I am sorry for not updating in a whole week. Though this wasn’t not my fault but the great authorities of China had blocked our VPN service that we received from itshidden.com. Therefore I was/am unable to visit websites like blogspot, facebook, youtube and so on. Quite annoying when you are trying to write stories for the folks at home. I would like to thank Serhat for the hard work he has done to make me able to post messages again. He has been working several days to help me out and I really appreciate that mate!
Like most of you probably saw on the news, China is currently celebrating a lot because the republic has its 60 years anniversary. Therefore the Chinese are free and celebrating with their families. This has resulted in CHECK-IT being closed for a week, so most of us took a plane and flew away to different parts of China. Me and Rob have decided to stay here in Xiamen and continue working for CHECK-IT. We need to make extra hours to be free on other days when friends are coming over. So the work floor is pretty quiet with only two employees! Though I must say it works a lot faster without having to explain everything six times in English. It is still hard to communicate with the Chinese as certain terms for the program development world have different meanings for China and Holland. You are never sure if you think the same about one thing! But so far we are managing pretty well, it simply takes a lot of time. Rob and I are currently working on the DVD project which is a nice change. We have been working on the website for a month now and I am getting pretty tired of working on the same thing all the time. So working on the DVD project actually feels a bit like vacation!
So work is going fine, though I must say that I like my student life better then the working life. The thing I dislike about working life is that everything is so planned out. You wake up around eight, make yourself some breakfast and go to work. You get back at half pas five and you go out to a small dinner. The short evening is all the time you get to do your own thing and you can’t really do anything big during the week days because you have to think of getting up early the following day. So staying up late till 3 am in the morning with a few beers on the balcony with your roommates having small talk isn’t really a option here. And I think that is the biggest thing I miss about Arnhem, you always hear that going to bed late and living life without any structure is bad. While it actually gives me the feeling that I am free and therefore I think it is a good thing. A structured life is quite boring if you ask me. But hey perhaps that is just the age? One thing I know for sure, I still have at least one and a half year to live the student life and I am definitely going to enjoy that.
I always had a lot of interest in television production and everything that comes with that. At the software park there are multiple companies that work in this area and one of the Chinese students tipped me when I was drawing on the whiteboard about a Chinese anime studio. This studio was only two building away and he said I should check it out sometime. At that moment I didn’t really thought about it but when I remember it later on I decided that it would very interesting to see how anime actually is created for TV. Maarten and I decided to visit the company to ask if it was possible to see how the progress goes.. we kind of hoped that the company would also be honored by western people showing interest in their company. Well, I can only say that we guessed right! We arrived at the company and immediately we received a meeting with the head of the department! We told him (Well, Kelevin did because we still can’t speak Chinese :P ) that a lot of people from CHECK-IT were interested in visiting. He said their company was looking forward to have us visiting them and that they would show us around and show us the progress of anime development. I am really looking forward to it and we shall visit within two weeks! So I am going to keep my eyes open and hopefully learn how to make my own drawings into a real cartoon. That would be so cool! The company is called momokings and can be found on http://www.momoking.cn/english. ( Use internet explorer, their website doesn’t work properly in other browsers. )
There haven’t been a lot of other developments. We are still going out twice a week but there aren’t really new stories on the clubbing. Except that Sam is starting to get good at on hitting on Chinese girls, although it are all shy girls we are getting better on meeting new people. It just so annoying that 90% of the people don’t speak English!
I will keep my blog update more often now I finally have a working VPN again. So stay tuned for more mateys!
Hugs and kisses,
Frenkie
(Written on: Saturday 3 October 2009 at 17:38)
