Steve's China Blog

Monday, May 09, 2005

Back to Work!

The holidays are over and I didn't get to do as much as I had hoped, but I did the important thing... caught up on my sleep! I did get to explore Dalian some. I went shopping at a bunch of different places and bought some nice shirts. All I packed to come here were winter clothes, so I really needed some lighter shirts now that it is getting warmer. I also ate a lot of steak, pizza, and cheesburgers. No fajitas though.

While wondering Dalian I found a place called China Tobacco Store, but they were either closed for the holidays or closed early in the afternoon. I'm hoping to go back there and see if they have any good cigars. A Fuente Hemingway or a Partagas Rojito would be real nice about now. They'll probably have cuban cigars, but I promised myself I would wait until Fidel died before having one of those.

One thing I really enjoyed doing was just watching people in the city. It is interesting to see what people are wearing, especially the young people. The clothes people wear are sort of like an example of self-expression and creativity. Up until about twenty years ago everyone was restricted to wearing the same clothes. Now they not only wear eastern clothes, but mixes of western and eastern, western, or even things made up with no way to identify if it's eastern or western. It makes me wonder what other things will change here. It will be interesting to see.

We moved into our new offices this weekend. My office is on the 8th floor of the new building. The view is very nice... we can even see the Yellow Sea (also called the Sea of Korea) from up here. The floors are carpetted, so I don't have to worry about everything I set on the ground getting dirty. It's clean, and quiet, and the TP is much softer than the sandpaper that was used in the old building. What else could you ask for?

A few of us also started our first chinese language class today. We've starting by learning Pinyin. It is sort of like phonetics, but more of a transcription system since chinese is not phonetic, but more of a symbolic or ideographic language. I think we're going to be learning Pinyin for awhile.

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