The "Family Style Workshops" of Huizhou

So it's been an interesting week. One of our US employees, designer Brian, has been in China for meetings with subcontractor factories and our Chinese design team in preparation for our meeting with Lowe's Hardware next week. Consequently, we've been running around all of Guangdong Province to various factories big and small in order to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the last week, I've been to Huizhou twice, Foshan once, and the very famous district of Foshan, Shunde, which is home to some of the larger factories in China.

Yesterday was one of the more interesting factory visits of my life. Brian the US designer, Jacky the manager of the sales team, and a few other employees were heading out to Huizhou to visit a factory that produced stone/slate tabletops for some of our tabletop firepits. We weren't really given any information about the factory beforehand, and apparently no one from our company had ever visited this factory before. About an hour outside of Shenzhen, still around 20km from proper Huizhou, we pulled off the highway and through some dusty, winding sidestreets until we arrived at an impasse. We didn't know where we were going, per se. We called the factory owner, who came with his little 2-door Lexus from the mid-1990's, to meet us at our location. We followed him for about 3 minutes until we pulled up to the factory. He emerged from the car, a fairly stocky Chinese man in his late 30's, one of the thousands of entrepreneurs who had come to Guangdong province for  a chance to prove their mettle in the free-market experience of modern China.

This was the factory...Notice the very house-like nature of it

"Looks like this is someone's house...", said Brian, upon our pulling into what was very much a driveway of sorts

"Ah, factory very large", I muttered sarcastically in Chinese to our driver.

From what we could see on the outside, this factory literally was a 3-story rickety old house, complete with clotheslines hanging from the 2nd and 3rd floor balconies. Upon walking into the factory "office", it became increasingly apparent that this was, indeed, some guy's house. What made this so apparent, you ask?

Well, one of the rooms adjoining the office was a kitchen. And even more interestingly, another of the rooms adjoining the office was a bedroom....

So we were in some guy's house.

"Can we see the production area?", Jacky asked, which I was quite interested to hear the answer to.

This was where they got their supplies from...unclear whether
it was just a pile of stone that they'd found, or if they ordered it

We were led around the back of the house, where there was a largeish (maybe like 1,500 square feet) shed. The shed had an aluminum roof, a small forklift, and about 8 people working back there, cutting stone to make tabletops. This was, as it would turn out, the factory. After our tour of the production area, we were led across the street to the area where they stored their raw materials. As you can see from the photo at left, this was not quite what one would expect from any type of factory, even a Chinese one. It was more or less a pile of rubble on the side of the road. That said, they did have some very nice-looking stone samples, and overall it seemed to have a decent level of organization to it. The owner proudly showed us varying shades of stone, and explained that they hand-cut all stone in order to make their tabletops. The potential of an order from us would allow this factory owner to expand his operation and possibly buy up the property next door, which would more than double his production capacity. He seemed to have an air of want, but far from desperation, in regard to securing our business. Finally, having seen the production area and material storage, he showed us one of the samples of their final products. I must say, it was pretty freaking impressive. A beautifully done, hand-made stone tile tabletop, something that I could easily see on someone's patio in the US. Remarkable to think that it was produced here, in all places, a random little factory-house in Huizhou. I was speaking with a friend of mine about this last night, and she informed me that these are quite common. Apparently the Chinese name is 家庭式作坊, lit. "family style workshop". Really amazing stuff.

All things considered, they do make bloody nice products

So overall a very interesting day in Huizhou. After the first factory, we went to a larger one which involved us doing a huge lunch with the factory 老板, or big boss. Designer Brian was slightly squeemish going into the meal based on his general bad luck with Chinese food, but he really enjoyed most of the dishes of what turned out to be a magnificent lunch. Will be returning to Chicago for 8 days a week from tomorrow, so that should be nice. Definitely looking forward to a deep dish pizza and some proper dessert (I love Chinese food, don't get me wrong, but that is the one place they lack to a staggering extent..dessert. Absolutely pitiful). So probably in store for some pie upon arrival in the US. And maybe some real proper ice cream (note: you can get like a nice Haagen Dazs ice cream here, it just costs like $9). Anyway, so dessert and deep-dish pizza are high on my list. And I assume I'll probably get China-sick about 4/5 days into my Chicago trip and have to make a run to Chinatown for some egg tarts, hot pot, and juice-boxed lemon tea. We'll see how that goes I guess.

Meantime, the next week should be good, I've been hanging out a fair bit with designer Brian, and it's been really nice having a fellow US citizen here to talk to while at the office. Very nice to be able to chat about the olympics, US politics, how much we both miss food in the US, and the like. Makes work more enjoyable. Apart from that, not much else going on, will try to post another blog tomorrow about some of the huge factories we visited in Foshan this past weekend. I've recently been inspired by the writing of a friend of mine who is turning his former HK blog into a book, and consequently will be trying to write more consistently for the time being...we'll see how long that lasts.

Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. One of the Most Brutal Vacations of my Life

I'm not much for organized travel. Rather, the ideal trip for me involves flying into developing country X (preferably sans return airfare), with a guidebook, a backpack, and a sense of "well, we don't really have any reason to be here, so let's make the best of it and see how things go". I've had a lot of incredible trips fitting this mold, and hope to continue taking trips like this for many years.

Like Shooting Fish in a....Pond?

This past weekend we had a "company sponsored holiday", which involved a 4-day trip to Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai. Now for those who have actually traveled in their lifetimes, you'll notice that this is a 3-city trip in 4 days. That is to say, there is a 0% chance that we were actually going to "see" any of these cities, it was just going to be "get on the bus, get off the bus" for 4 days. I sort of expected this, as it's a very Chinese style of travel, and tried to mentally prep myself for the rather ho-hum nature of this type of trip. But my god could I have never prepared myself for what went down that weekend in the Yangtze River Delta.

We left the office at about 5:30am on Thursday. After flying from Shenzhen to Hangzhou, we were immediately hurled into a bus with a tour guide. A really. obnoxious. tour guide. He had a microphone with like a hip-speaker thing, and was yelling into it the entire trip. In very obnoxious Chinese. So that was pretty awesome. Our first stop on the trip was a pretty decent restaurant in Hangzhou, as we arrived about lunchtime. It was immediately obvious that I was going to be something of a "guest of honor" during this trip--I always sat at the head table, immediately next to the sister of the 2 brothers that own this company (the brothers were not on the holiday, and their sister is what I would refer to as the "Company Mom", just a really nice 40ish year old Chinese woman who speaks about as much English as I do Arabic....so she's pitch-perfect). Anyway, so we had a decent lunch. After lunch we went to the pretty amazing West Lake of Hangzhou, and took a very crowded touristy boat around the West Lake. Still decent. We walked around that area for most of the afternoon, before going to a sort of shopping street, then this bizarre Song Dynasty-themed Chinese amusement park/folk village/mental institution/song and dance theater. Yeah, it was all of the above. Weird first day overall, but nothing compared to the devastation of Day 2.

Temple somewhere near Hangzhou

Day 2. A brutal day for sure. We got on the bus in Hangzhou, and our first stop was a "silk museum". By silk museum, I mean a place where they tell you how silk is made, then spend an hour trying to convince you to buy some silk. And of course I'm in the market for silk scarves, bedsheets, and lingerie, if not this may have been a pointless excursion. That said, there was some entertainment when, on their map of the old Silk Road, they had labeled Kuala Lumpur as a city in Northern Sri Lanka (I assume they meant to say Colombo...) Anyway, so after this whole silk business, we went to an equally asinine place that was a "Chrysanthemum Tea Museum". Same thing, "here's our tea, here's how it's made, now buy some". Should also be noted that this was all in Chinese. And of course I"m in the market for chrysanthemum related products, otherwise this may have been a pointless excursion. From here, we went to a place selling various trinkets. And of course I'm in the market for that too, otherwise...well you get the point. Anyway, all these places were ~1 hour apart by bus (ferally hot bus as well), so by the time we'd been harassed to the point of wanting to stab the tour guide, the day was done and we were just arriving in Suzhou.

A brief aside--I asked Lisa why the hell we had wasted 1 of our 4 days doing an unbelievable amount of shopping/completely idiotic activities. She informed me that this is how the tour guide makes money--he gets commission from the shops if we buy things. Frankly, I would be just as happy giving the guy like $10 (or even less, we could realistically each give him like $5, and the $200 he makes would be about 2 weeks' wage in China), and just have that extra day to not be assaulted by merchants peddling their crap. But apparently this is not how China works. Also quite interesting, none of my Chinese coworkers seemed fazed or aggravated about this absurd series of shopping misadventures.

The lads, Jacky (#3 guy in the company) and Michael (Old friend of the owner's, company chef)

Day 3 was interesting, we went to a very beautiful old village called Zhouzhuang, which was definitely one of the coolest places I've ever seen. Appropriately named the "Venice of the East", it is world famous for its canal system, and I was pretty surprised and intrigued to find that many people were still living here despite it being a tourist-infested village.

Zhouzhuang, the Venice of the East

Another brief aside--days 3 and 4 of this trip (Saturday and Sunday) were absolutely mental from the standpoint of the INSANE NUMBER OF TOURISTS AT THESE SITES. And they were all Chinese. I had no idea that domestic tourism in China was such an enormous industry, but I can assure you that having 10 tour guides with 10 hip-speakers screaming at their tour groups inside a relatively cramped temple is not the greatest way to enjoy the historical relevance and general awesomeness of these places. But anyway, such is life when the country you're living in has 1.3+ billion people.

So after our tours around Suzhou, we finally arrived in the center of the center, the economic heart of the People's Republic of China, one of my favorite cities in this world (as of now, currently #3 on my list behind Hong Kong and Seoul), Shanghai. Upon arrival, I left the tour group to go meet up with my old friend Douglon, who I had lived with for about a month in Hong Kong upon my return to Asia in October-November 2011. He's currently living in Shanghai and managing his Dad's building, the House of Roosevelt. I met up with him at the House, which was a surreal experience. Put bluntly, it is one of the nicest buildings on the nicest and most famous street in China's most cosmopolitan and expensive city. The building has a restaurant on the 8th floor, where we went for dinner.

At this point 2 things should be noted--

1) I had already eaten dinner at this point.
2) Douglon is a world renowned eater, and more importantly, a world renowned host. So I knew what I was getting into to some extent, but was sure to tell Douglon upon my arrival

"Now Douglon, I've already had dinner. So can we just do some appetizers or something else light?"
"Of course, no problem at all"

As it was Douglon, I should have known better. The next thing I knew, a waiter asked me how I would like my steak cooked. Sweet jesus. Before dinner, I ended up getting a text from Martin, the old friend that I'd met up with in Hong Kong a couple of weeks prior. He was in Shanghai, and came to meet us at the House of Roosevelt (he's also a good friend of Douglon's, so it was a nice reunion). We were also joined by another friend of Douglon's, a Peruvian girl who had grown up in Sweden. The four of us enjoyed a magnificent meal atop one of the nicest buildings in the city, with a beautiful view of Pudong/Lujiazui and The Bund. Or at least, the 3 of them enjoyed the meal, as well as the sight of me trying to force down more food after having already eaten dinner.

Wuxinting Tea House, Shanghai

Overall a fantastic evening. The following day, I went with some coworkers to a really interesting temple near the Wuxinting Tea House and Yuyuan Gardens. I'd been to the exact place almost exactly a year before, which was kind of cool. Following this, I ended up meeting up with another couple of old friends of mine, Madlien and Martin, who are currently living/working in Shanghai. We went to the French Concession, a beautiful, leafy, up-scale area of Shanghai, and had a few afternoon drinks. I then received a call from Douglon inviting us for an afternoon lunch/few drinks at the House of Roosevelt. It should be noted that they have the largest wine cellar in China there, and that Douglon, being a ridiculously good host, would not take a cent for the food or wine. Consequently, we had a fair bit of food and wine. The food was infinitely better than the night before, as this time I was not already horrendously full, and we had a couple of bottles of white wine/champagne. I was to meet with my coworkers at Pudong International Airport around 4pm. The House is around 1hr from the airport by taxi, and consequently when 3:45pm rolled around, we decided I'd best hightail it to Pudong. And so I did, but not before falling asleep in the back of the cab (too many glasses of champagne it would seem), only to be woken by a call from Jacky asking where I was (though to be fair, they didn't care that I was a bit late, as the weather was crap and our flight ended up being delayed a bit anyway).

So that was the trip to Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. As I noted in the beginning of this blog post, I tend to prefer trips that are completely unplanned. After returning from this atrociously constricting trip, I decided it was time to book something stupid, so yesterday I booked 1-way airfare from Hong Kong to Dhaka for the day after my birthday, as we have 1 week's holiday for Chinese National Day that week (I was really, really, really hoping to do Tibet, but unfortunately the Chinese government has closed Tibet to foreigners for the foreseeable future....welcome to China!). For those who don't know where Dhaka is, you clearly haven't been reading my blog often enough, as I wrote a fairly decent piece on Bangladesh last year. Anyway, so will be heading there for some amount of time in late September. Interestingly, that's the tail end of the rainy season, so should involve some flooding and perhaps malaria. And I cannot freaking wait.

That's about all from here, interesting and manic trip to the Yangtze River Delta, and making plans for an even more interesting trip to Bangladesh. Some photos from the trip below (apologies that they're a little grainy, my camera broke the other day...5 years old so that'll happen, so I used my iPad camera on the trip, which is not bad, but not sensational. Also, if my grandfather is reading this, a huge thanks for the iPad a few months back, it's been remarkably useful so far, and had I not had it during these last few days, I would have had no pictures of the amazing places I just went to. Also happy belated birthday to my grandfather, and belated father's day to both he and my Dad)

Weird Song Dynasty Themed Theme Park

Near Hangzhou

Love the Chinglish

Yeah it was this crowded in the temple...

Photo of the Day--February 23, 2012

Guangdong Province has been known as the "workshop of the world" for the last few decades, and for good reason. This behemoth of a province, with its 104 million inhabitants, was responsible for over 1/3 of China's exports up until a few years ago, when the cities around Shanghai began to grow in importance due to the Chinese government's efforts to make Shanghai the "Crown Jewel of the New China", and also due to rising labor costs in Guangdong. So basically, what I'm trying to say, is that odds are many things that you've bought in your life originated right here in Guangdong Province, in one of its innumerable factories.

And yet, unless your name is Griffin Curcio or Dalton Grambo, if you're reading this blog you probably haven't been to one of these factories, seen photos of one, or heard much about them. My company's factory is probably on the smaller end of the scale of Chinese factories--we employ between 500 and 700 factory workers, depending on time of year, and we occupy 3 pretty damned huge factory buildings in an industrial park outside of Shenzhen, in an area called Guangming New Area.

So what is life like in these factories, you ask? Well, it's interesting, that's for sure. I've really only noticed one glaring safety issue, that being the fact that in the hazardous painting room,there are a lot of signs showing people with big sort of like haz-mat masks on. I don't speak good Chinese, but I have to assume those signs indicate that not wearing a mask in these rooms could lead to death. That, and the fact that upon walking into the room, you're hit instantly with the smell of paint, and with an infinite number of infinitely small particles floating through the hazy air. So obviously, a place where masks are pretty necessary. ~25% of the people in there don't wear them. Oh god....

The factory workers are, for the most part, housed in dormitories on the factory property. These dorms are not luxurious. There are about 8 people to a dorm, and the conditions are a little bit cramped. Though overall, it's definitely not anywhere near as iffy as I was expecting. The factory is running 24 hours per day, 6 days per week--there are several shifts so there are always people in the factory working, though during daytime hours the number of workers is considerably higher than in the evening. The workers are also entitled to ridiculously cheap meals. The lunch served at the factory costs the line workers 1 yuan, and the administrative workers 4 yuan. 1 yuan=~$0.16, 4 yuan=~$0.66. So a 16 cent lunch if you're a line worker. The meals I've had at the factory are actually not that bad--certainly not gourmet, but decently palatable. Usually they consist of like 5 different dishes, usually 2 vegetable, 1 tofu, 1 pork, and 1 rice. I've noticed something fairly interesting--the workers all bring their own metal bowls. It's kind of cool, just seeing everyone after lunch washing out their metal bowl and putting it in this large metal bowl holding cabinet thing in the factory mess hall. And with that, the photo of the day:

And there you have it. Another pretty crappy photo. However, should be noted that I was at the office again quite late yesterday, and afterwards went out to a bar to meet a couple of businesspeople working in SZ, so really didn't have a whole lot of time to take a decent photo. HOWEVER, I do think that this photo does at least have some level of character. As I'm quite sure most of you have guessed, this is the cabinet for people's steel bowls. I think that in theory, it should be closed for a decent amount of time per day, and the thing probably "bathes" those bowls in UV light or something to disinfect them, but the fact is, in theory, fire extinguisher is spelled as such, but the sign immediately next to that cabinet spells it as "Extinouhier". Pretty sure that's not French, it's just wrong.

As far as factory wages are concerned, I don't know exactly what the wages are, but I'm pretty sure that for the more skilled positions, monthly salary is somewhere in the 3,000RMB per month range (about $500US). For very unskilled positions, I think it's more like <2,400RMB per month ($400). Again, estimates. The better-paid administrative people actually make pretty good money, I have no idea how much, but I know that when I went to the US with mad-dog James (a legendary 40-something Chinese man who I'm pretty sure has a handful of 20-something girlfriends), he bought an unlocked iPhone 4S...a $700US investment. He's sort of like the head of R&D, so it's very possible that he's on close to what I'm on, if not a bit more. It should be noted, he speaks absolutely 0 words of English. Which is why it was even more hilarious in the US when Jacky (my immediate boss, who speaks very good English) and I would be speaking with a customer and just be like... "Where did James go?" "Well, he can't get very far, he can't even say hello". This would inevitably lead to us finding him just wandering around some random parking lot or something in amazement, just having a great time wandering around. Legend.

Anyway, so I understand this blog post has been pretty fragmented, I've been writing it over the course of several hours during the morning between assorted work tasks (incidentally, I interviewed 2 people today for jobs within the company...how the hell I have the authority or qualifications to do that, I have no idea). So for that, I apologize, but again, it's not as though anyone's forcing you to read it, I'm just spamming the hell out of Facebook! So that's about all for today, see you all tomorrow :-D

A Pretty Interesting Realization: 30 Days of Blogging, Day 5

Interesting situation I found myself in today: I was driving to meet up with a friend at an Indian restaurant nearby my house, when it sort of occurred to me--I'm leaving for China on Wednesday (and yes, I realize that I won't actually be getting to China until 28 October, as I'm taking a bit of a west coast trip prior, but I'm leaving home Wednesday). Furthermore, I'm going to Shenzhen without a job, and with about enough money to last like 2-3 months. It was sort of a shocking realization, along the lines of "what the heck did I get myself in to?" thing.

This is not to say I was having second thoughts about going. I'm quite sure that China is where I want to be for the long-term, not to mention where there will be economic opportunities in greater abundance during my lifetime. It simply dawned on me that this would probably be a bit more complicated of a move than I'd previously thought. However, very shortly after realizing this, I got a pretty surprising phone call, from a +86 number. For those who aren't familiar, +86 is the country code for China. That is, at noon on a Monday in Chicago, Illinois, I was getting a call from someone in China, where it was 1:00am on Tuesday morning. Needless to say I was intrigued, and answered the phone so enthusiastically that I'd imagine the guy on the other line was more startled than a rural Chinese person seeing a 6'1" white guy. Or something like that.

Anyway. So this phone call turned out to be in regard to a position I applied for in Shenzhen about 2 weeks ago. The position came to my attention through a messageboard for the teaching program I was doing, and it was a job for a teaching position that involved "coaching" students who were going to be going to university in the United States. The Chinese guy on the other line and I spoke for a fair bit of time, and I've sent off a few letters of recommendation, writing samples, etc. If nothing else, a promising (and conveniently timed!) development in my job search.

After having had this phone conversation, I was completely reassured that it would indeed be quite manageable to find a decent job in Shenzhen upon arrival. Which is just a bit more evidence that following one's dreams, or at the least, doing something that you really want to do even though many people are telling you otherwise, is probably easier than the vast majority of people would have you believe. So for those of you who want to do something outrageous or seemingly impossible, my suggestion is to do it now! Otherwise, you may never be able to do so. And really, what's the worst that could happen?

Further job development--I've now got another interview set up with a German company upon arrival in Shenzhen. It was pretty encouraging when they instructed me to meet at the Shangri-La near Luo Hu, which is just one of the nicest properties in Shenzhen to my knowledge. It would be a real job (i.e. something that could be a career), so that'll be fun.

Apart from that, just trying to pack as lightly as possible as I get ready to head off to the great American West on a journey to return to the Far East. And this 30 posts in 30 days thing is already getting difficult, it's tough to be insightful in a universal way every day, but we'll see how it goes!

More news to come as I feel like posting it.

Macau, Finnish People, Shark Fin, Pig Stomach, and "The Netherlands???"

Tom Petty wrote a song a few years ago on his album “Highway Companion” entitled “Big Weekend”. In this song, he talks about “crossing every border with nothing to declare”, “going to hit the bars”, and “jokes in your language not coming out the same”. This past weekend involved all of the following, and then some. Friday afternoon after classes I headed to U-Hall to hang out with the guys over there. What happened there can only be described as once-in-a-lifetime. We hung out there for a bit, and as we were leaving for LKF, we passed by a bit of an alcove near the door of U-Hall. Inside, from what we could see, was some huge religious ceremony with about 50 people, with incense, offerings, and roast pig. We walked in, and found ourselves in a once-a-year ceremony. Essentially the people here (most of which were students) were praying to their ancestors, leaving out fruit for the dead, and roasting 3 enormous pigs. We were invited in (and were the only Westerners). We all decided to partake in the ceremony, which included lighting incense sticks and bowing to their shrine. We also had to write our names on some sort of banner, and while everyone else had written theirs in Chinese, we all wrote ours in English. Perhaps a bit sacrilegious, but eh, cultural immersion can get sketchy like that sometimes. We then sat down among these 50 or so Chinese and ate some roast pork and some wonderful cake (which was actually kind of like a bit firmer version of jell-o) that was prepared by a woman who has worked at U-Hall for over 50 years. We ended up staying for about an hour and a half, it was definitely one of the highlights of HK so far. After that we went out to LKF and sort of mulled around for about 4 hours, before deciding (at Henry’s recommendation) to hit up the “3:00am Dim Sum place. For those who aren’t familiar with this (which included myself about 48 hours ago), Dim Sum is somewhat similar to Latin tapas, basically a bunch of people get together and order relatively small portions of like 30 different things. The reason this place in particular is called the 3:00am Dim Sum place is because they don’t open until 3:00am, and close at noon. We didn’t know how to get there, so we got a cab and said “3:00am Dim Sum place”. The guy knew exactly what we were talking about, and took us right there. The place defined hole-in-the-wall. It was maybe 500 sqft. of eating space, and was absolutely jam packed with Chinese people. We got a big table (9 of us) in the corner, and ate one of the most glorious meals of my life. Absolutely incredible, we all had a bit of everything for about $4US. Got back and went to bed, given that I’d need to be up at 8:00 for Macau.

Saturday morning we went to Macau. It was a real good group, myself, Elliott, Lexx, Oliver, Cindy, and Rob. We got there and walked around the town for awhile before heading to the ruins of the Cathedral there, which was destroyed by an earthquake a few centuries ago. Took some good pictures there before heading up to an observation deck sort of thing, which offered some awesome views of Macau. We then headed back into town, before going to the most spectacular building I’ve ever seen (and if I may toot my own horn, I’ve seen a good deal of spectacular buildings), the Venetian Macau. With 3,000 rooms, a mall, an enormous casino, and countless other amenities, the Venetian is truly the pinnacle of the casino world, a city within itself (kind of written like an advertisement, that was). Anyway, upon arriving at this Mecca of the gambling world, I was a bit disappointed that I was able to exercise the self-control to not sit down at a poker table, however given the negligent amount of sleep I’d had it would have just been a terrible idea. After prying my eyes away from that glorious sight, we went upstairs to the food court for dinner. After dinner we went over to the Gran Lisboa, where we were planning on just catching the bus back to the ferry. However, the girls had to use the bathroom, and on their way there they encountered some absolutely spectacular artwork that had been carved out of ivory, jade, etc. We spent a good 15 minutes looking at all these magnificent carvings, which was one of the highlights of the day. After that we headed back to HK. After I got back to the dorm, I called up Ben to see what he was up to, and he said they were at a housewarming party being thrown by Henna and her boyfriend, Ville. I headed over there and was met outside by Raphael, who showed me upstairs. It was a decent little apartment, although given the crowd it was a bit warm. I was “initiated” into the party, if you will, by having a drink of some sort of Finnish (Henna and Ville are both from Finland) liquorice-liquer. Not bad, but eh. As the party continued we decided at 3:00, we’d head to the 3:00 Dim Sum place again. This time we went with Oliver, Cindy, Ben, Alan, Henna, and Ville. So we did. I ate very little (bit sick of it by that time), but did have the nerve to try pig stomach. It was actually pretty decent. It did, however, get me sick a few hours later, I think.

Sunday I got up and hung out for awhile, then headed to U-Hall to meet Divyan, Henry, and Raphael to go to Mong Kok (Kowloon side) for a bit of shopping and sightseeing. We headed over there and had lunch (which included shark fin), before heading out to shop a bit. Raphael bought some pretty awesome shoes, and Divyan bought an F.C. Barcelona hoodie, but other than that we didn’t really buy anything. We walked around for a good few hours before heading back to HK Island. Should be an easy enough week, I’ve got an assignment due in Theory of International Trade that could be quite easy.

Additional news, got an email the other night (or day in Illinois I guess) from Dr. Varner inviting me to apply for a paid internship in The Hague, The Netherlands. €700 per month salary for a 10 week internship. Certainly not great, but not bad either, and they’d be paying for airfare and accommodation. I hate to be so optimistic, but I think I’m the forerunner, as Dr. Varner approached me regarding this internship several months ago before she let other students know about it, so that’d be pretty decent. It would, however, force me to put the SA internship on hold, but given the absolutely massive difference in cost (SA airfare would run about $2,000 and I wouldn’t be paid, Netherlands would be like $700 and I’d be paid roughly $3,000 during the 10 weeks), it seems that The Netherlands is a better option. Also, it sounds like more rigorous work and more prestige in the job, which is better for a resume I guess.

Fact (s) of the day: Macau is the most densely populated independently governed area in the world, with roughly 50,000 people per sq. mile. 0.6% of Macau’s residents speak Portuguese at home. Not all Australians like vegemite.

Sleep update: I still haven’t slept through an entire night since arriving in HK