Perhaps I need a few more business trips to China during my 6 month wait for my Sky.
So I've been to China 4 times in the last year...each time for about 2-3 weeks at a time on business. I work for a battery company with a CM outside of the "enterprise zone" of Shenzhen in a place called Long Hua Village. So we get to spend some time in Hong Kong, and went partying a whole lot. Mostly I hang out in an area called Shekou (part of Shenzhen), which is a famous expat area where Dung Shao Ping gave his speech and opened the China ecomomy to the outside world. If you can look past the Tienamen Square incident (which I can't), he really has been the greatest thing to happen to China since the commies took over. Mind you I don't support the government, but the people are so amazing and have such a beautiful county.
It's a shame the air quality in Shenzhen is so crappy, and the pollution is disgusting and the quality of life for the average Chinee is kind of depressing.
I sadly didn't take many pictures of the really fun stuff (not sure if it would have been right because some of the things we did were a whole lot of fun), but here's one from our CM's building....They built the buildings before the roads...on my first trip (april 2005) that road you can see was a 30 foot deep hole where they were running water mains. By December the whole road was done. Just out of site is the "garbage pit" where they burn all their trash every Monday and Thursday. The stench is horrible.
The second is Hong Kong's Victoria peak, then a B&W of inside the airport terminal, and last a room full of 100,000+ batteries waiting to be sorted...
If you ever get the chance to go, make every effort to try. I never knew how much world was out there until I got away from seeing white people everywhere I went. BTW I am white...I finally understand the concept of discrimnation and unease people feel when being judged by the color of their skin. When working on a Saturday, I got a chance to see the families that live in the complex where they make the batteries. When they saw me coming out of our lab, the whole few hundred of them stopped their fun and games and stared at me like I was an alien...think something like..."My god white people really do exist...and look how fat they are."
Which brings me to my last little tidbit. Over there, people really like taking English names because some names are so hard to pronounce, and it helps people who don't speak Mandarin feel more comfortable. So I said that if a girl can call herself Victoria, I needed my own Chinese nickname....So they said I was fat, or rather "Big". And since my first name is Sean, it sounds an awful lot like the word for mountain. So my nickname became "Big Mountain" or 大山. Pronounced Dow Shun.
