China Trip
Ni Hou Ma
This all happened very quickly. On Tuesday my boss finds me in the model making workshop and says, “I’m sending you to China” There then follows a short conversation about when and what for. As for the when, maybe as early as Thursday…… So the next day off to Singapore to the Embassy of The Peoples Republic of China to get a visa. Situated right next to the British High Commission, it is a model of communist efficiency. You walk in and collect your application form with your queue number, they make sure you have a photo, if not there is a small room by the desk, well I think that is where you get you photo taken…….
There form is simple, probably more so if you can read Chinese, there is even glue to stick your photo on to the form with. By the time I had filled in the form, I had no more than 5 minutes to wait before my number was called. A quick check of the form, then I was told, “Collect at 3pm”. That was it, I was there no more than 15 minutes.
It was now 10am, what do you do in Singapore for 5 hours. The Embassy is at the end of Orchard Road, the Singapore equivalent of Oxford Street. The problem is, just like Oxford Street, it is full over priced shops all geared toward women.
I flew from Singapore on Saturday 1st July on a Silk Air flight to Shenzhen in China. The flight was nothing special, but considering Silk Air are the low cost branch of Singapore Air, the service was a lot better than BA! I stayed at the Holiday Inn in ZhuHai. It's not quite the same as the Holiday Inn Swindon where our Malaysia Engineers stay when they visit the UK. The one in ZhuHai is a luxury 5* hotel, the one in Swindon is not!
All I really got to see of China is what you could see from the window of a car, or the view from my hotel room. Most of my time was spent in factories over seeing tooling trials and generally trouble shooting. Not very exciting really......
The big difference was the food. Due to the huge size of the country there is a huge diversity n tastes. Unlike th Chinese food we get in the UK, which is mainly Hong Kong style food, the ZhuHai area and that to the north use chillies, lots and lots of chillies. To my hosts I think it was a game, see if they could find something that was too hot. They did not know the training I had been given in Malaysia by my tour guides!
The worst thing about China was the first thing I saw at the airport.........
They get every where. There was one on the opposite side of the road to my hotel, I did not go.
This all happened very quickly. On Tuesday my boss finds me in the model making workshop and says, “I’m sending you to China” There then follows a short conversation about when and what for. As for the when, maybe as early as Thursday…… So the next day off to Singapore to the Embassy of The Peoples Republic of China to get a visa. Situated right next to the British High Commission, it is a model of communist efficiency. You walk in and collect your application form with your queue number, they make sure you have a photo, if not there is a small room by the desk, well I think that is where you get you photo taken…….
There form is simple, probably more so if you can read Chinese, there is even glue to stick your photo on to the form with. By the time I had filled in the form, I had no more than 5 minutes to wait before my number was called. A quick check of the form, then I was told, “Collect at 3pm”. That was it, I was there no more than 15 minutes.
It was now 10am, what do you do in Singapore for 5 hours. The Embassy is at the end of Orchard Road, the Singapore equivalent of Oxford Street. The problem is, just like Oxford Street, it is full over priced shops all geared toward women.
I flew from Singapore on Saturday 1st July on a Silk Air flight to Shenzhen in China. The flight was nothing special, but considering Silk Air are the low cost branch of Singapore Air, the service was a lot better than BA! I stayed at the Holiday Inn in ZhuHai. It's not quite the same as the Holiday Inn Swindon where our Malaysia Engineers stay when they visit the UK. The one in ZhuHai is a luxury 5* hotel, the one in Swindon is not!
All I really got to see of China is what you could see from the window of a car, or the view from my hotel room. Most of my time was spent in factories over seeing tooling trials and generally trouble shooting. Not very exciting really......
The big difference was the food. Due to the huge size of the country there is a huge diversity n tastes. Unlike th Chinese food we get in the UK, which is mainly Hong Kong style food, the ZhuHai area and that to the north use chillies, lots and lots of chillies. To my hosts I think it was a game, see if they could find something that was too hot. They did not know the training I had been given in Malaysia by my tour guides!
The worst thing about China was the first thing I saw at the airport.........
They get every where. There was one on the opposite side of the road to my hotel, I did not go.
posted by Colin at 8:16 PM
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