Friday July 27, 2007

China - first impressions

I am here the 5th days now, so it's time for a blog with my first impressions about China/Beijing.

Beijing itself is really big, and I didn't expect so much traffic, and Smog. I always thought there would be more bicycles than cars. And it's really very warm here...

The food is really great. I tried a lot of different things right now, and everything was very tasty. It's really different compared to Chines restaurants in Germany - not only the taste, but also the way you eat it. The people here eat everything(!) with chop sticks. With chop sticks, the most difficult things for me right now have been the loin ribs, and the Beijing duck.You don't simply eat the duck, you wrap that with some vegetable and sauce into small pancakes - of course only by using your chop sticks. And if you managed that, try to pick up that roll, which is not very stable, with your chop sticks...

This week end, It's time to see Great Wall and Forbidden City...

The company (Redflag Chinese 2000) does a really great job with organizing everything for me. Somebody is picking me up every morning, so I find my way. You might think it would be easy to use a taxi and simply drive on your own, but until now none of the taxi drivers knew how exactly to find the company. It's located in a new area in the south of Beijing.

I am giving technical presentations or talks every day, so I think the developers understand a lot of things much better now. Too bad that a lot of information can't be found on the OpenOffice.org site, because it's only in the head of our developers...

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( Jul 27 2007, 09:19:58 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [2]