Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 4

This week was a boring week really. It was a pretty normal work week except that it was Quarter Close, so Tom had to work late alot. Tom and I went out one day, Saturday I believe, and Tom wanted to take yet another picture of the smog or haze. It is very different from Raleigh, where if it isn't raining, normally there are crystal blue skies overhead.

Then we took the metro over to the ZhangJiang High-Technology Park, where is where I work. This is the entrance to the areea. There is a little park in the middle between a set of buildings. The buildings you see in this picture are an example of the 12 buildings that are there. I work in building 10, which is the far one in the back of this picture.

As you walk up the side of buildings 12, 11, and 10, there is a shallow pond that has been built. You can see it here, along with the park area on the ohter side.

There are lots of gold-type fish (Japanese Carp maybe?) as well as turtles and a few ducks. In the middle there is a set of bricks setup shaped like a heart. In the water there are lots of tiny fish, almost look like babies where they are trying to keep them separated as not to have them eaten by the bigger fish. Also there are some turtles in there, which you can see in the very middle part.

Here is a closeup of the turtles .. aren't they CUTE!

and a closeup of the fish ... again, not sure exactly what kind they are.

Here are the ducks along with more of a view of the park and flowers on the other side.

As you get closer to the building, there is a lovely lily pond, reminds me of the lily pond outside of Monet's house in France that we visited while we lived in Paris.

Now, on to the building. I work on the 6th floor in an open floor plan. Here you can get a view from my cube back to the other end of the building. I sit roughly in the middle of the floor. The way they are setup are different from the cubes in Raleigh. In Raleigh, each person has their own cube with walls that go up between 5 and 6 feet. Here, the cube walls are lower, probably more in the 4 foot range, and there is a "cube" that is much larger and contains 4 desks, one in each inner corner.

Here is my cube. I know, very "bare", although I did put up a calendar! I didn't take the flat-panel monitor or port replicator from the US office, so I just use the laptop uniquely, so I have the cables that I plug in and the cable lock, but that is about it. I also have a little tiny fan that I keep in the desk (they don't allow personal electrical appliances like coffee pots, so I'm guessing my fan is a wee bit illegal) that I use when I get there in the mornings after my 10 minute walk from the metro station.

As you can see, I have my name plate and my cube number. 6B is the 6th floor in the "B" section, and then W040 is the desk number.

This is the metro stop that I use to get to work, and it is one line 2 (the green line) and that is the line that the apartment is closest to.

Just a quick view of how the metro works ... here is the sign and you can tell which way it is going based on the text greyed out (previous station) and the black text (next station). The metro's are in both English and Chinese, and the ticket machines also are in English.

Tom got through Quarter Close and then got sick .. his first cold in China. So we didn't do a whole lot this week because he wasn't feeling well. However, we did make the trek out to work on Saturday, and then Saturday night we ate at an Italian restaurant in Puxi (the other side of the river). It was pretty good although small and not packed (like most restaurants) .. just us and a table of what sounded like Russians. Sunday night we did dinner at a chinese restaurant a few blocks from here that I had seen when my team had a Team Lunch out.