Blurker Gone Bad

Why does my office smell like rotten food whenever I get back from a long trip?  There is no food in my office!  However, I do reside next to the food court.  What are they putting in the walls?!!


Things I did not have a chance to blog about while I was gone:

1. The fact that, on my second day in Singapore, I awoke to find myself on the other side of the bed with my head at the foot of the bed.  WTF?


2. The day that my ride did not show up and I had to take a taxi down to the Harbour Front to catch the ferry to Batam.  Luckily I found the guy with my ticket wandering around the port looking for me.


3. Running around Little India in the pouring rain looking for gooseberries for my colleague's daughter. (Note: Gooseberries taste like ass.)(Note 2: They were probably Indian gooseberries.)


4. Watching a pastry chef build a cake and refusing to leave until we knew what the cake was going to be (even though we were about to pass out from lack of sleep).

Oh, and apparently I still have jet lag, even though I slept for almost the entire 3-day weekend.  I guess you just can't escape.

Nothing important. I just wanted to say hi. ;)

Wassup witchoo?

I promise I was nowhere near Russia this week.

Love you!

As I followed the directions for overseas travel, I arrived at IAH 3 hours before my flight. Saying that I had plenty of time is a bit of an understatement. Of course, I'm sure had I not given myself all that extra time, the pilot would have decided that he wanted to leave early. There is precedent. ;)

With all of the hoopla about not bringing liquids, gels, pastes, or any other possibly dangerous items on board, you would think that the security personnel at IAH would have stopped the woman in front of me who walked on with a water bottle. Drinking from it. Walked right onto the plane, ha-yup. WTFBBQ?

The good news is that Singapore Airlines, which I took over from LAX to Singapore, gave out toothbrushes with little toothpaste tubes to all of the passengers. They also had moisturizer in the bathrooms. Yay! The flight over was really very pleasant. It was scheduled to run 17 hours but we made it in 15.5 hours. So, we got in at around 4:30 am Singapore time (that's 3:30 pm for you Houstonians -- everyone else, do your own math!).

I slept most of Sunday, so I won't get to run around at all until this weekend. At least I'm back in the Shangri-La hotel. Happy sigh.

This weekend we wandered around the city a bit.

Saturday we went looking for Yu Yuan Garden on Shanghai Old Street. Well, we certainly found Shanghai Old Street, but we were unable to find a garden! The little shops are set up in such a maze that we think we must have missed the right way to go for the garden, which is very small. The shopping was fun at least.

Sunday was another shopping adventure at Xiang Yang Market. The crowds were amazing, as were the hawkers. We had a great time wandering around negotiating prices with the sellers. At one point, Tracy ran out of money, so we went back to the hotel to get more!

Let me just say, things were bought. :)

So far so good. Today we do the wrap-up for the first supplier. They seemed to really enjoy the class, and asked a LOT of questions, especially at the end of each day when the lectures were over. We would be surrounded by 10-20 people all asking detailed questions about either the material we presented or specific prossessing issues that the company has seen. It was pretty cool.

Tracy is doing really well at the presentations, although she needs to slow down her speech. She speeds up when she is nervous, and that makes it quite difficult for them to understand. Of course, we have someone translating after every slide, but some of them understand a little English, so she is trying to slow down.

I actually had a really good compliment from the resident HP engineer who is here with us. He mentioned to Tracy at dinner the other night that she is a little hard to understand, especially when she talks fast, and that another engineering our group, SR, is *completely* impossible to understand, but that I speak very clearly and am easier for Chinese people to understand. Yay me! We told him that we also have problems understanding SR, so it was not his fault. Damn east Texas accent! ;)

After the wrap-up today we will be going to a silk factory to see how they make silk, from the silkworm cocoon to the weaving. It sounds interesting.

The food has actually not been great. The food at the hotel is pretty good, but the food we have at the supplier each day for lunch has been, well...interesting. Suffice it to say, I have had no problem staying within my WW points. Perhaps Shanghai will be better.

Oh, and the pollution here is amazing. Most days you can't see the skyline because of the smog. I should try to take a picture and post it.

Well, one week down. We're practically done! Can I come home yet?

The flights over were pretty uneventful. There was a bit of wind when we were landing in Chicago (there's a surprise!), but other than that, no problem. I have to say, after sixteen and a half hours sitting on planes, and another two hours sitting in a car driving from Shanghai to Suzhou, my butt is completely numb!

I'm here with another engineer, Tracy, to do some training at three different suppliers' facilities. We'll be doing some sightseeing today with a couple of women from the first supplier. I have no idea where we're going, but I'll be sure to take some pictures to post.

Speaking of pictures, this time I took pictures on the plane as we passed over the Artic Circle as well as Siberia. I hope they come out!

This is going to be quite a long trip, three weeks in China, and then an additional week in a hotel in Houston (on Westheimer) for another training class (I'm being trained for this one rather than doing the training). April looks like a pretty busy month for me. Three weeks away from home is about my limit. It should help that I have Tracy here to talk to when I just want to relax. It's hard being "on" all the time with suppliers.

Part of the reason for this trip is to train Tracy in giving the supplier training, so that she can go out and do this class on her own. Right now there are just two of us that are able to do the class (it's a week long class), and it looks like we'll be expanding, so we need another engineer who can be sent out to our various suppliers. Tracy is pretty lucky that management allowed two of us to be gone for three weeks. It's going to be quite a strain on resources at home while we're gone, but I think it will be a great benefit for Tracy to be trained on site in China.

So, off to do some sightseeing!

I'm looking for books to take with me on my trip, and I'm having trouble finding things that I haven't read yet.  Recommendations are hereby requested, nay, demanded!  Here is a list of my current tastes in reading material.  It's all SF or fantasy, and I refuse to apologize about that.  ;)

• I'm a big fan of Sheri Tepper, not because she writes about strong women, but because she tells a very interesting story.


• I like Cherryh's Foreigner series, Neal Stephenson's System of the World, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series.


• I like:



Old collections of short SF from the 40s and 50s.




The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley (and the rest of this series)




Orson Scott Card




The Belgariad - David Eddings (I'm sorry.)




Guy Gavriel Kay




Isaac Asimov




Tolkien

Thanks in advance for any help!