Paraag: Cultural Learnings from China for Make Benefit Glorious Village of Hoboken

Hello everybody! Once again, for your reading pleasure, I have been sentenced to a few weeks out of the country, and will therefore continue my habit of capturing my experiences in poem. In this case, my poetry is in free verse, which interestingly enough resembles a narrative. I am in China for two weeks for a 3 credit course that I am taking at NYU for my MBA degree with 50+ other students from the school. The course is aptly called Doing Business in China. I had actually wanted to take the Doing Business in Outer Mongolia or Doing Business in Liechtenstein, but those booked up too fast. Following the course in China, I’ll be going to Singapore for 4-5 days for work, and then back to China to do some sightseeing, somewhere (I haven’t figured out where yet, but since the country is sooo small, my options will be limited). Sunday, May 13, 2007 After some last minute shenanigans in attempting to get to the airport on time (fortunately all was well and there was much rejoicing), I met up with Liang and checked in at the Continental gate in Newark. Many of you may know Liang – he and I have been friends for 10 years and have canvassed the country together with P&G (Mehoopany, PA to Cape Girardeau, MO to Cincinnati, OH to Avenel, NJ). Liang is also taking classes at NYU for an MBA. Don’t get any funny ideas; he’s engaged. To a female. The Continental flight was really interesting – it was only a 13 hour flight and flew over the North Pole. I believe this is my first flight over the arctic region, though I’m not really sure that it matters. As many of you have experienced, service in coach class on US-based airlines has seriously degraded over the years in efforts to maintain low costs. As a result, there is no more free liquor on international flights (not cool at all) and meal #2 had a striking resemblance to meal #3 – both involved a bread product, cheese, egg, and a mystery meat that we shall call “sausage”. And both were equally nauseating. However, meal #2 came with a small container of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. Gotta give the props to those wily folks at Continental. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, they pull out the Haagen-Dazs trump card. Check-in through Chinese customs was relatively uneventful as well. I don’t think they really looked at any of our documents. There were three forms that we needed to fill out: an entry card, a customs card, and a health card. The health card was funny – I guess that the idea is to prevent people who have certain diseases from entering the country. But the classification of a disease was quite inconsistent and somewhat dubious – a virus or a cough, among others, and even had a box for the “snivels” (my guess is that they meant “sniffles”). On a positive note, I could already see that the Chinese government is putting a lot of effort into making the travel experience as user-friendly as possible in anticipation for next years Olympics – the customs desks had buttons for customer feedback installed that allow the traveler to press a button corresponding to their experience with their customs agent: just right or too much time. I was just happy that they let me through to begin with. My visa photo was less than friendly-looking and worth a double-take to anyone paying attention, and one of my technicians even texted me to let me know to “Have a safe trip. I told the FAA who you really are.” Our two week course is at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is widely considered to be the top university in China. Our hotel is the Unisplendour Centre, just adjacent to campus. The hotel itself had just been completed 1 ½ days prior, and had that fresh “new car” smell (also known as Eau du Drywall or Paint Thinner au Jus). As we found during the coming days, “completed” is a term that is being used quite loosely. Eventually (probably the day we check out), the hotel will have a gym, sauna, and bowling alley. I’m sure it will be a lovely place. Until then, we’ll manage using a single elevator and an unfinished stairwell. Many of the others registered for the course (60 in total) had also flown in on the same flight and were ready to get some real food after a few hours. So we headed downtown to this neat pond area (Qian Hai, I think it's called) which has many small restaurants and bars littering the pondfronts. After some meandering, the group of us settled in and picked a rooftop bar with enough space for the 15-20 of us. We had some appetizers that loosely resembled chicken fingers, lots of cheap Tsingtao beer, and just spent some time getting to know one another. After a few hours of cheap beer and very little food in our bellies, we opted to skip dinner and head to a place called Bed for more cheap beer and small appetizers. I could see that cheap beer was probably going to be a recurring theme throughout this trip. Somewhere around 1am, I headed back to the hotel to attempt to get some sleep on my bed that was about as comfortable as plywood. I know I’m making this hotel out to sound like a nightmare, but it actually is quite nice – once it’s all done, that is. Monday, May 14, 2007 Breakfast this morning wasn’t really much to write home about, but it’s at the hotel and it’s free, so I don’t know that I’ll be going anywhere else really. At 9am this morning, we had our first class session, which basically consisted of a few administrative issues to discuss and a couple of video presentations. I think they knew that we would be tired and jetlagged and didn’t want to schedule anything for today that we really wanted to know. The video presentations were apparently narrated by the Chinese Don LaFontaine (the dude who does all the movie trailers in the US in an inordinately excessively dramatic fashion). It didn’t take long for the entire class to be cracking up at the guy. First, he told us about the history and importance of the Badaling (ba-da-boom) section of the Great Wall of China, which we are scheduled to visit in week 2. We also learned that the Great Wall is indeed, very solid. Video #2 was about the Forbidden Palace, and was also fortunately narrated by the Chinese Don. For the remainder of the trip, the whole class was essentially extolling the virtues of the Badaling section of the Great Wall and its solidness. It would not be wise, dear reader, to question the solidness of the Badaling section of the Great Wall – doing so would certainly make you suffer. After an interesting boxed lunch (you get the distinct feeling that I’m not going to like the food on this trip, but let’s see what happens though) and a brief stop back at the hotel, we loaded onto two buses for a company visit to the Capital Steel plant. This place was absolutely enormous – a sprawling 17 square kilometer campus just outside of Beijing. The imagery there was really neat – there’s a mountain range in the background and a bunch of small Chinese pagodas and decorated walkways and a lake in the middle of massive pipelines and multi-storied factories and kilns. Our tour guide couldn’t speak an ounce of English, so Liang was volunteered to translate to the entire group. Conditions weren’t very ideal to learn very much, and we basically had the equivalent of an elementary school visit to a big steel plant where we could ooh and ahh over the vats of hot liquid magma (ok, ok, it was hot liquid molten steel) being poured into other vats, and then somehow magically pressed into sheets of finished steel. It was really hot outside too, so we were just happy to get back onto the bus. Maybe that was just me. We had a welcome dinner at the hotel, where we were ironically not really verbally welcomed by anyone in particular other than the wait staff. Dinner was better than previous meals and beer was also cheap (free, in fact). One of the other students on the trip, Rina, led a group of us to a place where she had had a good foot massage on Sunday night. Since it was about $8 USD for an hour, eight of us decided to try it out. As we would later find out, they didn’t quite have the capacity for eight people to get an hour-long foot massage at once, so they gave us a couple of random masseuses who appeared to be newbie trainees (I got one of the newbies). My masseuse kept looking over to the girl right next to us to see what she was doing and then attempted to do the same. Needless to say, my expectations weren’t very high and I wrote off the experience in the first 2 minutes. Though my masseuse was not female, he was a good looking young fellow. But I don’t swing that way – I believe the immortal Tone-Loc said it best in verse: “it’s the eighties, and I’m down with the ladies”. On a positive note, I was entertained by some Chinese gameshow featuring 40 Chinese Backstreet-type Boys who danced around. Two teams of two of them were somehow selected to compete in a contest to sweep and clean a hair salon, and then one on each team had to wash the gloop of gel out of their teammate’s hair. Riveting television. It’s really unfortunate that I didn’t bring TiVo to share with you all. I promise that I’ll remember next time for you. After the massage, we met up with about 20-30 other folks at an expatriate hangout bar called Tree for the rest of the evening. Strangely enough, of the two beers on tap, one was Beamish (and Irish Stout similar to Guinness), so I had a glass of that. When I realized that I could get four Tsingtao drafts for the same price, I switched over pretty quickly. Tuesday, May 15, 2007 Even though we got home pretty late last night, I decided to peel myself out of bed this morning to go for a morning jog on about 4 hours of sleep. Amazingly enough, there were 4-5 others from my class who were doing the exact same thing. I guess I’m not the only idiot out here. But the lack of proper rest was very apparent from the actual jog – I did about 2 miles at a pretty slow pace. We had a class this morning on Human Resource Management in China and learned some interesting things. First off, it became quickly apparent that to make sense of anything here, you have to understand the history of the past 30 years to understand what changes the nation has gone through. So, for you, dear reader, let me summarize briefly the recent history of China. And I promise that it will be shorter than the brief history that I gave you last year of Ireland. Way back in the year of 1949, two significant events took place. The first is that my mom was born that year. The second is that this is the year that the Communists won control of the country in a revolution, forcing the Nationalist government to flee to Taiwan. Mao Zedong (a.k.a. Mao Tse Tung) was installed as the Chairman of the new government. In 1966, Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in which he aligned with students (who became the Red Guard) against other members of the CCP which put the nation into anarchy until solidifying full control of the country and the CCP under Chairman Mao, while sending his political enemies in the CCP to work in the farms. The revolution was purification attempt against capitalist and anti-socialist tendencies that had been creeping up. After Mao’s passing in 1976, Deng Xiaoping took over and began to reform the CCP and the country’s economic policies, which eventually opened up the country to free enterprise, to foreign companies and to foreign investment. But during the period from 1949 to 1976, the entire country was a planned economy, where the government effectively owned and operated all enterprise – people were told where to work and each work unit (i.e. companies, factories, etc.) was given an annual output goal. This is a massive amount of change between then and now. Also, the Chinese government doesn’t tend to do anything rapidly – they believe in gradual change to better manage any adverse consequences that may arise. Arguably, this is also a trait of Chinese people as well, along with the patience to wait for change. Americans, on the other hand, are quite impatient. So, back to the Human Resource class, we learned several interesting facts: the labor participation rate for women in China is ~80% versus 65% in the U.S.; bribery and corruption is very difficult in China (as opposed to India) because no single person in the government has enough power to be able to make significant decisions – there’s just too much bureaucracy; state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China have a flatter pay gradient between the bottom and the top than private enterprises, and as a result, there are some significant pay discrepancies from market salary rates both at the top and at the bottom. We learned more, but I’m even beginning to bore myself. After lunch, we received a tour of the campus – for being in a major city, Tsinghua is extremely spread out with lots of open space and room to enjoy. I’ve gone jogging in the morning a few times to take advantage of this (the hotel gym and bowling alley is still under construction). We kept asking our tour guide where the Tsinghua students go to relax and hang out, and effectively we were told that they don’t do this at all. Liang’s fiancée Chenlu confirmed this later on, saying that they were “a bunch of nerds”. J Next was a visit to the Tsinghua Science Park, which required business casual attire to watch a 30 minute video presentation and a 30 minute Q&A session to learn very little about anything. About all we could gather is that the science park is a for-profit arm of the university that aims to be similar to a Venture Capital firm and provide financial and mentoring assistance to fledgling companies in exchange for ownership in the firm. But the presenter wouldn’t share any details about how they chose firms to invest in, what discount factor they applied (risk), and what return they were expecting from their portfolio of investments. And they also shared that they were being used by some major companies, including Google, Schlumberger, and my very own Procter & Gamble. Liang and I were both a bit puzzled by the association with P&G and were determined to go visit P&G’s office here and find out. After a bit of searching, we finally stumbled upon the Beijing Technical Center and had a very difficult time finding someone to talk to (and understandably so). After some very minor digging, about the only thing that we could ascertain that P&G needed the science park for is real estate. For dinner, about 20 of us went to a well-known Peking Duck restaurant called BaDong (the BaDongaDong restaurant was around the corner). We sat family style around two large round tables and let some of our members of Chinese heritage (Ken and Yenyen, primarily) order the food. After an amazing meal with a variety of appetizers (including duck tongue), entrees, four Peking Ducks, and a lot of beer for those who were drinking, we feared the worst from the bill – after all, the menu didn’t even have prices on it, which is a clear sign of “frugal buyer beware” in the States. So we all took a guess at what the cost would be per person, and whoever got closest wouldn’t have to pay – most of the guesses were in the 300 yuan range (about 40 USD) and reached up to 900 yuan. The total per person ended up being 161 yuan – which amazed everyone at the table. To work off our full bellies, we began a 20-30 minute walk to a bar. Unfortunately, after 30 minutes or so, we came to realize that we were walking in the exact opposite direction. So we took taxis to the bar of choice tonight, called Face. Our cab and one other somehow got dropped off at Babyface, which was a full out dance club/discotheque. 30 minutes later, we figured out where Face was and walked there. It was a neat place, with lounge-type rooms, an outdoor area and a few rooms with a pool table. We grabbed a vacant room with a pool table and hung out until 2am, when the bar closed. I played a couple of games with Kathryn as my pool partner – but we are both billiardly-challenged. To give us even a fighting chance, I came up with a few ways to even the playing field: our opponents had to play left-handed. We were still embarrassed. Wednesday, May 16, 2007 I didn’t sleep very well, but still decided to get up at 6:30am and go for another morning jog, pretty much duplicating my route from before. I’m guessing that I’ve had about 10 hours of total actual asleep time since I arrived in China. Our class this morning was on cultural values. This is a very important discussion to have, however, it didn’t end up being much of a discussion. The material was very contradictory and we all left a bit confused: on the one hand, Chinese people are reserved, but they are also very friendly. Chinese people are very direct, but they go around in circles explaining context before getting to the point. All the while I was trying to place my experience with Chinese-born friends and colleagues into what I was hearing, and some things made sense and others didn’t. But that in itself may be the issue. You simply cannot make generalizations about a nation that has undergone the amount of social and economic change over the past 30 years. If anything, this is what I learned from the class. A few of the generalizations probably still make sense, in comparison to the prototypical American at least: respect for authority, respect for elders, and very patient. However, I think these generalizations are probably true for the entire continent. One thing that we did learn is that Chinese names are written and spoken with the surname first, and that you should always address someone by their title (Doctor, Professor, Chairman, General Manager, Director, Vice President, etc.). At P&G, everyone is on a first-name basis – we all call our CEO by his preferred initials A.G., and I have to think a minute when someone else mentions something about Mr. Lafley. From what we’ve learned, most foreign companies have held on to their own customs from their base country – this is also true of many European companies in the United States. Another key takeaway was that guanxi, or social networking, is vitally important to getting things done in China – business occurs through connections to those in a position to help. As such, Chinese take guanxi very seriously and will go out of their way to invite someone over for an expansive dinner or give gifts for this aim – an argument could be made that this is a milder form of bribery, but likewise an argument could be made that this is no different than any other society. From a business standpoint, the key point is that you need to make a connection with someone who has connections to be successful in China. Interestingly enough, one of the most common criticisms that Asians get in the US in the business world is that they do not network enough. But maybe that’s just at P&G. It was extremely hot today – the sun was being especially vicious in direct contact that I could feel my skin burning and melting off. What a wonderful day to tour Tiananmen Square, which was a huge open air area that could hold half a million people. More importantly, there was no shade. After the Square, we toured the Forbidden Palace, which still has a huge picture of Chairman Mao on the front. The Palace had a little more shade, but indoors would have been even better. The Palace itself was very beautiful – there was a lot of fresh paint and a couple of the buildings were inaccessible due to restoration (part of getting ready for the Olympics?). The palace grounds seemed to be a never-ending cascade of courtyards leading to buildings with pass-though gates to the next courtyard. Perhaps the most memorable portion of the tour came from our tourguide Tony, who looks like a 6’4” version of Yao Ming. On the bus ride to the Palace, Tony showed us a map of China and said that it looked like a rooster or a cock. Then he pointed to one end, saying this was the cockhead, and the other end was the cocktail. Immediately, every male on the bus went into full Beavis & Butthead chuckle mode. Yes, men – they’ll never grow up. After the palace, a huge group walked over to a market area where food stalls were set up so that you could walk up and buy appetizers from a variety of vendors to fill your tummy. I had an awesome bowl of tofu and a dumpling, but our sub-group didn’t appear to be too adventurous. We didn’t have any takers for the grasshoppers or scorpions. So we just ate at a nearby restaurant and let our Chinese delegation (Liang and Yenyen) order for us again. And to finish the evening off, nine of us went in search of a massage parlor, and we found a pretty good one at the Peace Hotel. Liang, Rina, and I had a one-hour full-body massage while the rest had foot massages. And no I did not get a happy ending (Mom – don’t ask what that means, just move on please). My masseuse kept commenting in Chinese that I was very strong and had a lot of dense muscle, or at least that’s what interpreter Liang tells me. The massage did work out the kinks in my quads, which had been very tight for the past few days from my morning jogs. However, my back and shoulders had also been bothering me but I don’t think the masseuse had enough time to fix that quite up. After the full body massage, the three of us decided to follow it up with a one-hour foot massage. I learned that when you tell the masseuse if it hurts where she is massaging, she can tell you which part of your body that is linked up to and that it’s an indication that you have issues with that particular organ. For me, both feet indicated stomach problems (strangely enough, I’m suffering from a bout of heartburn just as I write this). Kevin (who had the foot massage first) decided to join us and do a full-body massage while we did our feet. Then he decided to let this masseuse dude (who also is a chiropractor and acupuncturist) do this thing called cupping on his back. Basically, cupping involves taking a mini fish bowl like thingamadoodle (~4” diameter), lighting a match in the bowl to expand the air by heating it up, placing the cup on your skin while the air is hot, and the subsequent cooling of the air will create suction. Don’t worry – I have pictures. Each of which are worth 1000 words. Supposedly, cupping does something about your Chi when the bowls are placed over the pressure points. Two of the twelve cuppings on Kevin’s back caused extra discoloration – the masseuse dude said that meant he had some issues there. Since my shoulders were still sore, I figured that I might as well try this too. One of the cups fell off and broke, and another one showed extra discoloration – supposedly, this one was linked up to one of my kidneys. Or perhaps it’s just a blood blister. Who knows? At the end, I was left with 11 little crop circles on my back. Very attractive indeed. Thursday, May 17, 2007 For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to sleep a wink last night – nonstop tossing and turning from the crazy firm beds (inspired by plywood), Liang snoring, me consciously trying to fall asleep when Liang wasn’t snoring, and some residual jetlag for sure. However, I somehow still remained completely coherent all day today as if nothing happened (though some would say that I’m not quite coherent in normal situations). Today’s morning class was taught by a professor from the Tsinghua Law School on the Legal Environment for doing business in China. I think the professor knew his stuff, but he just droned on and on and didn’t really use his own slides very much and didn’t really make any major points. At one point, one of my classmates asked him point-blank what he would consider the top 3 watch-outs or must-dos regarding the legal system and he somehow managed to skirt that too. Typical lawyer, I suppose! At the same time, this was a confirmation of one of the generalizations that we learned on Tuesday about Chinese people – they give too much context and take a long time to get to the point. One other thing that was apparent was that history explains a lot here as well – the CCP and Chairman Mao had essentially done away with laws during the Cultural Revolution. It was Mao’s way or the highway, except that I don’t think the highway was really an option. So the country basically had to recreate an entire legal and judiciary system from scratch after Mao passed away, and as a result, some legal frameworks that we are used to in the US simply don’t exist in China. Lunch today was from McDonald’s – your pick of a Big Mac or chicken sandwich. I opted for the chicken sandwich, but it didn’t taste right at all so I tossed it. The last thing I wanted to eat was McDonald’s though; I barely touch the stuff in the US and I’m certainly not planning on starting in China. So I just went back to the hotel to attempt to get a nap in. It didn’t work. This afternoon, we had a company visit to Lenovo, a electronics manufacturer who recently purchased IBM’s computer manufacturing division. The thought is that you’ll begin to see the Lenovo brand in the US in the next few years. Haier, a long time Chinese manufacturer of appliances and electronics, has already begun selling a few things. Anyway, the Lenovo trip was neat. We got to look at some of their new products. And then we got a tour through their assembly area. Their facility was pretty hi-tech and they’ve instituted lots of operational and supply chain improvements (automated warehouse, Kanban, grape charts, 5S to name a few). Liang and I had all sorts of more detailed questions on logistics and supply chain since we have a manufacturing background. Unfortunately, our guide could not answer any of our questions. You know – for a group of 60 MBA students, you’d think that the company would have a senior manager talk to us and give us the chance to ask more strategic questions. It didn’t happen at Capital Steel, and it didn’t happen here. Great. After Lenovo, we headed downtown to the Lao She Teahouse to watch a traditional Chinese variety show. They kicked it off with some traditional Chinese music, which somehow managed to resemble bluegrass music with all the twangs and slides in the performance. There was also a very poor and unfortunate martial arts performance from some supposed yong monks – I called them the Shaolin-monk-wannabees. But there were two really cool performances too: the first was a hand shadow performance (two guys making animals using their hands between a light source and a screen) with some unbelievably real looking dogs and birds. The second neat performance was a guy who balanced a huge jar on his head – he’d toss it in the air with his head and catch it again on the top or the side or even the rim. But jeez – give me 20 years of non-stop intensive training and I’m sure I could do that stuff as well. Show me something impressive already… Of note, on the busride to the show, Tony shared with us how he met his current girlfriend. One of his aunts set him up and they met at the subway and walked around and talked for 15 minutes or so. Then he told her “I think you are very clever and very beautiful and I think you would make a suitable match for me.” He was visibly blushing after he told us this. Tony’s the man. I’m going to try this line sometime – clearly, I can use all the help I can get. Now that my brother has gotten engaged, there’s no escaping the questions from my parents anymore. Damn you, Rupa! A bunch of us headed out to an ex-pat bar called The House of Suzie Wang – kind of a strange name for a bar, but whatever sells I suppose. It was too packed, so after an hour or so, we decided to go clubbing and took taxis to Babyface (the same one from a few nights previous). The music was very techno, which didn’t appeal to everyone, so half the group (including me) walked over to Face. Boy this seems repetitive. Friday, May 18, 2007 Last night, remembering my issues the previous night with falling asleep, I got some OTC sleeping pills from Quoc, who had successfully used them to conk out on the plane for the entire flight over – seemed like exactly what I needed. I looked at the box and it said to take 2 pills. So I did. When I attempted to wake up at 7am this morning, I wasn’t exactly in one piece. My body and my mind were simply not on the same page. I spoke with Quoc later on, and he told me that he only took 1 pill for the entire flight here. Couple that with the fact that I’ve probably only taken an OTC sleeping pill once before in my life and couple all that with me only looking for 4 hours of sleep and then I realized that I made a wee minor miscalculation error. This morning’s class was supposed to be on Corporate Strategy. The professor who taught it chose to not follow his slides whatsoever and kept going on tangents, and we ended up learning more about financial markets than anything else. He was a really good professor and very knowledgeable and we enjoyed his perspective, but he didn’t stick to topic. Even so, I learned a few good nuggets of info that I shall share with you: the country has deregulated significantly and the private sector now accounts for more than 80% of China’s GDP; SOEs are still established in key core businesses like telecom, utilities, and airlines; many SOEs function as a government work unit and not only as a corporation – in addition to a production function, they also have an administrative/social function to perform (hospitals, schools, etc.); and some of the small struggling SOEs were taken public with cooked books to bail them out in the stock market only to have the true performance become apparent a few years later. The professor had an interesting analogy to explain this last point: it’s like an ugly girl – she has plastic surgery to make her look pretty and someone marries her, then they have an ugly baby and the husband realizes that he has married an ugly girl. Political correctness is not a strong point of this faculty. In the afternoon, we had a class on Private Equity taught by a guy who works in industry. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your preference for learning new things), I don’t think I have much to share with you on this class. It had very little impact on me. Liang, Deborah, and I left early to get a taxi to the airport to catch a flight to Xi’an (home of the terra cotta warriors). Since we left during rush hour, the cabbie took a bunch of backroads and we got to see an ungodly amount of new construction for Olympic Village and other hotels for next summer’s big event. When we arrived at Xi’an, we were dropped off at a really nice looking hotel and realized that Liang’s uncle had the serious hook-ups. We were only charged 300 yuan per night per room, whereas the going rate was closer to 800 yuan per night (~105 USD). After settling in, we went to the Muslim section of town – apparently, there’s a large Muslim population in the city that started when the Mongolian Khan’s invaded and a few of the soldiers stayed back and settled here. This group of Muslims is their descendents. Anyway, the Muslim section is basically a street full of street vendors and neat little eating booths. So we walked around and did some window shopping and ate some random little appetizers before sitting down for a full meal. The food was crazy cheap – I think we paid about 30 RMB ($5 USD) for all 3 of us to fill up our tummies. But the best part of dinner was this “fashionable” Chinese dude at the table next to us, complete with Right Said Fred “I’m too sexy” inspired see-through top. However I would suggest that he should probably should lose the gut before going with that particular look. We took turns trying to secretly take pictures of him or take a video clip of him. Saturday, May 19, 2007 We started a full day tour this morning to go see some local sights and the terra cotta warriors. Our tour guide Sally was local, very fluent, and very knowledgeable. I kept wanting to ask her if the bus driver’s name was Harry. The first stop on the trip was to the Wild Goose Pagoda (not to be confused with the Wild Turkey Pagoda). This structure is over 1300 years old and was built to house a bunch of books that one of the first Buddhist monks brought over from India. The pagoda also leans a bit to the west, so Xi’anians call it their “Leaning Tower”. The next stop was to some ancient archeological ruins from way-prehistoric times. These ruins were discovered when some pots containing skeletal remains were excavated during construction of a power plant for the city. After discovery, the location for the new power station was moved elsewhere, and a massive structure was constructed in place to serve as a museum right there. For lunch, we were taken to a place that specialized in tour bus groups. In other words, they specialized in giving you a bunch of not-so-great food and letting you meander around their mall for a bit to do some convenient shopping. I actually ended up getting a Gore-Tex North Face jacket, but I had to do a bit of bargaining. This was my first foray into this since I had arrived, and I talked her down from 960 RMB to 350 RMB (~$45 USD). I now know that this even was probably way too much, but at the moment, I was proud of myself. Next, we were taken to a “terra cotta factory” which was essentially another excuse to go shopping for a few hours. I was less than amused. Finally, we were taken to the actual site of the terra cotta warriors. There are about 7000 of these statuettes at this site that were constructed long ago by an emperor who believed that he needed protection from his army in the after life. So he ordered his entire army to be cloned in clay, but 20% bigger. As a result, every one of the statuettes is unique and different and a mold had to be made for each person. After the emperor died, a general who was looking to take over the kingdom ordered all of the statues destroyed, so they’ve been working on restoring the statues to original condition – so far about 1100 have been reconstructed. Also, they haven’t completely excavated the entire site because they found that the paint fades over a few years and they want to try and preserve it when they can find the right technology. There are three pits of warriors on the site, and insanely massive buildings have been constructed over them to house them in place. Pit #2 is almost completely unexcavated – they believe that most of the warriors in this pit are still in tact and again don’t want to ruin the paint by uncovering them too early. The weather was extremely hot today, and the smog was getting outright unbearable. By the end of the trip, I had come down with something and decided to stay in for dinner and get some rest. My stomach was queasy, my sinuses were stuffy, and I had a headache. Xi’an is surrounded by mountains on three sides, so this could explain the thickness of the smog. I don’t think we saw a blue sky the entire time we were there – just this grayness hanging around. Ick. Ordering room service for dinner was quite an experience though. For the first time this trip, I didn’t have Liang around to translate for me. So I called up room service and asked for the Beef with Oyster Sauce. However, somehow I had ordered the Minestrone Soup instead. After a few back and forths with the lady on the phone, she put someone else on the phone and we went back and forth again a few times. Finally, I realized that they were expecting me to order by number and thought that I was ordering B-4 (sounds like Beef) which was the Minestrone Soup, whereas I was looking for an L-5. That was some nice excitement. Then the dish came with mushrooms, rendering half of it inedible for me. Mushrooms are part of the slimy food group, which I don’t care to partake in. There’s also the sticky food group (which includes caramel and honey) which I also try to avoid. Okie doke. That’s all for now. I’ll send you the next write-up as soon as I have it completed. Until next time… Tidbits: 1. Chinese people seem to have some strange fascination with the English language. Most people walk around with T-shirts that have words emblazoned on them in English, even though they can’t read the language. The strange thing is that often these English phrases make absolutely no sense – we saw one that said “Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke” and another that said “We delieve in the fower of lovers. Lovers rock.” right underneath a small skull and crossbones. 2. There’s also some strange fascination with Snoopy. In the course of a single day, we came across three different items emblazoned with a Snoopy logo. The first was a cheap ball point pen that came with our welcome packet. Later, an old lady’s hat had the little Snoopy figure printed all over it. And lastly, a worker at the steel factory had some very crass artwork stenciled on the hood of his car; but he also had Snoopy car seat covers. 3. Random aside… one of the more underappreciated song lyrics is from Coolio’s song “1, 2, 3, 4” where he pines that “if you got beef, then eat a porkchop”. Excellent advice. I think I’ll have a T-shirt made with this line on it. (Sorry about that – I was listening to my I-pod when I was writing this update, and I have this song on there.) 4. I had forgotten my sunblock back home. So I went to a shopping centre to buy some, and all lotions (including suncream) were “whitening”. The standard Chinese consumer has fair skin, and therefore “whitening” lotion blends in with their skin. On my skin, the opposite is true. 5. We learned that infrastructure is growing in China at the rate of a full city of Houston per month. And since Houston is crazy spread out, so that’s a crazy amount of development.