Work and a Trip to the Countryside

(Written on Monday, September 18, 2006)

Work continues to move along. It is slow from time to time; waiting to talk to the right people, deciding which course of action is the best, which design is the best, and so forth, but it keeps moving. I regret to say that I can’t say much about the work that I am doing right now beyond the fact that I am designing a condensed form of the Urban Safari that I wrote about earlier. The company with which we are working insists that we work under a confidential contract, so no written mention of the company’s name is allowed. Sad story, but my involvement has given me a good understanding of what it takes to design and to implement an entire project. To the right you can see some of the fruits of my team’s effort. What you see is a tentative floor plan for the tent which we plan to take VIPs through in order to give them a true HighTeam Safar experience (in 20 minutes). The first area is set up like a spa. We plan to do massages and tell a story about the Silk road while the VIPs receive first class treatment. After that, we will walk them through a gallery (the other room) that showcases the various projects that we have done. After viewing the gallery, the VIPs will get to sample some fine wine and food and they will be given a short presentation on the nature of Urban Safari and how it can benefit them and their clients. It’s all basically a glorified sales pitch for HighTeam’s services; it should be pretty interesting to see how it goes. My work has been mostly dealing with details: how to time the motion of the VIPs, how to move the food into the gallery and the dirty dishes out, designing jobs for the various people that will be working on site, and so forth. It’s an interesting challenge, but I am happy to say that it won’t be my job forever. As I understand, this is more of a learning experience for me so that I can work as a designer in the future and keep the production and implementation needs in mind.

This weekend was a lot of fun. I took a trip with one of my co-workers Yang Yang (though she often goes by the English name Tina, to her family’s vacation home in the mountains to the north of Beijing. It was, for the most part, a very relaxing trip to the countryside. We went up with her uncle who was entertaining some of his old high school classmates. They basically did their own thing while Tina and I explored the area. The weather was very hot, but the views were beautiful. The town in which we stayed was in a large valley surrounded by mountains. To pass the time, Tina and I walked through the pastures, talked, sang karaoke (yep, karaoke), ate delicious food and so forth. Basically we took the trip as a chance to escape the working world, if only for a day or so.

The main adventure of the trip involved a very old, very scary U.S. Army style jeep. Tina’s uncle took us and some of his friends on a terrifying trip around the mountains. We started by driving down some paved roads . . . no big deal. Then the road ended. We continued flying at 35 mph down what could be called a road, but it was more like a jeep-width pathway that was full of huge holes, miniature ponds, and so forth. I had to hold on for dear life to keep from flying out of the jeep when we went through some of the pot holes (in true Chinese style, there weren’t any seatbelts). My ultimate realization of fear came when we were turning the jeep around to head back to the road. Tina’s uncle was very careful about his turning and maneuvering, so I asked why. He told me something along the lines of “no breaks.” Ummmmm . . . yeah. So we continued flying around these non-roads and now I was just in shock. “How in the world do we stop if we go down a hill?” was all I kept thinking to myself, and I kept trying to glance at Tina’s uncle’s feet to see if he was actually working a break pedal or not. Like I said, it was terrifying. As it turns out, this was a situation where something got lost in translation. Apparently “no breaks” didn’t mean that the jeep didn’t have any breaks, because we eventually got to a point where we had to put on the breaks, and they worked just fine, it just didn’t happen until we were back at the house. Needles to say, I was relieved. At this point it was the end of the trip, so I felt better mostly because I felt less stupid for getting into the jeep in the first place.

After that, it was back to more relaxing. I got to practice my Chinese, and I’m starting to feel a little more comfortable with it. As long as people are having conversations about food or their hobbies, I can follow most everything (and food is a large part of life here, so I understand a surprising amount of what I hear), but if the conversation drifts off to something else, I’m lost pretty quickly.

Other than the sporadic adventures, life has hit a pretty even keel. I’m starting to settle into a pattern. Wake up at 7:00 a.m., do some yoga and watch some Chinese music television, head off to work until 6:00 or so. Then on Monday, Wednesday, Friday I have Chinese class from 6:30 till 8:30, and on Tuesday, Thursday I have a little time to relax after work. It’s quite a breakneck pace. It’s really insane to think that I’ve been here for almost a month already! I feel like I just arrived, but I know that I’ve done a lot in the time that I’ve been here.

Note: I can't any photos other than the first one to work yet . . . I'll try and post them again at a different time.

Skull Camp, etc.

(Written on Monday, September 11, 2006)

So this weekend I went through the HighTeam training camp, and it was pretty amazing and grueling. I have to keep the description of the event somewhat abridged because it is a bit of a company secret, but I think I can give you an idea of what it is like. It was essentially a HighTeam boot camp. The weekend started with them giving us a card that had a skull and cross-bones in the center and the words “I want quit” below. They explained to us that, if at any time we felt like we couldn’t do what they were asking us to do, we could pass them the “I want quit” card and the pain would be over. They would let us leave. However, a permanent mark would go on our record saying that we quit in the middle of the camp. The card was overkill, in my opinion, but the camp was tough.

Throughout the entire weekend (Friday mid-day to Sunday evening), I only got about 7 Hours of sleep. I spent the other 40 hours learning the ins and outs of HighTeam’s corporate structure, completing projects, giving presentations, doing team building activities, and having an all-around good time with other employees from all three of HighTeam’s offices in China. Oh yeah, and did I mention that all of the lectures were in Chinese? Well, they were. Thankfully I had one guy on my team named Naudel who spoke good English and who was quite intelligent. It was very strange for me to have to learn everything through translation, though. I kept thinking to myself, “what if my translator isn’t picking up on the important nuances of the presentation?” and “what if the translator isn’t translating properly?” I think that this was actually very good for me though, because it forced me to be completely dependent upon my co-workers and teammates. I had no choice but to trust that they were doing what was necessary to keep me up to speed. It was very humbling.

That said, the other kids loved it when I did actually speak Chinese. The first thing I said when we were doing introductions was (in Chinese). “Hello, my name is Nathan, and I speak Chinese really poorly, so I’m going to speak in English.” For some reason, everybody started laughing and cheering. I don’t really understand Chinese humor yet, but apparently Americans who speak limited Chinese fit into the hilarious category.

My extremely shaky knowledge of the Chinese language did lead to a couple of challenges, though. Our final project was to write a marketing plan proposal to present to a company, in three hours. We got the proposal finished, and I was chosen to present along with Zhou Hua, a site-planning expert who only spoke Chinese. Moreover, before I presented I we didn’t have time to educate me about the content of the 7 or so powerpoint slides that were written entirely in Chinese, nor did we have time to educate Zhou Hua about the 13 slides that I was going to present. Surprisingly enough, the presentation went quite well, or so I thought until we hit the Q&A section. The big moment in our event plan was to have a 30+ story building wrapped as a present and to ceremonially and symbolically un-wrap the building by using some sort of mechanism at the top of the building which allowed the cloth wrapping material to fall dramatically to the ground. The only problem was that, according to the event plan (which was in Chinese), everybody was supposed to be inside the building when this happened. Kinda kills the drama huh? So the first question directed to me after the presentation was, “How do you plan to unwrap the building when the people who are supposed to participate in the ceremony are inside the building?” “How in the Hell should I know!!!” was what I thought to myself; I assumed that my teammates were smart enough to make sure that the big, dramatic moment in our event was properly planned. So I stood up there, thought for about one second and said, “I believe that this question could best be answered by Zhao Hua, our logistics expert.” Then I turned to him and waved him on stage, and asked the judges, “Could you ask the question again in Chinese?” They did, and he answered. I still have no Idea what he said, but they seemed amazingly satisfied considering our clear lack of communication. So that was it. And our team received the highest score of all four teams for our event plan and presentation. Wow.

Oh, another fun thing about skull camp. They have MAFIA, the role playing game, here in China! If you haven’t played Mafia before, a) you should, and b) you probably won’t understand this paragraph very well. So about 13 Chinese kids and I played Mafia on the second night (when we probably should have been sleeping), and it was awesome. About five of them spoke some English, so that made the game progress pretty smoothly, but it was very funny trying to debate with people when I didn’t know what they said until somebody translated for them. Then, I would have to make a rebuttal and have it translated for them. I don’t know how much of the arguments were lost in translation, but the game worked out very well and was as fun as ever.

By the time skull camp was over, I was completely exhausted (though not ready for sleep since I drank two Red Bulls to stay awake for the final presentation), so my friend Erica and I got some foot massages. Man that was nice. I really need to start budgeting my money so I can do that more often! But . . . whatever.

Today it was back to work. My boss let me come in at noon because he knew that I was tired (he’s really nice). And after I came in I found out that I’m going to be given a leadership role planning and executing an Urban Safari after an event for some Intel VIPs (at least that’s my understanding for now; I’ll write more about it after I have some meetings about it). Pretty cool huh? I hope so, cause I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot of work.

That’s all I have for right now. I’ll try and write more soon, but the internet in my apartment is currently not working, so I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post for the time being.

More fun times

(Written on Sunday, September 3, 2006)

The Urban Safari (Wednesday, August 30th):

The Urban Safari was quite amazing. It was pretty much what I expected: fine wine, food, and cultural activities, all to entertain VIPs. The head of the Chinese division of Mazerati, the head of the Special Olympics (international), Chief editor of China GQ, etc. I ended up being recruited to take photos as our team followed these VIPs around and provided them with entertainment. Sadly, I can give too many details about the event because it’s a HighTeam trade-secret. However, I will tell you that the final stop was one of the most beautiful restaurants that I have ever seen (and probably ever will see). It was modeled after a 1000 year old building. Think of the most beautiful indoor decorations that you have seen in movies about ancient China, multiply that by two and you’ll have an idea of the aesthetics in this place. As a second benchmark, for most people who want to hold dinners at this venue, the cost is about $3000/person (which seems unreasonable . . . my informant may have misspoken and the true costs is 3000元/person . . . more like $375/person). Long story short: it’s nice. I spent most of that portion of the evening drinking wine, chatting with co-workers and sitting on the patio area which faces the forbidden city. It was very nice. And after the Urban Safari finished. . . massages! Some co-workers and I got some free coupons to get body massages at a Thai-style spa. It was phenomenal. I think I may have to make the massage trip into a weekly event. And at $15/hour I may even be able to afford it!

Chinese Class and the Bar Scene (Friday, September 1)

Friday I started Chinese class. I had a little oral exam to assess my level, and they ended up placing me into the last lesson of level one. So, in theory, I hadn’t lost anything from the semester of Chinese that I took in college . . . ehem . . . that’s certainly not true. However, when I got to class on Friday, I realized that I was probably in the right place. There were three other kids in the class, all French, and they were just starting to learn how to tell time (time is a subject that I learned very well when I was in class). So they struggled along and I had an easy time. Then we started asking and answering questions and it was my turn to struggle. They had learned a lot of vocabulary that I didn’t know. So they were asking me about going to the supermarket and which foods I liked and if I wanted to go on a walk in the park and I was hearing something like this: Do you want to go with me to the 超市 in order to buy 蔬菜? We could eat 肉. Do you like 肉? So yeah . . . that was interesting. Eventually, though, I realized that if I just steered the conversation towards something that I had studied, I was once again able to fake like I could speak Chinese pretty well. Oh yeah . . . and we played a counting game where you had to skip numbers that were multiples of 7. Bam . . . MATH MAJOR . . . I was good at that :-P. (Ummmm. . . random side note: it sounds like somebody is slaughtering a baby Velociraptor on the floor beneath me) Anyhoo, we finished up class after that . . . all-in-all I think it was a success. Today (Sunday) I’m catching up on the vocab that I didn’t know and it’s coming swimmingly.

After class, it was bar time. My friend Erica from work had some friends who had birthdays and some who were opening bars, etc. So we went for a night on the town. I was hanging out with all expats, which was alright because I was finally able to express myself fully and be understood fully. Ahh . . . what a relief it was. So we had a good time drinking away (the night started at an all-you-can-drink champagne place. Woah was that a bad idea. After that it was to a shady nightclub and then to Erica’s friend’s bar. Surprisingly enough considering the amount of alcohol imbibed, there aren’t any crazy stories to tell. I ended up getting to bed around three a.m. and spent the majority of Saturday sleeping.

During the portion of Saturday that I was awake, I did some shopping. Boring yes, but it’s the little things that sometimes mean the most. I went to a grocery store called Jenny Lou’s, and guess what they had there! LETTUCE, TOMATOS, MUSHROOMS and SALAD DRESSING! I have been craving a decent salad since I arrived and finally the things to make one were made available to me! So I bought stuff along with other things, went home and had myself a delicious salad. Mmmmmmmm. It made my day.

After that I had another dinner by the forbidden city with mediocre food and a great view (pictures to come).

Last bit before I leave off. My job is finally getting some structure. Basically I’m in a new R&D section of the company. So, despite my training in Math and Economics, I will end up being a business researcher. Basically the bosses want me to locate, read and analyze articles and case studies that come from major American business publications (i.e. Harvard Business Review), and to translate the articles into a form of English that can be understood by the majority of the company. When I’m not doing that, I’ll be supporting other projects, writing proposals to get new projects, and so forth. Basically I’m part of an all-purpose team that is in charge of keeping us at the cutting edge of market research and market practices, and that also helps other projects so that everything runs more smoothly. We’ll see how it goes.