New Years Eve

It has been an interesting year, not the best year I ever had, but far from the worst.  Made some new friends, caught up with some old ones, and learned a few things along the way.  The weather outside is crisp and cold, really pleasant so long as you aren't working in it. 

I expect the New Year will bring more challenges and discoveries.  I am looking forward to it.  After all I did get the almond in the Risgrynsgröt.

Shanghai Survey Truck

Now those that have been patiently following along know how much I loved the CalTrans approved Shanghai Team Survey truck.  And since maintenance is a vital part of survey operations I thought I would introduce our factory authorized service representative:

He is the guy on the right.  The tent with the cheerful red and blue strips is both his shop and his home.  For various reasons we would see him about once a week, usually for a flat tire, but occasionally for some other tweak or fix.  He always wore a smile.  He most certainly overcharged the lao wài (foreigners), we didn't mind.   Never did learn his name.

Not sure who the woman is, but she really wanted to be in the picture.    Notice the bright red box in the background?  In that box is $40,000 worth of survey equipment.  Security never said a word to us about carrying it back and forth through the gate.  These being the same guys that randomly roust workers as they pass, searching through the papers in the baskets of their bikes and such.  China.

Meet Suzi and Yu

Meet Suzi and Yu.  These two charming young women are part of the new face of China.  Recent college graduates (a college education is a precious thing in China) they are just starting their careers.  Like most of their peers they have a strong desire to learn and practice English.  So we struck a bargain, they could practice their English with me and in turn they would help me with my Chinese and show me their China.  It worked out really well and I wish I had stayed longer to take more advantage of it.  The most interesting thing wasn't the differences, but the similarities.  People really are just people, the same hopes, fears, and dreams.

Chinese Cooking

Making breakfast this morning (and let me say it is very nice to be cooking again) I came to the realization that there is a lot to be learned from chinese cooking.  Or perhaps not learned, but reminded about.  The two main keys in their cooking are patience and preparation.  When you order a meal there it seems to arrive very quickly, but what you aren't seeing is the hours of handwork peeling, slicing, folding or the waiting while food items cure, pickle, or roast.  It seems to me much in our lives, both private and professional, can be improved by being patient enough to properly prepare.  I know I really need to learn this...

Pictures...

Okay, there is no good excuse just the simple truth I have been lazy.  I will start going through all the pictures and do some posting with the stories behind them.  Soon.  Honest.

Home

It is good to be home, really good.  Seattle (Shoreline) is a beautiful place to live, still hard to find work, I may find myself traveling again, but a beautiful place to live.  And, as if to remind me just how nice, the weather has been wonderful.  We took the puppy to Gasworks Park on a simply beautiful day:

And that afternoon I sat in the backyard and watched him run around.  It is wonderful:

I am keeping my leg up and it is healing, I am finally starting to feel rested (though I still wake at 3:30am) and I am looking forward to the next job.  I miss the work, and the friends I made, but I do not miss being in China.

Out of China

In mid-September I published a post about a political event and how it had made "a hard job harder".  Shortly there after I found out my post was having the same effect, so I promptly took it down and locked the blog for a bit.  Now those of you who know me know I am not the politically correct type.  I say what I think and will stand behind it.  But I am not a hypocrite, those working on the SFOBB job deserve respect and support.  It is a hard demanding job that wears people down.  Sometime soon I will post about the human cost of this project.  What I will not be doing is posting my view of leaving China, no good will come of it and it will just make a hard job harder for those still there.  If you want to know, email me, if I know you and trust you I will share.

Open Again

After a temporary closure due to my little political outburst, the blog is now open.  I will be doing some updated posts shortly.

Lunch

This was lunch today:

Now I don't usually eat fish here because of the Chinese butchering technique: "Find a cleaver of sufficient size, start chopping at one end make bite size chunks until done."  But these showed up boneless and very very tasty!

Utilities on the Island

With the exception of some of the more modern developments (fortunately including my apartment complex) electricity is the only utility anywhere near a modern standard.  In many places the water supply comes to mutual sinks, often outdoors.  This, I finally figured out, is a communal water heater:

And if you use gas to cook, electricity is the choice for most, though some still use wood.  It arrives on this, being driven by a smiling man in a blue cover all:

If you got caught riding that in the US you would be arrested as some kind of terrorist.  Personal safety does not seem to be a big issue for him.

Repairs in China

Having something fixed in China is an interesting experience.  The flush valve on my toilet has been broken for awhile.  It still worked, but you had to push down a little button.  With my wife coming to visit I pushed to have it fixed.

So the repairman showed up to fix it last night.  With no tools, just the part.  And it didn't fit.  So he had to borrow my Leatherman (as I really don't have any other tools) to fix it.  And this was actually a good experience as these things do.  It only took one visit.  Repairmen often show up with no tools.  The next visit show up with tools, but no parts.  Third visit tools and parts, the wrong parts.  It took one of the guys here 3 months to get his kitchen sink fixed.  This is the only place I know of where things go like this, uniquely Chinese.

I miss Godwin...

Now Nigerians are not really famous for being great drivers, because well many of them aren't.  But I always felt safe with Godwin.  Not so here.  It is the little things, like the idea you can drive around a red light...

ZPMC Emergency Aid Station

And we are pretty sure the white box is empty.

Haircut

What can I say... I was bored, had a new power tool, and the heat was killer...

Visa reset

Yesterday was a long day.  Visas in China are complex, each country has a different program.  I have a one year visa that I am told can be extended to almost three years, the catch is I have to leave the country every 90 days.  I just finished my second pass at this by making a one day trip to Hong Kong and back.  See Hong Kong, is, but isn't China.  The "One country, two systems" thing only makes sense to the Chinese.  But as always interesting things happen on the trip, the one that struck me as outragously funny yesterday was this:

What looks like an out of focus picture is actually a cloud forming inside the cabin of the airplane when they turned on the air conditioning.  The funny part is how everyone just kind of ignored it.  At one point you could not see more than about 5 feet.  The flight staff and most the passengers didn't ignore it, just behaved like it wasn't happening.  Surreal.

Another long day...

It is almost 7:00AM, it is 89 degrees, it is 92% humidity... damn, another long day.

Clearly not water...

I don't know what I stepped in, but it did this to my very expensive, size 15, oil-resistant, Wolverine work boots:

That stuff that looks like asphalt stuck to the bottom of my boot is actually the melting sole of my boots.  Something I stepped in turned my very comfortable boots in to large poisonous gummy bears.

Dehydration

One of the strange things about working in a hot humid environment is how easy it is to become dehydrated.  The reason for this is that as your body sweats to cool you down there is too much water in the air for the sweat to evaporate so there is no cooling effect.  Then because you did not cool down, you sweat even more.  ZPMC has been dealing with this for a long time and have come up with an interesting answer:

ZPMC "Salt Soda Water"  Comes in two flavors, both bad, and a Popsicle version that isn't so bad.  And they make a lot of it.  Warehouses of it:

And there is a whole group of people here whose job is to ride around in three wheel bikes handing these things out.  I have had more than a few myself.

Bragging Rights

Meet Bay 14:

350 meters (1150 feet) long by 40 meters (131 feet) wide.  Two independent surveys by two different companies in let's say less than ideal conditions.  Relative error? 0.0005 meters (0.02 INCHES). Step up!

Shanghai....

4 AM, 85 degrees, 80 percent humidity, gonna be a long day outside....

It's weird....

It's weird, but I am starting to want one of these....

Because someone asked...

Here is a picture of the struts that will support the bike path.  The strust are built and fitted here, but the path itself will be fabricated in the US.

Okay....

Lenny insisted on taking this picture to prove I do occasionally work.

Did I menton...

Lifting heavy things?

This is west segment 7 of the bridge being floated around a portion of the dock to be loaded on the ship.  Why floated?  Because it was too heavy for the dock.

The kitchen...

This is my kitchen, and no, it isn't as large as it looks, definitely a one person workspace.  And the surfaces are all at about my belt-line.  Not much in China is made to fit me.   On a related note here are two interesting gadgets I have found:

The one on the top is what I first found when looking for a cheese grater,  It cost 4 Yuan (about 60 cents) and I have no idea if it works, but it is a totally handmade work of art.  The item on the bottom is a multipurpose vegetable peeler, shredder, knife, bottle opener, that is just handy to have around.  It cost 7 Yaun (about 1 dollar) and I am bringing a few home with me.

Having fun in the sun!

Thought I would share this picture.  It is 7:30am, 85 degrees, and you can see the fog.  Don't Robin, Ganguly, and I look like we're having fun.  The vest is pretty flattering too!

Packaging

for some reason the Chinese seem to really, really like packaging.  Now I know I take more pills that the average person, okay three average people, but this the  the detritus from one weeks worth of meds:

They only make meds here in the minimum doses, so if you need more you take more pills.  and each and every pill is in its own bubble pack.  And it isn't just medications, a bag of peanuts comes with a little plastic tray in the bag, everything seems to come with an abundance of plastic packaging.

Shanghai Parks

Shanghai has lots and lots of parks, from small little niches to huge areas,  here is one I stumbled across the other day:

Very nice.

EXPO

I didn't see much of the Expo when I went.  (The Chinese pronounce each letter individually E X P O) I am not a big fan of waiting in line, so after waiting in three separate lines just to get in the gate I was done.  I haven't given up on it, but I will wait a bit.

One thing that did catch my eye was the fence around the place:

It doesn't show up as well in the pictures, but not only is it a double fence, but one is topped with concertina and the other electrified.  That is a serious fence, serious as in prison fence.

Urban Agriculture

Lately I have been taking walks at lunchtime thru the area out side the ZPMC gate we call "the village".  Now Changxing Doa is mainly an agricultural island, just not really in the area around ZPMC.  But that doesn't stop the people who live in the village from doing a bit of farming:

That canal is just over a mile long and almost all of it is partitioned into these small family plots.

Very Chinese to try and make the most out of every bit of space.

One note, that water is not a nice green.

A Sea of Holes

With all the talk of welding you might forget about all the bolts that go into building our little piece of the bridge.  Well no one has actually sat down to calculate it, but there are hundreds of thousands of bolts going into this project.  Which translates into a sea of bolt holes. For example:

and

and the really interesting fact?  Every single one of them is drilled by hand.

Chinese Welders

Now the Chinese have taken quite a lot of lack for the delays in the bridge due to welding issues.  And the deserve some of it, but since I like to play Devil's advocate, here are a few frames to put things into perspective:

Now here is a fairly common scene, three guy s watching, one woman working.  All the inspectors here agree that the women are much better welders.  Which is a statement given the nature of this group.

The next two pictures are more "day in the life" kind of things, until you realize they do this 12 hours a day.

Grinding, lots of grinding.

Cutting, a lot of that too.

Now it gets a bit more serious:

These two folks (one male, one female) are inside the confined space of a tower shaft during Vertical Trial Assembly.  Poor ventilation, poor lighting, and sparks flying everywhere.  Not fun.  Did I mention 12 hours a day?

And it gets better.  The next two photos are of two welders working on the East Line grillage.  The grillage is a super-critical part of the cable system that supports and aligns the cable as it turns under the bridge into the east end anchor.

Yes, they are arc welding.  In a narrow gap between heavy metal plates.  Oh, and I did mention preheating...  those 100mm plates they are squeezed between have been heated to 160C (320F).  There have been issues, but this is not easy work, it takes skill and stamina.

One last detail.  Now I have no way to verify this, but it is my understanding that the average welder at ZPMC gets paid room, board, and 60RMB per day.  Workers on this project get a premium 80RMB per day..  80RMB is $12.30, per day.

Got to love China...

Okay, this is a cut and paste from the Shanghai IKEA webpage:

----

Friendly Remind!

To secure the safety of residents and the domestic/oversea visitors during Expo session, Shanghai Public Security Bureau and the Municipal Commerce Committee jointly made the decision on special safety management of cutlery. According to the safety management, hazardous tools of knives must be purchased on registration of customer’s real names. “Knives for kitchen use must be sold at specific shops and be purchased on registration of customers’ ID card.”

On sales of knives, customers’ ID card shall be checked and the related personal information, types of the purchased items and quantity be registered. Sale report be submitted to on a weekly basis, and recorded at local Public Security Bureau.

More detail please consult SALES co-worker. Thank you for your cooperate!

 

---

 

Yes, it is true, you have to register to buy a paring knife in Shanghai. 

"Wet" Markets

Wet Markets are where most Chinese go to get their groceries.  In essence they are full time enclosed farmers markets and you can find a wide selection of fresh food.

Fresh Veggies (field ripened!):

Fresh Meat:

Very Fresh....

and live seafood:

All at prices that are so low it is hard to believe.  I got a whole roast duck, not a large duck, but enough, for 14 Yaun.  That is $2.00.  It was delicious!