opening day.

this morning i went to the bank of china with katelyn (chinese girl from kansas) because i needed to use the atm. we got there around when it opened at 9am and of course both of the atm machines were not working. one said out of order and the other said administrator is operating, please wait. so wait i did. katelyn was opening an account so it took a while. eventually the atm started working again and we were able to make it to our 10:30 meeting. on the way back to microsoft, i had this sandwich: the bread was like an egg pancake and it had ping paste and pepper sauce on it. it had duck and lettuce inside. it was delicious! they do breakfast here so much differently than i'm used to.


our first meeting was pretty official and surreal. we all introduced ourselves and met the people that will be in our group and our industry mentor (the guy that gives my group a problem to solve). each industry mentor gave a short presentation on their project proposal. it was really interesting hearing about all of the problems they are going to be working on. after that we took a group photo and then it was off to lunch! the food is in the basement of the building and they have a cafeteria and a few different restaurants. i ate in the "western" restaurant today. it says Merry Christmas above the door and has santa claus on the window of the door. not even kidding. apparently they stay up all year. is that what america is known for? anyway, i got grilled chicken in teriyaki sauce. it was pretty good. they actually give you a fork :) i am getting pretty good at using chop sticks. i'm gonna master that by the time i get home.

after lunch i went to a group meeting where our sponsor explained the project further and we got to ask a few questions. the chinese guys in my group are really cool so far. i haven't gotten their chinese names down yet, but their english names are max and george. i'm really excited about the project we are working on and i can't wait to get started!! we are supposed to read up on the subject this week and also pick a project manager and write a work statement. a work statement is just a few pages long and describes the problem we want to solve and how we want to solve it.

we then went to find our work stations. they are less than cubicles, but we are all near each other. i'll try to take a picture of it because it is hard to describe. [putting pictures on the internet is harder than i thought it would be. i'll work on that and get back to you.] i had a little trouble logging on to my computer at first and it took some it help to get it working. eventually i logged in and then i couldn't set up my email! but i had to go to another paperwork meeting and when i got done with that, email was working. it is pretty cool having as my email address. 

at 6pm we met downstairs to go to dinner as a big group (20+ people). we went to a seczhwan (spicy) restaurant. the name of it translates to spicy grandmother lol. we ate for two hours. umm i'm full! they have those spinny circles in the middle of the table and the waitress just kept putting more and more dishes on the table! if you wanted something, you had to grab it fast because it might spin by you. they also had fresh watermelon juice, some chinese berry cranberry juice, papaya juice, and corn juice. yeah corn juice. it tasted like cold cream corn to me but without the chunks of corn. there was of course more duck. when they finally stopped giving us food, we jumped back into taxis that took us to the microsoft building.

i'm going to try to stay up a little later tonight than i have been because waking up before five every morning isn't good for the soul. tomorrow morning we go to the police station to register because we are "living" here and not just staying in a hotel. i hope they don't keep me there :)