June 9 Week

July 9-11

My apologies to the faithful.

Sorry about the lack of blogging. Work was hectic and I’ve had to do afew things. I was afraid of this. I’ll try not to let this happen again. So here you are, this should tide you over for a while…


Another week of training, but this time in the plant. This stuff is pretty simple. It’s just a whole lot of mixing and dispersing. Sheer lots of sheer. And that’s about it. I mean compared to electrolytic reactors, Fixed bed reactors, distillation columns, extraction columns, oxidation, vacuum crystallization, this stuff is pretty simple. But when you underestimate the fucker, it’ll bite you in the ass. The biggest obstacle here is the quality checks of the product and the short lead times. One of the businesses has 760 customers, can you believe that crap, all from one plant. That is a logistical, customer service, operational, quality control night mare. As one of the guys here says, just a plain nightmare.

Language and cultural barrier. Had an interesting conversation with one of the lab techs. He just graduated from a university here with a chemE degree. He works as a tech and he was helping me with the process. His English is pretty good, but it is selective. He can have conversations about the weather and stuff and I can see how he has practiced it. He ended questions with “isn’t it?” Really nice guy. Wah Da or peter is his English name. Some Chinese people have English names and some do not. The ones that do not, the first name is their family/surname. So for example Fu Yi Lin, Fu is the family name. Yi Lin is his first name. Oh and Prison Break is hugely popular. Let me tell y’all about DVDs, I can get the entire Sopranos series, not just a single season, but the whole 6 seasons (7 if I wait a year), for about 30 bucks, now that’s terrifying news for a recovering TV addict. All the stuff in theaters I can get if I want a handheld grainy version. Once the DVDs come out, you can get these for like $1. You have to be careful of the street vendors though, it’s better to ask people who have been here for a while and ask where they go. There is a place called Oscar’s that is supposed to be pretty good. I am still fighting the moral dilemma of getting these suckers. Yeah I’m laughing too. That was a good one wasn’t it? No seriously, what the eff?

Four days of training at the same plant as last week. I got to play MahJong (not majan) again with some guys at the plant who promptly took me to school. The first night I wasn’t the worse player, but wasn’t far off, but the second night, oooh boy. It was so bad, the next time, they want to play for money. I wish I was hustling them, but to hustle them, you have to be able to play well when the money is on the line…well what’s the exact opposite of hustling? Oh yeah that’s right, sucking.

The weekend was pretty good. Friday night we just went out to random places, nothing crazy and went home. Saturday I played Ultimate and BBall. My dogs(which means feet for those who do not speak jive) were tired after that. Took a short nap, got cleaned up and met up with Ryan and Jason and Jason’s friend from Taiwan, Jason, who runs an import/export business…yeah that’s right somebody who actually does import export. We go to a brazilian steak house. For all you carnivores such as myself out there, heaven’s got to have places like this. They just keep bringing you barbequed meat, chicken, lamb, pork, beef and so many different cuts of beef, grilled bananas, pineapple, holy cow. For those of you didn’t catch that, it’s all you can eat…. It will take at least 2 whole days for my body to process all this meat and food. Then we go play some pool, still getting schooled, night club MT which is pretty good. Live performances, Dancers, cool DJ. The main host is this black dude from the States and he is freaking fluent in Chinese, I mean no accent, (not that I’m a great expert at judging Chinese accents), Jason told me he used to be a VJ on Chinese music television. At one point he took his wallet out started wadding up 100 RMBs ($15 U.S.) and just starts throwing it into the crowd. He threw about a $150 total into the crowd, not mmuch, but still pretty cool. They had a bathing suit contest, winner gets 10,000 RMB. I tried to take some videos, but my behind the camera skills are awful, so it just gave me a head ache trying to rewatch it. Erase button please. So the night ends up pretty good, left at the perfect time, but the lesson learned, do not wear sandals to a club. Just don’t do it. It’s not work the risk of some idiot throwing up and you having to walk through it because there is no other way to go….It was awful Just plain awful. Besides a broken glass, you stepping on it, might mean Hep C.

Next weekend Hong Kong.