I went on a business trip to China for about two weeks. The company I’m working for, Vtech Engineering Canada, has branches in many different cities in the word. Most of them are responsible for the research and design, but as many other companies, the manufacturing is done in China. The city in which the factory is located in is called DongGuan, very close to Hong Kong.

Well, let me just tell you that China is developing very fast, of course you already knew that! What I knew from China was what I had seen on TV before, which was very crowded streets where everyone was driving bicycles. Of course I didn’t see the entire China but at least the cities I went to changed my prospective.

Below you see a view of the Bowing 747 wing flying over 35000 feet on top of the beautiful land of clouds way below.

We landed in Hong Kong and there we took a ferry to DongGuan. The air at this time of the year is pretty warm (over 34 degrees Celsius) and more than that it is humid. The humidity is so high that you can see the water vapour in the air. Soon you turn into a wet cat and sweat will be dripping off your body. We just kept drinking water to avoid ending up like a dried tomato left in the wet air!! Below you can see some shots from the ferry window we were riding on.

The second boat you see is a Chinese traditional wooden boat that is pretty common there. Sometimes I see people paddle to move these giant boats! Well I guess that returns to if you have the money to buy a motor for your boat or not.

There I was with two engineer colleagues and good friends of mine: Kaveh Farahmandi-Fard and Barney Au. If you want to make any situation into a party just add them into the mix! Barney was acting like our translator and Chinese language teacher! He is an originally-Chinese Canadian-grown man and he has a personality that can make any trip worth while. Kaveh kept learning Chinese from him and was not shy to use the words he had learnt. I on the other hand, did not have the memory to keep the words and would forget them in a couple of seconds, and yet I tried! 

Below you see them with me in a restaurant named “Hot Pot”, try to guess which one is which:

Hot Pot restaurant was an entirely different experience. They give you a small oven to cook your own food. You order a pot of soup that will go over the oven as seen in the photo. Then you will order any kind of raw food you want to cook such as mushrooms, different kind of meet and vegetables. You just through them into the pot of soup and they will cook in a while and you will have them. It was delicious!

On the weekend Kaveh and I were left alone in the city. We had some friends to write some Chinese sentences and their translations that would help us communicate by showing them to people. We started discovering the City on foot.

The city was very well developed in many parts. People were mostly young and dressed in more westernized fashion. People being young is because they have mostly come from other parts of China to work there. When you communicate with them you will find them very kind, helpful, simple and down to earth people. I hope they always remain this way, as I mentioned China is developing and people are getting way richer than they were before, and money has a tendency to change people! They are a strong nation that stick together and hopefully they won’t lose their values.

All throughout the city many beautiful high rises were made, showing that the architects there are willing to add more artistic taste to the buildings. And yet you could see older places which were not following any standards! Below you can see photos of an alley that amazed us with its high power wiring:

We kept walking down the city and when we thought we were completely lost, suddenly we found some very beautiful gardens. There people had come to enjoy the beauty and the entertainment in the park. We saw many bride and grooms there that had come to take wedding shots in colorful environments. There was a beautiful lake as the center piece of the park:

We found a fantastic tea house with a traditional Chinese style:

And further away, we found some monument, which was name politically incorrect as “Anti-Japanese” monuments. Hopefully someday people will forgive each other and the names change.

At the end, we found ourselves in tropical rains, as if we were not already wet enough!

In the city we also found many shopping malls and in some of them you could find very famous name brands for very low prices. You just have to make sure you bargain to get a price even lower than you can imagine!

Although I very much disliked the hot and humid weather, I liked the colorful city and had much fun with my friends, although sometimes we had to stay up until 3:00am to get some work done!!

At the end, below is a picture of us with factory engineers and assembly line girls. These are the hardworking people who are moving the world of today forward and with a fast pace.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.