#UPDATED: Today after our breakfast, we met up with Kenny at the Beijing Railway Station to catch our train to ZiBo. A town three hours away from Beijing. The train ride was quick and comfortable.
As soon as we arrived we took a Taxi to the place of our project, where Kenny worked for a long time. It was a newly built mall, where our company designed the security camera, elevator, escape and air-conditioning infrastructure. We were allowed to visit the „ZiBo Adventures“ weiterlesen
Autor: Jan-Lukas Plenio
Slow Saturday
We woke up moderately early on Saturday. We went around the corner to the western supermarket
to try out the loaf of bread they were offering. Our verdict: Its not bad, but not great either. One can guess what taste they were trying to accomplish.
With new energy we met Li and Zhu outside to play some ping pong. We were not allowed to use the indoor tables in the basement of the school, so the ones outside had to make do.
After a few hours of showing our Chinese friends what’s what in the world of table tennis we went inside and started to study and go through „Slow Saturday“ weiterlesen
Enjoying work
The alarm clock woke us at 07:30. Alex was so kind to go out and buy our breakfast baguettes on his own, so that I had time to wash my hair under freezing *ass water. We waited at 08:30 at the bus stop. Unfortunately we couldn’t take the first bus, even though it was the correct line, but it wouldn’t have stopped at our destination. The second bus arrived minutes later, cramped and full. The drive took longer than usual due to heavy traffic on the streets. Nevertheless we arrived at work on time. Johnny welcomed us and we went straight to work. Our task was to set up a SQL database and expand our knowledge of the syntax and various commands.
When Lili arrived it again was time for some more gifts. She brought us „Enjoying work“ weiterlesen
Guo An Electronics
Our first upcoming day working in an Chinese company began by waking up at 7am in the morning. We quickly got dressed and went to a French bakery to buy two baguettes for breakfast. The day before we already bought some honey and nutella, that guranteed a tasty first meal of the day. We met with Zhu at 07:50 to walk together to the bus stop, where we met with teacher Chen. They wanted to show/teach us the route we would have to take to get to our workplace from now on.
It was a one hour drive to our new workplace at a firm called „Guo An Electronics“. The company is located on the 14’th and 15’th floor of the JM International Hotel.
The working atmosphere seems nice. Its very bright and the rooms are well air-conditioned. The employees work in a small cubicals, but not as cramped as you see in the movies. We met with two employees Hang and Gong, unfortunately neither of them speak English. That is why the content of our conversation remaineded at a bare minimum. Quickly they set up two cubicals for us, but that was it. We hadn’t really been assigned a task or anything. Everyone was very forthcoming and friendly but lacking a real plan for us. Before lunch a female employee approached us and greeted us with:
Beijing Roast Duck and kTV
On Sunday morning we were greeted by Li, Zhu and our new closer friend called Lee Xu. We walked towards the subway station to drive to a place where we would eat breakfast. We, again, had no idea what to expect, but after a few minutes in the subway an a short walk we arrived at a more expensive restaurant. We were seated at a very nice table and were told we would eat the famous Beikjing Roast Duck. Besides the duck we ordered many different side dishes and rice. The first dishes arrived quickly and were served by our waiter, which age didn’t seem older than maybe eleven. Everything expect one dish was fking amazing. The flavors, the spiciness, the fresh ingredients, the perfectly cooked meat. Just wow. The kicker of course was the roast duck itself. Covered within a small pancake wrap together with slices of cucumber and sweet bean sauce:
Here’s a video of Zhu showing how it’s done:
English Corner Endurance Test
On Friday we awoke in our room, which sadly was still cold.
The heater only seems to work for about 15min and then shuts itself down.
We headed towards the canteen to get something warm to eat for breakfast.
We were to afraid to try something new, thats why we settled on chicken burgers,
we already knew were a treat to eat:
Afterwards we were off to electronics class, where we learned about logic gates.
To our surprise we actually understood some of the material the teacher tried to teach 🙂
A glimpse at the teachers computer screen revealed, that she had the tools to watch
the screens of every student in the room and remote control them:
Even though they have those surveillance tools, they don’t really seem to care 🙂
For lunch we had our trademark beef noodles, that we grew very fond of.
For me it’s the best thing we have eaten so far.
While working on our network design we had to create with real Cisco devices,
we were told that afterwards we should go to the English Corner together.
The English Corner is located in the Remni University campus. It’s a small park
where Chinese citizens, foreigners and students gather every Friday afternoon to
practice their oral English skills.
We did not really knew what to expect and as soon as we set foot on the premises
we were approached by dozens of Chinese citizens from every angle. They were coming at
us like bees. Soon two large crowds gathered around me and Alex and we nearly
talked to them two hours straight. The conversation topics ranged from German Education,
to German History to the Chinese former „One Child Policy“.
It was overwhelming and exhausting, but very educational and
definitely helpful for our English skills!
Exhausted, but pleased we took the subway home, grabbing a cold Yanjing Beer on the way.
Gallery:
Till next time…
Your Luke and Axel spreadsheet
Wednesday
We again woke up early this morning, having to go to class at 08:15 and eating breakfast 08:00.
Today we had burgers, which tasted quite good, mcdonalds quality, but for only 10Yuan!
Strengthened by our healthy meal we headed towards JAVA-class. We were greeted by our friendly teacher „Melody“. The lessons were quite interesting, learning about access modifiers.
Each student had his own computer to work on and a live broadcast on screen of what the teacher was doing. Giving the students the possibility to work side by side with what the teacher tutored.
Additionally the teacher had the ability to lock all students PCs to force them to listen 🙂
top picture: full focused learning!
bottom picture: playing some games during breaks 😛
After three 45min blocks of very educative java lessons we again headed towards the canteen
and ordered a soup I had noticed a day earlier. It was delicious and prepared freshly:
Afterwards we rushed towards networking-class, but were quickly interrupted by our teacher Mr Chen who asked us to go to a Cisco meeting with him. The meeting was held in Chinese, as well as the powerpoint and the handed out materials, fortunately we had a small private chat afterwards with the cisco representative, so not all was in vain.
We ended our day at a local bar, having German beer and fries.
A little bit pricey, but with a very nice ambiance and most importantly „fast“ Wifi!
Till tomorrow
die Pekinenten
Our easter
Early in the morning Zhu & Lee waited for us to head into town together
and enjoy a delicious breakfast. Not far away from our College we entereda very small restaurant and were told to eat donkey.
The dish consisted of a small soup and bread with donkey meat:
All in all the dish was quite delicious. A little bit greasy,
but tasted interesting and fresh.
After our donkey breakfast we headed towards the subways station
to travel to Tiananmen Square. At the entrance of every subwaystation
is an extensive security check, more thorough than at Tegel-Airport,
which is a pain and really time consuming.
We tried to enter the national museum as well as the forbidden city,
but both were that heavily crowded due to the Qingming Festival (Tomb-sweeping Day),
that we decided to try another day and only take a look from outside:
Instead we headed towards the wangfujing market. After a quick detour at McDonalds,
we were prepared to enjoy the culinary delicacies Peking has to offer.The highlight was scorpion on a stick, which died on the grill before you own eyes.
The taste was interesting to say the least, but all in all it was nothing one would miss.
Lee, Zhu, Alex and I ended the day with having dinner together at a small restaurant nearby.
I had handmade noodles with „meat“, which later, because I complained about the
indistinguishable rotten smell, turned out to be intestine…
From donkey, to scorpion, ending at intestine – nom nom.
The beginning
Our destination, 7353km away. We would travel this distance in a little more than nine hours.
Alex and I met up at Tegel Airport on Friday at 6pm. After a Frappuccino Mocha at *bucks
we headed towards check in. Everything went smoothly, no complications with our luggage.
The flight with Hainan Airlines was a straight flight with a duration of ~9 hours.
The ambiance in the aircraft was quite noisy, lots of people talking, chinese
elevator music in the background and hectic stewardesses trying to calm the crowd.
Nevertheless time flew by with a good amount of inflight entertainment and red wine refills.
Tired but happy, we made it!
On our way out of the airport, after we fetched our luggage, we were greeted by our teacher Chen,
two Students (Li & Zhu) and one man, the driver?, who remained unknown to us. They were overly attentive towards us, immediately carrying our luggage for us. It was awkward. The 1/2 hour ride
to our college did not help either. Li & Zhu have only a very limited amount of English vocabulary and
our teacher Chen has a mixture of basic English and Chinese accent, which is very difficult to understand, too. Alex and I did our best to make conversation and Li & Zhu seemed to use a
prefabricated list of questions to help get things along.
After we arrived at the Beijing Polytechnic College they showed us our luxurious apartment,
located in the girls barracks, which will serve as our new home for the coming two months.
Normally this apartment provides more than sufficient living space for a total of eight students,
but fortunately we had it all for ourself.
Overwhelmed by our impressions we were led to a restaurant famous for their delicious dumplings.
Our guides placing the order was a more timeconsuming task than one would imagine – total of 20min.
The dumplings were delicious and came in huge quantities.
to be continued, n8n8