This is a photo that an engineer traveling in China took of an actual product labeled “Emergency Kit” offered in the mini-bar of her Chinese hotel room.
What “emergency” do you think will cause this sucker to be purchased?
Our friends and co-workers Chinese wedding photo.
The humorous, obvious answer was their pigs. But the answer was incorrect because pigs should not be plural. It was their single pig.
Having kids will definitely bring some needed unpredictability back into our lives….probably not to the extent that we had in China, but perhaps as much. On our first date night awhile back, Andy and I came up with a plan to take a year off of work to travel the world in the next ten or so years. At this point, it is only blue sky dreaming, but I really want us to make it happen. Hold us to it!
Leaving Shanghai to move back to the US
Why do the Chinese not search to understand what is really going on in Tibet? In my mind, this can be explained by two things: conditioning and fear. I had a conversation with a Chinese friend about it and she said that the torch relay protests are being taken personally by Chinese people.
Talking with him reminded me of all that we have learned living here and the naivety of a newbie. His business is commodities trading of some sort and his boss from Texas had sent him here because the China office was not meeting their deliverables and seemed to be disorganized. He has grand plans of getting things organized and fixed up in a few months while at the same time traveling extensively to Japan and India as well. I just looked at him and smiled and said, “good luck with that.” After that, he was talking to my friend Junie and he turned back to me and said, “you guys are depressing.” I asked why and he said that I had shot down his plans of doing well, rapidly at work and then Junie was explaining to him why you should not give money to children begging on the street. (Often, the parents will do cruel things to the kids to put them in a pathetic state in order to exploit them for money. Junie should know as she has spent countless hours volunteering at an orphanage that had kids without thumbs and eyes from parents doing just that. Also the kids on the street are not in school and by giving them money it encourages the cycle.) I quickly agreed with Junie and the guy looked genuinely depressed. I really had forgotten how much we have learned living here and it took a guy fresh off the boat and eager to succeed to remind me of all of the lessons learned.
I have been ready for a new job for quite awhile…really ever since we moved here. I finished my MBA last year and now have over eight years of experience at HP, most recently a lot of coordination and project management but still a fair amount of programming. My goal has been to move into a project management role, but it has been nearly impossible to do while we are in Shanghai since if you are hiring a manager, you either want a local hire or experienced manager from the US as an expat. In February, a great Project Manager within my organization decided to leave the company to become the R&D Manager at a start-up in Boise. I put my feelers out about the job and started getting a lot of feedback that I would be a good candidate to replace him.
I am reading an interesting book that comes highly recommended by two separate close friends called “Eat Pray Love.” It is about a woman’s year-long journey recovering from her divorce through Italy, India and Indonesia. I believe it is getting a lot of press in the U.S. right now. I just finished the “Pray” section where she is living in an ashram in India for four months finding God.
The next thing we knew, we found ourselves talking to a taxi driver in the below freezing cold at 1am negotiating (I should really say accepting) the price of a cab ride to an unknown hotel. Long story short, we paid 300 RMB (about $38 which is very pricey for China) for a ride that cost 150 during normal hours and called the taxi drivers friend, who spoke very broken English, to try and figure out where the Holiday Inn was.
