fun facts about China ...

- they have strange car brands here ... the Volkswagen “Santana”, the Nissan “Happy” ... and for some reason Buicks are very popular!

- coffee tends to be served pre-mixed with milk and sugar ... a sugar-lover’s nightmare, as they don’t usually have packets of the individual components! luckily for me, the national pallet seems to call for “double-double” (more like “one-and-a-half, one-and-a-half” really) ... imagine Chris giving up coffee?! hehe

- so much outsourced / “overseas’d” manufacturing occurs here! the industrial park where i work has representation from about a hundred members of the Fortune 500 ... and the park didn’t exist five years ago, so much of this is recent! i can see virtually all of the well known high-tech and bio-tech firms during my daily drive here ... and i’m sure the companies that i don’t know are simply suppliers to the multinationals (for example, my client makes phones for Sony-Eriksson, routers for Oracle, etc.) this is because the labour is so cheap, of course. the workers make so little money that there is a big problem with theft. my students tell me that their company had to weld down the sewer grates in the factory because the workers were stealing them to sell as scrap metal ... and the same happens with metal platters from the cafeteria!!

- there are ‘official’ taxis here (after my time in malaysia i keep wanting to spell it ‘teksi’), but there are also many unofficial taxis; people trying to make an extra buck by picking up tourists at the city’s sites. well, i learned last Saturday that taking these is a mistake. i took two that day, and each of the guys tried to sell me ‘additional services’.
two minutes into my first trip, the driver turned around and started making a fist out of his left hand and poking his right index finger in and out of the hole ... trying to sell me a friggin’ prostitute! then he took some strange route through the city, including a short-cut through a really dingy neighbourhood ... i was scared sh*tless that he was going to kidnap me!
there were no taxis outside of my next destination, so i fell for it again and hired a gentle looking older guy to take me back to my hotel. he tried talking to me the entire way ... when i didn’t understand his mandarin he tried speaking louder and more slowly! hehe ... then he kept motioning to my shirt and giving me the thumbs up ...
“you like my shirt?”
“shirt, shirt!” he exclaimed, excitedly
finally, a connection! “thank you!” i said, and gave him the thumbs up ... i like my green Aqueduct shirt too ...
... the next thing i knew he had driven us to a silk shirt factory! apparently they get a commission for bringing in tourists ...