will get to go to Hong Kong and even further afield on the Mainland once we have settled in a little better.
Thursday/ flat, on the floor
I have to submit a picture of a Chinese toilet – amazingly these are found even in the brand-new building we just moved into. Mercifully each washroom has one western-style toilet as well. Yay! We didn’t have those in the building we started in the first week. An interesting exercise it was to put your feet on the white footholds and squat to do the dirty deed !
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.
Tuesday/ entrance 入口, and exit 出口
I’m learning a little bit more about the written Chinese language, a language of pictographs. Many basic Chinese characters are in fact, highly stylized pictures of what they present.
Around 9 out of 10 characters is a combination of a ‘meaning’ element and a ‘sound’ element.
A contemporary Chinese person might know and use between 6,000 and 8,000 characters – but one can get by with as few as 2,000 or 3,000.
The two characters 入口 rù kǒu on the sign below stand for ‘entrance’. A depiction of a person that goes through a door, opening, gate.
‘Exit’ looks like this 出口 chū kǒu. That first character is a foot, coming out from an enclosure! The foot is leaving through a door, or gate.
Monday/ show mercy to the green lives
I’m taking a walk around the apartment complex where we stay, in Dameisha.
I like the sign that says Show mercy to the green lives under your foot! .. a very philosophical interpretation of Keep off the grass!
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.
Instant noodles 方便面 (say Fāng biàn miàn) and Chinese noodles 中式面条 (say Zhōng shì miàn tiáo).
It’s Friday ..
.. so we’re getting out of the office! Woo hoo !
There are plans afoot to visit Walmart in the city of Shenzhen on Saturday, so that we can get pots and pans, knives, forks, extra towels & what have yous. My internet access at the apartment is not up and running yet, nor is the central heating working.
We have made a start to our project, though; met dozens of colleagues and client team members, and it was not a bad week at all.
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.
Thursday/ workshops
It was another long day meetings at here at the Daya Bay offices.
We’re doing workshops with the indispensible assistance of our colleagues from the China firm. I translate from SAP (how to use it) to English. They translate my English to Chinese. Questions in Chinese come back to me in English, and so it goes.
Wednesday/ Daya Bay nuclear power station
Here is the Daya Bay nuclear power station where we work.
Infographic from Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.
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.
Tuesday night/ arrival in mainland China
I lucked out and got upgraded to FIRST CLASS from San Francisco to Hong Kong (so abandon any sympathy you might have had left for me for the 15-hr flight and think personal pod with entertainment, flat-folding seat and five course meals!).
Saw two movies, had two meals and two naps, got in Tue night at 7 pm at Hong Kong International airport on the island of Chek Lap Kok. Customs and baggage claim at the airport went very smooth.
Once all of the team had arrived at Hong Kong airport, the drivers of two vans helped the 10 of us to load up all our luggage. Next stop was the China mainland customs and checkpoint where some of us got scanned for a high fever.
The drive in from there, to our apartments in Dameisha, to the east of the city of Shenzhen (pop. 12 million), was interesting. This is no longer Hong Kong. This is China. No English. We made our way through Shenzhen’s high-rise buildings and apartments with their gaudy neon signs, and several tunnels. The area is very hilly.
Monday/ at San Francisco airport
Everything is going smooth so far. I arrived at Seattle airport so early that United put me on the 6 am flight (original schedule was for 7.40 am).
My bags are stuffed with Starbucks coffee and decadent Western snacks such as m&m chocolate candies.
Hopefully they won’t confiscate any of it in Hong Kong at the customs check point!
Sunday/ my bags are packed ..
.. so I should try to get some sleep. The taxi will show up at 4 am !
I want to be at the airport early, so that I miss the Monday morning business crowd. I will post again as soon as I have access in China, but it may not be until Wednesday.