It’s been a week since I landed in China, and I have really enjoyed my stay till now. At the start of this trip I knew that food was going to be a problem here. However one week has passed and I have not yet had an upset stomach. Every evening my colleague George cooks vegetables and rice for dinner. So this was like having home made food. In the afternoon at workplace we order meat curry and rice. This food is spicy just like our Indian food. So the food in fact has been very good.
(Picture top row left to right: George, Me, Allan, Abdul. Bottom row left to right: Carrol, Grace, Joline and Jessie)
My office timings here are 8:30 A.M to 5:45 P.M, Monday to Friday. There are some company buses that leave at 8 A.M, about 5 minutes from our apartment. So I wake up daily at 6:40 A.M and have bread and jam, bananas and a glass of vitamin C juice. Every evening when we return from work, we head straight to the supermarket, purchase some vegetables and some necessities and then return home. Because George takes care of the cooking, I only bother to fill my stomach.
The workplace is good. The first thing we do after entering the office is access the Internet. There is an Internet Café in the office, as we are not allowed to send mails from our work seat. Lunch is from 11:45 A.M to 1 P.M. The lights go off prior to lunch indicating that’s it’s a lunch break. People here finish their lunch in 15-20 minutes and take a nap. People here bring their sleeping stands to office. They just open these and go to sleep. Other than the 4-5 people we interact with, the others don’t really speak English. People here only speak the local language, so if we have to communicate with them, it’s definitely not possible.
Shopping at the supermarket is easy coz all products have their price tags displayed. It is better if one is able to locate the product he/she wants than to try asking for a product. Allan our project lead has provided us with 3 sheets of translation. It basically contains some information in English along with its Chinese translation. So if we want to know which bus goes from any place to our apartment we just show that paper to the people at the bus stop. Allan has been really very helpful. From the first day itself he has been helping us out in many ways.
The only scare I had this week was during the Mumbai blasts. Because of the time difference between India and China, (China is 2:30 hours ahead of India) I had already gone to sleep. George happened to watch the English news channel, so he woke me up o update about the same. I called up home soon after to find out about their safety. By next day evening I was able to confirm that all my friends were safe. It’s sad that about 200 or more innocent people lost their lives, but it was good to know that people continued with their lives as usual the very next day. Cheers to Mumbai’s never say die attitude. God is there to do justice to what is right and wrong. I know that he is watching all of this.
Just want to end this article as it starts to rain here. I think its going to be a wet weekend. But I don’t think it’s going to have an impact on us as we have to just eat, sleep and watch T.V. for the next 2 days. Bye for now.
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