First Chinese Class, First Day of Work, First Squatter Experience

First Day of Chinese, First Day of Work, First Experience with the Squatter

Yes, so the last couple of days have been full of firsts.

First Day of Chinese

Monday morning started off oh so right – with a fresh plate of hotcakes from a McDonalds we found about a 10 minute walk from the hotel complemented nicely by some yogurt from a convenience store I figured I ought to consume to fight off the osteoporosis since I’m not about to try and get my calcium from the un-refrigerated milk here. After breakfast, my roommate Stephanie and I decided to go try and figure out if a big Chinese looking building a couple of blocks from the McDonalds was anything significant. Turns out it was the Beijing Drum Tower, which, along with the Bell Tower, used to mark the north and south points of the central axis of the Mongol capital way back when (i.e. like 1200?). Anyway, it had some very steep stairs, great views of the city highlighting the contrasts between old and new and featuring the smog, and lots of big drums up in the top. Apparently, the tower acted kind of like an ancient Big Ben, as a guy would bang out the time ever so often for the city’s residents’ information. We got to see a drum beating demonstration and a bunch of their ancient time-telling devices which are pretty fascinating and clever.

After a stroll around another part of the old neighborhood it was time for our first Chinese class. Perhaps the most hilarious 3 hours of my life, or at least the first 30 minutes, which we spent learning the pronunciations of all the pinyin letters. We did a bunch of consonant differentiation drills, the first of which just happened to be differentiating between ‘m’ (“muh”) and ‘f’ (fuh). Please just put yourself in my shoes for two seconds, imagine a 60+ year old Chinese teacher repeatedly yelling “muh! fuh!” and try not to laugh. Impossible. The rest of the class was actually really hard, with moments of hilarity dispersed throughout of course, and a little discouraging because I learned that basically everything I thought I had picked up the last few days just from being around was completely tonally wrong, and being tone deaf as I am, it’s going to be a little challenging to get people to understand what I’m saying.

First Day of Work

The place I’m working 3 days a week is called Telestone Technologies. The biggest part of what it does is design, manufacture, and distribute products to wireless communications companies in China (like our AT&T) so that they can provide better coverage in more places. So for our first day of work this morning, each company was supposed to send a representative to the hotel to pick us up and show us how to use public transportation to get to the city. The pick up time was 9:00. Ours (I’m working with another guy from Chile named Pato) came at 10:00. Then we spent the next 2 HOURS riding a bus to a subway, riding a subway, switching lines and riding another subway, switching lines and riding ANOTHER subway, then getting on ANOTHER bus, then walking about 10 minutes to the building. This city is ginormous and apparently a two hour commute isn’t all that uncommon, but we got there literally at noon. Everyone was very nice and welcoming though - and after our long journey offered us a lot of water, which we were really grateful for, until we sipped it and remembered that they serve the water hot here (so I put it on my desk for later so it could cool down to room temperature).

After a couple of introductions (most people there spoke at least some English), the lady who had brought us there took us to eat at a restaurant nearby. I had rice with some sort of diced pork (who knows what pork parts), cucumbers (I am becoming all about cucumbers), and some sort of soup (the best identification of which I could get was “it’s from the sea”). Interesting. But not bad – AND I was pretty proud of my first public chopsticks performance. I’m getting better.

In the afternoon, our supervisor gave us a power point introduction to the company and instructions to spend the rest of the day reading their brochures, so now I’m all educated on repeaters and splitters and signal amplifiers and base stations and antennas? I also spent a little while helping out woman who sits in front of me who wanted to put an adage at the top of one of the marketing materials for a new product and wanted me to pick out an appropriate one in English from this sheet of “famous” adages she had found on the internet. My choices were things like “a cat has nine lives” and “do as you would be done by,” so that was interesting, but we finally decided on something along the lines of “he who does not advance moves backwards”. We’ll see how well that one sells? Later that same woman offered me an apple, which I originally refused because I wasn’t hungry, but she then insisted that it was “a gift”, so now I have a giant apple. We got home around 8:00, so I grabbed some chicken nuggets from MickeyDs and rented a bicycle before coming back here for the evening to go to bed, since we’ve got to leave for work again at 7:00am! Yikes!

Oh yes, and I also had my first experience with the squatter today. That was also interesting. I can’t figure out how to make it work without removing my pants completely. Suggestions are welcome.

A "squatter"

And just as a p.s., I was almost really impressed by Chinese airline service as we came back yesterday and the (non-English speaking) lady at the desk of our hotel started signaling to me to come over. She handed me a package, which I was kind of confused by since I wasn't expecting anything, but she insisted it was for me, and someone who speaks a little Chinese said that it was from the airline. I opened it and it was a knock off iPod shuffle without earphones or anything, but hey, a nice "we're sorry we lost your luggage gesture" I guessed. Well, this morning the same lady came knocking on our door and found the box in our room and took it back. Apparently it wasn't for me after all.