Tuesday, July 26, 2005

It doesn' get better than this...

...I have my cup of Pete's low-fat vanilla latte and a butter croissant at hand. One thing I truly missed in the 2 months in China was my coffeee fix in the morning.
Been back a litle more than a week now. Weekend was spent watching a lot of TV, loads of shopping and just chilling.

I also started reading the 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman. Its about Globalization being powered, not by companies, but by individuals...with technology and lifting of trade barriers and such being the enabling factors.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Heading back home

After two months in China, I am heading home this evening. At last!! I will be taking the ferry from Jizhou Port to Hong Kong this evening. Will stay overnight in HKG, do some shopping(for my sister) and then catch the flight out to SFO. Should be fun.

Its been an interesting 2 months here...my perception of China and the people has changed to a certain extent, I think I understand their way of working better now. And I also see some similarities with my countrymen.

Although I am not 100% staisfied leaving at this stage in the project,I have no choice. My visa expires on Jul 19 and I have to exit. But I am confident the team will finish the project on time and I am only a phone call away. The next week promises to be stressul at work though.

Yesterday, I took the team I worked with and a few colleagues from the US office to dinner...one of the few western-style restaurants in Zhuhai. It was a fun time..well, I had fun, I hope they did too ;) It was also a good opportunity for me to get some informal feedback on the course of this project.

Over the course of this project, I have tried to put myself in other people's shoes. Without divulging too much of the project, I will just say that it involves transitioning development effort from one IT development center to another. It is just not transfer of technical stuff but also the business side of things. That has been quite the challenge.

I actually volunteered for this project(although i did not know then that it would involve travel) because I wanted to step outside the bounds of my comfort zone. I know I do not want to continue to be a Software Engineer all my life, not that I am saying there is anything wrong with that. Its just not exciting enough for me. I want to explore my skills at people management, project management and product management..and I think this project is the first stepping stone.

Got to wrap up some stuff before I head out. My next post will be from the US. Happy journey to me!!

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Reed Flute cave@Guilin

Monday, July 11, 2005

Action packed weekend

Whew, what a weekend!!

Friday was an ok day at work. In the evening, decided to go play ping-pong. Went to a place where they have all these ping pong tables that you can rent by the hour. Played for about 2 hours. In the adjacent tables, I saw these kids ranging in age from 5 to 8 years who were in training..they played some amazing shots. The coach would pass the ball onto them and they would have to repeat the same shot about 20 times in a row..their speed and accuracy in shots was amazing to watch.

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon getting a facial...two hours of pampering. And then in the evebing, it was time for badminton. Now, I have not played this game since high school and I have never played this game with a net before. So, I was pretty happy with the way I played. I guess my tennis shots came in handy.

On Sunday, I had planned with a couple of friends to make a trip to Guangzhou..the capital of the Guandong province. We were taking the bus out there and had all these instructions written out in Chinese to show at the ticket counter and the bus driver. It took us about half an hour just to find the ticket office in the shopping mall. Once we got our tickets, we had no idea when our bus would arrive. So every time an announcement was made, we would rush to the counter to ask if it was our bus. After a few false starts, our bus finally arrived and we got in. The trip lasted about 2 hours but it was a pretty comfortable ride. Once we got to Guangzhou, we caught a taxi to take us to the shopping area. Spent a few hours browsing the shops and getting items on our list. Then we went to lunch in a Thai restaurant. We were lucky to find a waitress who could speak passable English. The most tasty food I have had in the past two months. Probably not great food by my usual standard, but definitely tasted pretty good yesterday. We caught the bus back and reached Zhuhai. Again, we had an issue with communicating with the driver of where we wanted to get off. He wanted us to get off at the very first stop in Zhuhai and we wanted to get off at the last one. After a few moments of showing him the Mandarin phrasebook and the paper with our Chinese instructions, he walked off in a huff and let us alone. We finally got off, had dinner at McD's and headed home.

Only four more days and I will be on my way home!!

Monday, July 04, 2005

Wimbledon Finals

I tried to watch the finals of Wimbledon - it was too one sided for my taste.
Roddick played like he did not belong on Centre Court - very uninspiring tennis.

Davenport vs. Williams was slightly better..but I still could not get myself to watch the match in its entirety.
Other than that it was a pretty relaxing weekend.

We have a team dinner planned for this evening..followed by some karoake singing. We do have some people on the team who are really into it. But most of the songs are in Chinese so it is difficult to sing along.

[I got to start posting something of substance on this blog]