A woman pulling a bathtub

I was biking to work one day and stopped at a busy intersection to watch a woman cross the street. She was clearly in some state of homelessness, and had a firm grip on some sort of leash that was attached to a bathtub, which waited at her feet to cross the street. The bathtub had a random smattering of recyclables in it, but still, one would think a bathtub not the best way to transport… anything. Maybe we need to introduce more shopping carts here. [They have them but as the Chinese don’t buy in bulk they are not that popular]. When will I get a digital camera? Honestly.

I started my new job, now I’ve been at it for a 6 weeks, and it’s great. I don’t know how I went so long without having to use my brain at work [actually I’ll tell you how: $$$]. I work about a 25 min bike ride from my house, which takes me to the south eastern part of the city, near where $600 million project scheduled for completion in time for the 2008 Olympics, the new CCTV [China Central TV] tower is being built.

My job is, essentially, helping companies figure out what they want to move or expand into a new office. Right now I am working with Nokia as they embark on a major move to a giant R&D center, which will potentially become Nokia’s largest R&D center in the world, in the south of the city. We help them figure out how many people they have, how many they will have, what they want to change about their office in terms of manager rooms, storage, etc, and as the time gets closer we will help them select furniture, security, IT, etc, it sounds easy but its actually pretty major.

I’m enjoying it, my boss is very interested in making sure I learn everything that is going on, so I can feel those bullet points on my resume actually being something that I learned while doing.

I work with five Chinese project managers, young bright guys who all speak English, and three foreign guys. [We could say I was hired because of my gender but I’m ok with that]. In conclusion, job=good, that’s about all I can say about it. Keeping me busy and mind occupied!

When I’m not working, and I don’t have family or friends in town [Poppa Nelson came into town and bought me a new washing machine, it’s my prized possession!], I’m still riding my bike, last weekend was another major race, major meaning they bring the pro’s in, such as the woman who won the gold in the Athens’ Olympics. She’s serious. But I still managed fifth place [not counting her and another pro!] so I was happy with that, and third in the club races, which was decent. Hopefully I’ll have more photos of me contemplating how much I really want to be heffing up this hill soon. Finally the season of decent temperatures is here, which makes for good biking, but the days when I can just wear t shirts out at night are numbered, soon I’ll be in my full suit of long underwear and be frozen. I don’t look forward to it!

But I do have some trips planned to get out of the cold long winter… I’ll be home for about two weeks over Christmas, and the Nelson’s are planning a family trip to Morocco over Chinese New Year [February].

This year a bunch of my good friends have left but I have managed to find new ones for my essential six days a week eating out schedule. Yum. I’m also playing Gaelic football [I know you haven’t heard of it, it’s a combo of volleyball /basketball /soccer played on a soccer field] and we have a tournament in Shanghai in October. I play with a bunch of Irish with names likes “Aoife” that I rarely understand but seem to be nice people.

Observations:
A young girl sits straddling her boyfriend on a very main street at 6 pm. And they say China isn’t big on affection?

My friend Caroline, possibly one of the most hysterical people I know, lives in the ‘new’ type of neighborhood- not quite the luxurious villa, but the just-out-of-town affordable group of 17 apartment buildings in some complex called “Heaven’s Boat” which apparently is filled to the brim with babies. She texts me: “sitting on a bench surrounded by cigarette butts, babies in split pants and got gently reprimanded by guard for slipping feet out of sandals. Spit ok. Bare feet? Not ok.” [She contends that they were clean feet too. Perhaps the guard didn’t want her clean feet to touch the general area that 1.2 billion toddlers regard as their giant toilet? Possible.]

So as you can see common sense hasn’t quite hit the nation. In fact, foreigners are hired these days solely because we grow up with that ability to have common sense, to “think outside the box” and not how our education system told us how to do it. We learned how to think, they learned how to regurgitate and now they are having trouble finding people that can help companies like IBM fill their human resource voids as they grow and grow…