Hello again,

Well, what a hectic few days I've had! You'll be glad to hear that I've now made it to Shenzhen and have settled in well. To pick up from my last blog post, I did catch the flight to Shenzhen from Shanghai but upon boarding the plane was struck with a problem. I simply couldn't find seat 16D, anywhere! After concluding I was the only english speaking person in sight I thought I would take a punt at asking the flight attendant. Luckily he was able to help me out, and it was at this point I realised how much I must have stood out being a 6'5 westerner. The seat numbers were listed underneath the overhead luggage compartments and silly me had my head up in the clouds ducking as to not hit my head off the roof! I think some of the locals found it quite funny. It's usually the first thing people say to me over here, it's almost like being introduced to your grandparents friends who's first reply is always "My, you are tall. what did your mother feed you?" Very good, with 21 years of practise I can now probably recite over 100 individual responses. Rant over.

After some texting to my property agent and a phone call later with the taxi driver I eventually made it to the apartment in one piece with my luggage which was a relief. I was briefly shown around and then left to my own devices. After a quick unpack I settled down for the night and managed to fullfil what can only be described as a 16 hour on-off hibernation. Brilliant! It was a shame to waste away a day but meant I was wide awake for the World Cup final on the Monday morning (2:30am-5am). I managed to skype back home to the parents who thankfully put on the TV back home and turned it up so I could get some english commentary which was brilliant, just a shame about the lag. Worked a treat none the less. so on the monday morning I got a taxi to one of IBM's facilities in Shenzhen (KJY). Here I met Sammi who got me to fill in some paperwork and before you knew it I was finished. She then walked me out to get a taxi and told me to go to the hospital to get a chest x-ray as it was part of IBM HR policy in Asia. As far as I'm led to believe it is a check for TB but I'm not entirely sure. Once I arrived I walked up to the kiosk at the front door armed with my english phrase book and pointed at "chest", "x-ray" and " business". I was told to pay 9 yuan (90p) and was given a ticket and told to go to cardiology on level 3. I walked away and had another look at my ticket trying to decipher what had actually just happened so I sat down andtook some time to reflect. At this point I thought it best to write out a note in chinese and show it to one of the wandering nurses to get a second opinion, when at that moment the woman next to me saw me struggling with my pen and piece of paper and asked if I needed any help. I said to her that I needed an x-ray of my chest for work and she showed me the place to wait but said I would probably have a good 3-5 hour wait ahead of me. Great I thought, so I decided to make use of this time and left the hospital to go and get a chinese SIM-card for my phone. On return from the phone shop the hospital was still closed for lunch so I took out my ipod and got myself comfortable. About an hour later the same woman approached me and asked if I was still waiting to be seen. After saying to her I was still waiting she went and spoke to someone from the hospital and came back with a form for me and told me to go to level 5 for my x-ray. Luckily she and her husband accompanied me upstairs and guided me through the paperwork and x-ray procedure and within 10 mins I had my certificate and was all finished! A huge thank you to this woman as she saved me a lot of hassle and time! On the walk back from the hospital I decided to take a small detour via a park I had seen on whilst on the taxi in the morning. Lovely little quaint park with cracking scenery, got some brilliant photos. For dinner that night I sampled one of the local restaurants (albeit one with an english menu) and treated myself to royal chicken and rice. Brilliant! By this point I had still not found a supermarket and there is only so much nutritional goodness from the delights of 7-Eleven (the chinese equivalent of SPAR). 

Next morning I made my way to the taxi rank with my note to the driver with the destination and made my way down to the gate 3 of the Futian Free Trade Distict. Here I was met by Eylin (pronounced Aylin) who seems to be the co-ordinator of me at IBM ISH3 (the other IBM facility in Shenzhen). We got the free bus from the gate to IBM and was finally introduced to my manager, Feeling Wang. I'll let you add your own joke here. Feeling is the technical support manager within the manufacturing facility and is very nice, though can be quite difficult to understand at times as his english isn't too great. Then again my chinese isn't that great either so we have a routine of writing words down, using a phrase book or acting out what we are trying to say. We are getting there, slowly. For lunch, the senior manufacturing engineer and Feeling's boss, Cloud took a group of us out for lunch which was very nice and my first proper experience of chinese food. Cloud is a brilliant guy who knows how to treat his staff well and I look forward to getting to know him better. Thankfully I managed to pick up the art of using chopsticks pretty quickly, but was told to "not be nervous when eating". I just assumed he meant to relax and that would help me improve my chopsticks technique, but I have since realised that this translation actually meant he wanted to completely disregard any table manners I had learned previously and "go to town" on my food. This was confirmed when fish bones were getting spat out onto the table and worst of all when the cutest wee girl across the table burped without making any effort to cover it up. Me, finding this hilarious was on the cusp of breaking out into fits of laughter but no one at the table even flinched so my smile was quickly wiped off my face. It was a brillaint experience none the less and I hope to do it again soon and hopefully pick up some more of the local quirks. That afternoon I got a tour of the faciltiy in which they manufacture their X systems, power systems, retail systems and storage systems. It consists of 5 levels of production areas, 1 level as office space and a further level acting as a warehouse. It seems like a pretty slick production line they operate and I'm looking forward to learning more about the processes and systems they use in order to bring the whole job together.

On Wednesday I spent most of the day in the power systems department on the 5th floor learning about their production line in more depth. In a nutshell the process is as follows: preparation of parts > build > test > final inspection > packing > shipping. It will be pretty interesting to see how the different production lines will differ. That night Cloud's secretary took me out to dinner for some of her local food which was nice, if not a damn bit spicy. Turns out she is from around the Szechuan district! My plate actually contained more chilli's than everything else combined. The next day (Thursday) I spent the day working on a presentation about myself to give to the 2 facilities in the coming fortnight. They are hoping to invite along a lot of the employees to help them improve their english and as such I plan to put a lot of effort into my presentation and delivery. I've also invited people to email me with any questions or additions they would like to see in the presentation (such as some scottish culture i.e. loch ness monster etc) so I'm hoping for a good turnout. I hope to improve my presentation skills through this seminar and I look forward to seeing how a chinese presentation will differ from the type I have become accustomed to. That night I decided to go along to rugby training with the local team (www.szdragons.com). Really enjoyed myself and some some cracking folk. After training I tagged along with a few of them to a local bar complex not too far from my apartments and shared a few pints which was nice. I was even introduced to the manager of the bar who was infact from Inverness. It was nice to be able to talk normally again and not worry about the folk at work struggling to understand me. Today, I have been back into the power systems department and followed one of their products from start to finish. Really interesting and I hope to learn more about SAP management and the duluth testing they use to test the software/systems. Hopefully I'll get the opportunity to do that next week at work. This weekend I'm hoping to go and visit 2 of the other SF interns over in Hong Kong and see the sights and soak up some culture. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a multiple entry business visa so I can make the 1 hour trip across the water as much as I want. Right, I'm going to wrap up this blog as it's almost time to finish work but I'll keep you all posted soon!

Dougie