Steve's China Blog

Monday, June 27, 2011

Old bites, new bites

On Thursday and Friday they were spraying insecticide at my apartment complex, which they do all over the city at this time of year. On Thursday my housekeeper was cleaning my apartment, and no matter how many times I tell her to only open the windows that have a screen she opens them all, so when I got home from work on Thursday evening there were a ton of mosquitoes in my apartment. I didn't get much sleep on Thursday night.

After work on Friday I got home and wanted to take a nap, but Kitty called and wanted to take me to a restaurant that she had found. When we got there it turns out they did not open until 9:30pm, and we were too hungry to wait so we went to a DongBei restaurant nearby. DongBei means EastNorth, and refers to food from the Northeast part of China. We had a dish of sliced beef with spring onion; pork with green beans; and a salad made of shredded lettuce, shredded cucumber, and cold clear noodles. It was quite good and a nice change of pace from the spiciness of Sichuan food.

On Saturday evening I decided to go find a new restaurant near my apartment that I had read about online. The Lazy Pug is owned by an American couple, and the head cook is from Chicago. The decor is very nice... sort of hip and laid back. They have only been open for a few weeks, and are still working out little problems here and there, but it is a nice place. And there was a cute little pug puppy named Basil there who liked the California Pale Ale.

I liked the California Pale Ale also. For dinner I had a caesar salad and the pulled pork BBQ sandwich. This is the only place I know of in Chengdu that has slow cooked pork, and they say that they cook it for 15 hours. Next time I go there I want to try the bleu cheese burger.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

100 years of IBM

100 years ago today IBM was established. At the office we had some presentations in the morning about the history of IBM and the vision of the future. I missed it since I had some work that had to be finished. In the afternoon though we had a little party. We had a huge cake,...


Our big cake


Our Chengdu site manager, Kevin, lights the candles

some cookies, soft drinks, and a game with IBM trivia. Even though the questions were in Chinese I got one of them right and one a nice little prize. I couldn't read the question, but the possible answers were software languages, and the only one on the list that was created by IBM was FORTRAN.

During the last few months IBM has been sending us information and videos about IBM. This is one that we got, and has been very inspirational to all of us at my office...

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Testing. Testing. Is this thing on?

I haven't posted much in awhile. I've been pretty busy wrapping up my project, and studying for a DB2 certification exam for work. Of course, the exam got cancelled on the day I was suppose to take it. We're having some network problems because of some new distribution of bandwidth plan that China Telecom came up with, and no one at the office could access the test website.

I mentioned wrapping up my project for work, and my time on it will be finished at the end of this month. I am hoping to start on a new project in Chengdu, but since we have a lot of projects all over the place I am not sure where I will be living a month from now. There's a possibility I might be on a project in Shenzhen. There are projects in India and the Philippines too. Of course, I would prefer to stay in Chengdu, but who knows? Maybe I can take a year of unpaid leave and study Chinese full time.

Other than all that there is not much going on right now. This weekend is a 3-day weekend since Monday is the Dragon Boat Festival holiday here in China. I'm not sure if I will go to see any dragon boat races, and may just spend the weekend relaxing and not reading any technical manuals. Ok. maybe I'll read a little bit.