#333 Da Huaping

Today marked the 15th anniversary of Kathleen and my wedding day. I bought Kathleen a very large Chinese vase. These are quite common to see around China, but until now, we had not bought one. I got some advice from wives of my former-expat colleagues, Bill and Stanley. They both suggested that the Bird and Flower Market in downtown Suzhou was the place to buy one of these.

The market closes early during the week, so I asked Nash, our driver to go there during the day today and buy a "da huaping" or big flower vase. He got the Chinese-guy price of $50 USD which I was quite happy with.

#332 Bajiu With Max

We had a guest named Max from the Motor Grader group in Brazil visiting this week. Last night was his last night in town, so it was time for the requisite Chinese business dinner with 20 dishes on a round table. We had a fun group of folks for Hong Kong cuisine at an SIP restaurant called Zen.

Per Chinese tradition, we topped off the meal with a bottle of baijiu which is a rice-based alcohol like grain alcohol. It seems every culture has their version of after-dinner kerosene - Italy has grappa, Greece has ouzo, and so on. I am an old China hand now, so I have learned to never swallow baijiu. I fake the shot and dump it in my teacup, or hold it in my mouth and expel it into my beer. Sounds disgusting, but I can assure it is less disgusting that drinking 6-8 shots of baijiu and living with your body for the next 24 hours. Poor Max is on a 15 hour flight now back to Chicago and certainly still tasting baijiu in the back of his throat.

#331 Bug in the Lunch

Our office is in the midst of a heated disagreement on steps that should be taken or not taken to improve the lunch service. Typically in China, lunch in the company cafeteria is provided free to employees and paid for by the company. This probably harkens back to the days of proper communism when the work unit provided work, housing, food, and clothing.

Lunches are also a major driver in employee satisfaction with the job and the company. At the moment, it seems that our Wuxi R&D center is driving a lot of employee dissatisfaction because the food is terrible. Now in my book, all company-supplied lunches in China are bad, just to different degrees. The Suzhou factory was near the top of the lunch quality scale, while my new work location, Wuxi, is near the bottom.

Our general manager and his staff think the food is just fine. All of the employees and managers from other organizations think the food is awful. Just in time to support the "food service is bad" argument, my colleague Welington found a bug in his lunch today. Yeccchh !

#330 All-Employee Mtg

I was asked to give a short product update at the Cat Suzhou all-employee meeting this week. You can see me hard at work above making my presentation to the group. The woman on stage with me is Misty, our department secretary who acted as my translator.

We now have about 1000 employees at CSCL and the multi-purpose room holds only about 300 at a time, so we had to hold the meeting at four separate times over two days. I felt a bit like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog day as I kept reappearing to give the same presentation again and again.

You can see the audience's rapt attention as I share the progress on our new Wheel Loader field follow program and product cost reduction efforts. I especially like the guy in the second row with the gaping yawn as he claps.

I pulled out some simple Chinese to warm up the crowd and finished with a plea in Chinese that people with cost reduction ideas submit them to me. In China, a foreigner (me) attempting to speak Chinese to a group of locals can always earn some cheaps laughs and enthusiastic applause. I enjoyed receiving both.

#329 Sunday in Suzhou

Kathleen took a trip to Hong Kong this weekend to attend a Girl Scout troop leaders conference with three of her friends. They left on Thursday afternoon and will return on Sunday night. By all reports, it sounds like they are having a great time and have discovered a very hip and happening section of Hong Kong with great shopping, restaraunts, and night spots.

The kids and are doing our usual Sunday thing. We went to church, got haircuts for the boys, and went out to lunch. Our barbershop and noodle shop though were new locales recommended by our driver Nash.

I used up the pre-paid card last month from the usual barbershop and decided to try a new place. Nash suggested that we go to the shop owned by another Caterpillar van driver named Robert. I had no idea that Robert was an entrepreneur, but we decided to try it. We were quite satisfied with the quality and price of the service. Robert charged us 60 RMB ($9 USD) for three haircuts. A good deal. You can see a picture of Robert (on the left) and Nash (on the right) in the picture above.

For lunch I asked Nash to suggest a noodle shop for lunch. He took us to a place near the framing shop on Gang Jiang Lu and we had a nice lunch. The kids groaned at the suggestion of eating at a Chinese restaurant. They would prefer TGI Fridays or Subway. Above you can see Maria demonstrating her two-handed chopstick technique. I am using the authentic one-handed suck and slurp method. This restaurant even had cold bottles of water (a rarity). In the end, everyone ate well and enjoyed the lunch. I would certainly go back and recommend it to others - except I don't know the name or how to get there!

#328 Best Buy

Best Buy recently opened in Suzhou. It has everything you find in the U.S. stores at 20% higher prices. Like many stores in China, it has a lot of people in it on a Sunday afternoon - Dozens of blue-shirted associates and probably more than 200 customers wandering the place. The girls and I had a fun time checking out the iPhones and the computers.

As I am learning more Chinese characters, it is fun to follow the translation from English of things like "Best Buy" and see how it was derived. In this case, the Chinese 百思买, pronounced "bai si mai", has the first two characters to approximate the sound of "best" while the last character is the actual verb "to buy". By the way, "mai" also means to sell if you pronounce it slightly differently. Chinese is a crazy language.

#327 Basketball

On Thursday night, I went out to dinner with a group of colleagues from Suzhou and was recruited to play on the department basketball team. They seemed desperate for a big American guy to help defend against the other team's big American guy - Jon #40, our operations manager.

I agreed to play, though it has been decades since I played a game of basketball and I was Joseph's age the last time I played on a team. The running shoes as basketball shoes were a dead giveaway that the red team's new walk-on player was perhaps not much of a threat. I proved to be little more than a nuisance when defending against Jon who is 6 or 8 inches taller than me and has been playing basketball for decades.

Though basketball proved to be a very tough game, it is certainly good exercise and was a nice challenge for a Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately our team got killed 52 to 37.

#326 Country Ride

I took my new bike out for a long ride in the Suzhou countryside this afternoon. Juliana and I set out at 3:00 on our bikes for her friend's house at the "Seviar Expert Villas" south of Golden Lough. Juliana was attending a birthday party sleepover. After dropping her off, I continued south past the last SIP high rises, looking for some of the rustic Chinese countryside that cannot be far away.

I found some nice small towns, rice farms, and attractive scenery with lots of green fields, ponds, waterways, and workboats. It was quite interesting. Unfortunately, many nice scenes are marred by litter, smelly piles of open garbage on the roadside, and people living in quite primitive and filthy conditions. It seems that life in the Suzhou countryside is a beautiful and simple, but not prosperous life.

#325 42nd B-Day

Time marches onward and today was my 42nd birthday. My big gift, I purchased for myself, was a new mountain bike from the Trek store at the Xinghai Neighborhood Center. I wanted to buy a nice bike and started at the Giant Store on Renmin Lu downtown. They had one that matched the features and price range I was looking for, but the only color available was white I bought my first mountain bike as a senior in college and I liked everything about it except the color - white. I never liked the idea of a white mountain bike, but since I bought it second hand, I did not have any choice about the color. Today was different. I was paying top dollar (actually top RMB) and decided that color mattered.

I ended up with the Trek bike above which has an aluminum frame, front suspension, hydraulic disk brakes, and Shimano components. I added the obligatory accessories for China - kick stand and a bell.

The next picture is a picture of my departure from work. I left early this afternoon to go bike shopping. Unfortunately, at the time I left the building, we were having an enormous downpour. The photo shows our driver, Nash, with a cardboard box for an umbrella, making a mad dash for the car. One most days in China, I wish I could just drive myself to work. However, today I enjoyed the perk of having a chauffeur make the dash in the rain so I could hop in under cover of the building's front door canopy.

The party this evening consisted of my favorite calzones for dinner, more gifts from Kathleen and the children, and a home made carrot cake (recipe care of our friend Tamara). The kids all gave me hand drawn pictures as well as framed pictures of themselves to hang in my new office in Wuxi. During their visit last weekend for the family day, they all agreed that the office needed some sprucing up.

#324 Saved a Man

You won't believe this story - the strangest thing happened this morning at the gym. I arrived at my usual time, around 6:15 AM, and there was a guy locked in the glass-walled interior aerobics room ! He started banging and waving as soon as I walked in and flipped the lights on.

I ran out to the lobby and told the desk person (in my best Chinese) that there was a man locked in the inner room of the second floor gym. They sent a guy right away with a key.

Above is a picture of the guy getting sprung.

I asked the escapee how long he had been locked in the room, but I could not understand his response. He just kept saying thank you.

My God - only in China !

#323 Wuxi Family Day

Recently, my job location changed from the Suzhou factory to the Caterpillar R&D Center (CRDC) in Wuxi. Wuxi is another mid-sized (5 million people) city about 30 minutes west of Suzhou and Caterpillar has three facilities in Wuxi. I now travel to Wuxi every day and today the CRDC held their 1st Annual Family.

These family day events are loved by the employees and the employee satisfaction team spent a lot of time and effort planning the day. This event included games, professional entertainment, an employee talent show, a buffet BBQ dinner, and fireworks. The kids also got to see my new office - my first office with a door at Caterpillar.

You can see us enjoying dinner with friends Paul and Colleen and twin three year old boys. A highlight of the event was the watermelon eating contest which was won this year by our new friend, Chris - a visiting foreign dignitary from Aurora, IL. Chris is moving with his family to China in November to launch production in China another Cat machine product line.

#322 Boys Canoeing

Joseph, Marco, and I had a good time this afternoon canoeing to Island B. We packed a picnic lunch and found a spot on the north side of the island with a view of the high rise apartments. We sent some text messages to my colleague Duane from the island. He recently moved from Golden Lough into one of those high rises opposite Island B.

It is a pretty lengthy paddle to the island - more than an hour each way. The trip back proved longer because of a headwind that sprang up. The boys were nice company, but little help in propelling the boat. They only dragged their paddles in the water slowing us down rather than speeding us up.

I dream someday that we will take a canoeing and camping trip to the boundary waters in Minnesota. Lazy as these boys were today, though, it seems like a long way away !