Getting to know Xiamen

It has been two days since my last post so I have enough new stories to share! My last entry was last Friday when we had the official/unofficial kick-off of the CHECK-IT project (heard later that there will be another kick-off with more high officials blablabla ). After writing my last blog I managed to sleep for 13 hours, so I guess I managed to keep one of my old habits over here :P. Therefore Saturday started a bit late for me because I woke up at 15:00pm. Luckily almost every Dutch student was that lazy on Saturday so there was no shame for me. We decided to use the time that was left to explorer a bit more of the local area here at the software park, so we headed out into what we would describe as a ”sloppenwijk”. I was pretty shocked when we walked around there, so far we had only seen a bit of the center were most people are pretty fortunate. Walking around in the local area made us realize how lucky we actually we are. Young kids playing at the dirty street while the cars rush by, dumping grounds laying next to the homes, a constant horrible smell of waste laying around and buildings that looks like they can collapse when you breathe too hard. Though the people don’t seem to bother about the shape of their surroundings. Of course they are used to it, but you would think that if your house is held together by a few wooden poles, your face wouldn’t be smiling all the time. Well, not here. I guess they take the sentence “altijd blijven lachen” pretty serious around here.

After walking around a bit and buying a few things in the local shops ( Calvin Klein boxers for 1 euro :D, fake as hell and it turned out to be “nut crackers” instead of boxers :( )we went back to the apartment and decided to have dinner in the local restaurant downstairs. There was another hard job there for us, we had to choose dinner. Try that with no pictures and only Chinese letters on the menu (pretty damn hard to decide!) We managed to simply do it by pointing at food that lay in the pre-made cabins and got three different kinds of food with rice. Of course we expected it to be a bit more expensive than buying food in the supermarket, but what a big surprise there! We only paid 7 Yuan for the meal and 1 Yuan for the cola. So calculating that to euro means that we spend 80cent for the total meal. We mutually decide that cooking for our self was not an option anymore... don’t judge us! We are hard workers so we may threat ourselves now and then! We had planned to go to a local pub or club in the evening but to make that happen we needed some help from the Chinese part. So after a few MSN talks with the Chinese students we heard that it was almost impossible for them to join us or show us were to go because they never go out. The entrée fee for a club here is 200Yuan which means you will have to pay 20 euro just to get in a club. That is even expensive for me! So that plan disappeared while the evening was still young so after chatting a bit with each other we decided to keep it simple and just drink beer and watch a movie with each other. That night I couldn't sleep, I managed to make a few calls to the Netherlands and was really happy to hear known voices but due the time difference I had to make the phone calls late at night. Afterwards I couldn't get to sleep because the Chinese workers next to our apartment work night and day! So a finally managed to sleep at 09:00 am and got up (again) at three! After that we went to a shopping mall where I got a new Chinese phone number. So if you want to reach me please send me an email and I can give you the new number for texting :D.

At the evening Carol (Chinese student leader) took us to the movies. We went there together with Carol, Steven and Tjeerch?? (no clue how to spell his name.). They actually play English movies here without the synchronizing of Chinese voices so perhaps I can still keep my hunger for movies fed here! We enjoyed the movie G.I. Joe and we went to a really small pub/drinking café where they actually ran towards the supermarket to get us beer. ( Talk about service!) So after we had bought 10 beers for 6 euro we went back and got some sleep because the following morning would be our first working day!

Our first working day was slow, we went to the office not knowing what to expect. Turned out the company direction had the same idea. So the first hours was just sitting around and trying to get to know the Chinese students and their studies. Rob and I managed to set an appointment with the Dutch coaches for a meeting about their wishes for the promotion DVD. This will be held tomorrow so Rob and I used the spare time to work on our point of view for the DVD. We already heard that they would like to have a small promotion video for the CIFIT fair next week so there is a big change that we will have to work hard this week. At 11 o’clock there was a meeting for everybody where the groups were pointed out. I will be working on the company website with five others but four of them are currently in different projects. Therefore I will work with only Carol the first week, and I am kind of lucky with that because she is the best speaking Chinese student by far! We set down and spoke about the needs for the temporally website that will be build for the CIFIT fair and created a small plan on paper. When we were done the day was already over so it was time to go home! We went straight towards the restaurant and had diner again for the amazing price of one euro :P. Tomorrow will be our next working day. I hope we can make a quick start this time and be productive! I’ll keep you guys informed!

Huges and kisses,

Frenkie :D

(Written on Monday 31 of August 2009 at 23:16 )