First Days

One of the issues that many people warned us about was the high air pollution in Shanghai; fortunately at least so far, this has not been a problem.  We really have seen no evidence of this and in talking with a number of people it is not high on the issue list.  But the air pollution issue that we have noticed first hand is that there are a lot of smokers here and very little effort has been made to separate them from the rest of us.  We didn’t consider this because in Michigan and most of the world, this is no longer an issue. 

The weather here has been unseasonably cold and we even saw a couple of snow flakes yesterday.  The interesting thing is that none of the buildings in Shanghai are insulated, merely poured concrete and steel.  So when the weather is this cold the heating systems cannot keep up and many of the engineers at work were wearing their coats while working at their desks.  I understand that this is typical for this time of year.  Yesterday we went to an “international supermarket” and it was so cold that I thought the cans on the shelves would freeze.  The size of this supermarket surprised us as it was no bigger than a seven eleven.  However, the prices were much bigger, often 2 to 3 times the price of goods in the US.  The biggest price increase that I noticed was on milk, now this was a surprise because I would have thought that this was not an imported item.  Come to find out that the Chinese have avoided all dairy products throughout history and even today it is not a main staple in their diets.  Needless to say then is the fact that beef is also not common, instead most all meat is chicken and pork.  Even bread was not common; instead rice and noodles often replace the need for bread.  They often eat rice at all three meals and is therefore a main ingredient in any meal.  I got a nice surprise today when I had a typical Chinese meal (pork noodles and fruit) at the office that cost me less than $2. We are still having difficulty with meals as it is not easy to find restaurants with English menus.  There is a street about 10 minutes by taxi from our hotel that has about 10 English speaking restaurants on it so we normally take a taxi over for dinner.  I am sure that this difficulty will change as we get more accustomed to the area and the language. 

Yesterday we had a great adventure; we went to a typical market with stalls of vendors selling everything from electronics to leather belts and handbags (fakes of course).  Since we needed a couple of things, I thought this would be a great place to get the best prices.  The interesting thing about these places is that you really have to barter for the best price and although I like this, Catharine had a very hard time with this concept and with the people saying “hey lady want a handbag”.  But in spite of her embarrassment, Catharine allowed me to continue and I ended up with a belt that started at $120 and finally cost me $15.  We also found out that copyright laws are non-existent here in China.  New release DVDs go for about $1 each and software is also very cheap, I got all a great deal on Rosetta Stones Chinese language software.  The rest of the adventure was equally exciting; we decided to try to get back to the hotel via the subway instead of taking a taxi.  We were able to figure out the subway fairly easily and after getting confused only one time, we found our way to the hotel.  Unfortunately it was very cold yesterday so we took a taxi from the underground station to the hotel and Catharine reminded me that it took about ½ hour longer than the taxi and saved us only $2; but the adventure was great. We were so exhausted from our adventure that we decided to take a nap and did not wake up until we had missed dinner.  So ended my “man of leisure” status and today I started work.

Work looks like it will pick up where I left off 2 years ago as very little has progressed in the intervening time.  It appears that I will be a sort of a consultant for the advanced and core engineering departments.  I will have two bosses and will need to please them both.  I will also have to figure out what the status of the group is without upsetting the team and help them create a vision and the plans for the next couple of years.  This could be interesting but not particularly exciting.  But at this stage in life I will settle for interesting.

We thought the writing on the attached picture was interesting and typical Englisese.