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.