Hello from Shanghai. (second travelogue from my 2006 China trip)

As noted in the previous post, I am posting two travelogues from my 2006 trip to China. It would be best to read the post below this one so that they will be in the proper order.

Hello from Shanghai.

Friday evening; September 8, 2006 (Second travelogue of this trip)

In my first travelogue I forgot to mention that the weather is very warm (over 90 degrees) and quite humid. When we took our evening walk the other night, we came back ringing wet. It does not cool down much in the evening (perhaps 80 degrees). It did get a bit cooler later in the week. The temperature should not be a surprise. Ningbo is about the same latitude as New Orleans.

We spent four very intensive days in the plant. The production area was not quite as bad as we had thought, but they really have a long ways to go to get up to USA standards of perhaps 10 years ago.

The plant was very hot and they had almost no lighting in the plant (actually, they had the lights installed, but no bulbs in them). A rubber plant is very dark because of all the carbon black that goes into the product and with not much light, it is seems even more dark.

The plant used many solvents that have been outlawed in the US. I suspect that some were very toxic. The built their “cement house” (where the solvents are used to disolve the rubber and make an adhesive compound) on the roof of the building so that the fumes would not travel through the plant. The fumes were vented to the atmosphere.

For Tom’s benefit, they are ISO 9000 certified, but there is no way that they should be!! I did not see one ISO required document or any signs of ISO compliance in the factory. It just makes my blood boil to think of all the money companies all over the world spend to get certified and it really does not assure the customer of a quality product. I guess I had better get off my soap box, but Tom will relate to what I am saying.

Working with the Fengmao folks was very challenging. In spite of the fact that we had three folks serving as interpreters, it was very difficult to get our concepts understood. The interpreters were OK at conversational translation (marginal would be a better description), but had almost no ability to translate technical information. We had to really compromise our descriptions and we have no way of knowing if our compromised thoughts translated well. When we write our report, we can use precise terms and they can take their time doing proper translation.

With the exception of lunch and dinner today, every meal has been Chinese. While I sort of like Chinese food, a little goes a long way. We returned to Shanghai today to prepare for our flight home. The hotel restaurant had hamburgers and they sure tasted good. Tonight I had spaghetti.

Roy is quite an adventuresome eater. This time it caught up with him. They warn you not to drink the water, eat un-peeled fruit, raw fish, etc. - kind of like Mexico. In any case, he has been a bit under the weather for the last two days. He said he knew better, but just wanted to try everything.

Speaking of meals, we had a special dinner with the Fengmao folks last night. It was quite an event. The table was about 8 feet in diameter (gorgeous inlaid wood) and had a large “lazy Susan” wheel in the center. They kept bringing dishes of Chinese food that is typical Ningbo dining and placed the dishes on the lazy Susan so that all could eat a bit of each dish. Most of it was pretty good. Anything that was not cooked we avoided. Two things that I remember that were different were bamboo shoots, and duck tongue. In general it was fun and the owner of Fengmao is quite a character. He seems to have taken a liking to Roy and me. His wife was there and she seemed very nice. They all invited our wives for the next trip. I doubt that that will happen since the plane tickets are over $10,000 (not a typo)!

Dress in China is very casual. I saw almost no suits or sport coats even in the financial district of Shanghai. The first night and tonight we are staying at the Marriott and it is about $165 per night. It is very fancy and still casual dress. Our hotel in Ningbo was just as nice and it was about $70 per night.

On the plane to San Francisco, I talked to a lady who was moving to China.
She told me about a computer to computer voice system. The software is Skype and it lets you “dial” another computer and have a conversation just like you were on the phone. It uses the microphone and speaker in the computers and even makes a dialing noise. You connect via a system that is a lot like instant messaging. You can see if anyone on you contact list (Pat in my case) is hooked up to the internet. You can even use a web cam and see the person you are talking to. Pat and I downloaded the software and have had several lengthy conversions at no cost. There is a delay in the transmission, so you need to use the old two way radio method and complete each communication with the word “over”, but it works pretty good. We had a couple of conversations that were garbled, but we also had at least one hour of good conversation. I told Pat that I probably talked to her more on this trip that many previous trips .

Today we traveled from Ningbo to Shanghai and will fly home tomorrow, departing at 12:45 PM and arriving in SF at approximately 9:00 AM. We checked in to the hotel and then went over to the SAE office. As soon as we left the hotel a lady approached us selling fake watches. Roy looked at them and that was a mistake. The lady offered Roy a fake Rolex for about $30. He said no and she followed us for at least a block loudly telling us she was dropping her price. She ended up at about a dollar. There were several folks selling these watches.

Now for some general observations and information:

The average factory worker makes about $115 per month. The skilled worker makes about $160 per month (or slightly less than $1.00 per hour).

As I mentioned in the last travelogue, there are about 30 cars per thousand people. However, the death count from accidents is over 100,000 per year. If you ride around much in a car you will quickly understand why. People on bikes and scooters go the wrong way on the street and cars dodge them by going into the other lanes. There is no way to describe the chaos in the streets that we were on.

Fuel is not expensive here. Diesel is about $2.35 per gallon and mid-range gas is $2.50.

The Chinese are huge users of cell phones – especially the business folks. In the Fengmao plant, the higher level folks were on their phones at least 10-20% of the time. The Chinese talk very loud (apparently part of the culture), so it is very disconcerting to try to have a discussion in a meeting room with a couple of folks on the phone.

The Shanghai population is about 17 million. There is at least one city that has over 30 million in population. Everywhere you look there are high rise apartments.

Well, I guess that will have to do for this trip. My brain is fried. I have not slept well at all, and the mental impact of the drastically different culture and language has taken its toll. I will sure be glad to get back to the good ole USA!!!

Trucks at a fueling station

A mixture of modern and primitive transpertation