Lenovo Plant Tour

We went to visit the Lenovo plant in Beijing with our ISYE 3104 Warehousing class. It was pretty cool to get to see the inside of a manufacturing plant and its warehouse and assembly lines.



When we got inside, they asked us to put on the white clean room suits. Since Lenovo manufactures computers, their shop floor is very dust sensitive. Not quite as sensitive as the wafer fab plant that we visited, but still needed the bunny suits.



Of course a few of the guys decided to be cool and wear their sunglasses with their clean room suits.



Alex and Lindsay are wearing the little headphones that the tour guide used to talk to us while walking through the shop floor. It was pretty noisy inside and we had a fairly large group of about 30 students, so these headsets actually worked quite well.



We also got special orange visitor badges. And we had to wear slippers over our shoes, as you can see on Christine's feet.



After visiting the manufacturing side of the Lenovo plant, we went to visit the office buildings.



I liked the artificial water fountain thing that they had next to the building.


They took us through their museum that showcased the development of their company from the 1980s until today. Here is one of the first PC's that they designed.



To start the tour, the guide asked someone to throw a paper airplane through the window. Here is our professor, Dr. Chen Zhou, reaching for one of the airplanes to toss through the window.



Chris didn't actually get to start the tour, he's just demonstrating how to throw a paper airplane.



They had a GIANT paper airplane!! I totally want to make one this size. Probably would need a few rolls of butcher paper or something though.



Lenovo used to be called Legend, back in the day. And then they bought out the PC side of IBM.



Here is another one of their ancient computers. I think this was the first laptop. Check out the floppy disk next to it :)



Lenovo also designed the Olympic torch for the Beijing 2008 games. I got to hold one of the replicas of the torch! It was lighter than I thought it would be. I can't imagine running with this in my hand.



There are many different Lenovo locations across the world. Their US headquarters are based in Raleigh, somewhere inside the RTP area.



JQ is pretending to be our tour guide and showing us one of the displays of the more recent computers.


I have no idea why they had World of Warcraft figurines in their little museum display. This was in a fake dorm room area, where they had displayed both their PC and their laptop as well as some other random electronic accessories they make like scrolling picture frames.



This is a display of some of the hardware components inside their computers.



Lenovo recently designed a laptop with an extendable screen, I think it is meant for people to do artsy fartsy design stuff. This computer was supposed to be released in August but I think they pushed the release date back to December.

Silk Museum

For part 3 of the Great Wall tour day, we stopped by the Silk Museum on our way home from the Great Wall. It is located downtown near the Olympic Village area. I am not sure if this is legitimately a famous Silk Museum or just another classic tourist attraction scam to get us to purchase silk goods at outrageous prices.

On the way over there, we passed a building that looked like some kind of computer chip (according to our tour guide). I wasn't quite quick enough to catch it from the bus window, so here is the best shot that I got.



This building looks kind of like a large sand castle, I have no idea what it is since I was too tired to pay attention to our guide by this point.



Here is the entrance up the stairs to the Silk Musem. Of course it is painted red, so many things in China are painted red because of the color's positive connotation here.



This picture shows a glimpse of the old Silk Road, used to bring silk and other goods from China to Europe and the West.



Then they had some exhibits of things that were made out of silk, like this.



And of course they had the traditional silk robes, embroidered with more colors to be fancy. I think robes like these were reserved for ceremonial purposes only.



This is one of the many signs in the museum that translated the display description into English. My LCC teacher would have freaked out about the spacing of the words and the ridiculous breaks in the middle of a word (like how half of "revert" is on the next line").



Speaking of funny signs, there was a bump randomly in the walkway between gallery rooms and this caution sign was posted up near it.



They also had exhibits of how to weave silk from the actual silkworm cocoons. You have to soak the silk cocoon in water to soften it up, then somehow untangle it using those cylinder machines.



The next step would be to weave the silk thread on a loom, using some kind of shuttle or rapier. My PTFE (polymer, textile and fiber engineering) professor would be so excited for this exhibit because that is pretty much all we talked about in my Yarn and Fabric Formation class. Well, that and we would do more engineering-like thigns such as calculate the number of spinning machines and looms needed to produce X pounds or yards of fabric in Y number of hours, etc.



They also let us stretch out the silk fabric to show how they make filling for comforters and blankets.



The end of the Silk Musem was pretty much like a Silk department store that sold everything from silk shirts to ties to undergarments and shoes. I was wayyy too tired by then to take any more photos, so this is the end of the 3-part post from the Great Wall trip! Now I can start catching up to our more recent adventures :)

Peace Corps in Ukraine!

Last Friday evening, I received a phone call on my local Chinese cell phone from my Peace Corps placement officer. We are 12 hours ahead of Atlanta and EST here, so I listed my availability from 8-12 (pm for me, am for EST). He called me right at 8pm on the dot and asked if it was a convenient time for us to talk. He said that he had evaluated my file, and he had a few more questions for me.

I should have prepared more for this phone call, for essential the questions turned into a phone interview. My PO (placement officer) started out by asking me questions about why I wanted to join the Peace Corps, how I've been preparing for the Peace Corps service over the past few months, and what kind of English tutoring or teaching experience have I had. Since I was nominated for teaching English as a foreign language, there was a requirement for a minimum amount of teaching experience. My PO mentioned that since I was nominated for Eastern Europe, was I prepared to handle extremely cold winters and psychological challenges such as dealing with stress, being in another culture, and perhaps facing racism or prejudice for being an outsider and a minority.

After I answered all of the PO's questions, he congratulated me and told me that he was confident in my qualifications and would be officially inviting me to become a Peace Corps Volunteer! He sent the Invitation documents by UPS to my parents in California, and they just received it yesterday (1 week later). My little sister, Celina, showed me the documents over Skype video chat which was pretty fun and probably the most efficient way to tell me about it.

I've been officially invited to serve teaching English in a secondary school in Ukraine, departing September 24th for staging then training in Ukraine for 3 months. My official service will be from December 17, 2010 to December 17, 2012. I now have 7 days to accept or decline the Invitation via email. Thank goodness I don't have to fax or mail anything in for that, I have no idea how to fax in China and I doubt the mail is reliable here.

I'm really excited about being placed in Ukraine, its one of the bigger countries in Eastern Europe and possibly the easiest to pronounce. All the countries that end with -stan, like Krgyzstan and Uzbekistan are more fun to pronounce. I spent most of yesterday morning reading up on Peace Corps in Ukraine on the PC Wiki page at http://www.peacecorpswiki.org/Ukraine.

The Great Wall of China

Finally... after the Ming Tombs, we headed to the Great Wall of China at Mu Tian Yu. We got there around 1pm, just in time for the hottest part of the day. Here is part 2 of the posts from the day that we visited the Great Wall!

This is the entrance to the Great Wall. Our tour included the admission tickets, otherwise we'd have to buy them at the ticket booth. Notice the guy in the light blue shirt, smoking his pipe?



Of course, a few of the guys from our group wanted to talk to that guy, so they asked me to talk to him in Chinese for them. Annie took a funny candid picture of this guy trying to sell me that pipe for $150 rmb.

They sold tickets to take a ski-lift like cable car up to the wall and then luge/tobaggan down, but it was $65 rmb for both ways (and $50rmb for just luging down). I can't believe that they've managed to commercialize the Great Wall, this looks like it could have been at a ski resort or state fair, but no its actually how many people get up to the Wall. The bottom part with the guard rails and bright flags is where the luge track is.



Anyways, a few of us (only 5 out of like 25 in our group) decided to be hardcore and hike up the steps instead of taking the lift. The steps just got steeper from here...



The view hiking up was really pretty, so much lush green countryside.



Almost 45 min later, we got to the top! This is the view from where the lift drops people off, they have a little shaded picnic table area up there.



The little picnic area comes complete with a scenic overlook point. I'm already getting sunburned, walking up under my umbrella didn't help that much...



See the guard tower in the middle of this photo? We climbed up to about there, then turned around because we had to be back at our tour bus by 3pm. But I think the people who took the luge back down had more time to climb further (since they weren't already exhausted from the steep hike up).



The steps along the Wall are uneven in height and depth, and a little crooked. I guess they didn't have the advanced technology back then to make everything level and equally spaced out. But that didn't stop Chris and Holly from getting a classic jump photo :)



We walked around one of the guard towers. I guess they installed the telephone poles and lines more recently..



We walked by a little drink stand and bought waterbottles for $10rmb, but they were totally worth it because they were half frozen. Bottles of water are usually about $2rmb at street stands, but of course they hike up prices at touristy places. Then we decided to take photos in this little doorway, and the lady who sold us the water bottles came up and put her hat on my head. Its one of those faux Red Guard hats, I think she was trying to sell it to me as a souvenir but I would never actually wear anything like that haha.



There are a lot of quality street signs in China that have been translated roughly into English by non-native English speakers... here is a good example. Evan and Annie were like what the heck is this?



You can't quite tell from this photo, but I guess the steps were really getting steep here, some of the steps were like over 1 foot to account for the steep slope.
In addition to the sign shown above, they even installed a railing to help people walk up and down safely.



I'm standing just 1 step above Annie in this photo, and I'm pretty sure that Annie is like at least 8 in taller than me... so the steps are really steep!



I liked this lady's hat. And how this photo shows how the steps suddenly drop off.



So we walked all the way back down to the bottom. And came out by another entrance to the Great Wall.



This entrance looked much more scenic, or at least this pond part was really nice.



And then of course there was a street of shops for all of the tourists. Reminds me of Chinatown, except we are actually in China!



So a few people bought souvenirs along the street like tshirts that said "I Climbed the Great Wall", and then we hopped back on the bus to head back downtown. Such a long day, my next post will be the last in this 3-post series about all the places we went with our tour bus.

The Jade Museum and Ming Tombs

Since we have so many people in our group, we hired a tour bus to take us to the Great Wall. We have about 30 students from GT and there are like 5 students from NUS (the National University of Singapore) that came to Tsinghua with us to take classes. Of course, tours like these have to stop off at a few touristy places where they want you to spend your money. So on the way to the great wall, we stopped at some Jade Museum. This post will be the first of 3 posts from our Great Wall trip.

We walked through some exhibits of pretty fancy pieces of jade. It wasn't really like a museum, more like 3 rooms with jade exhibits.



And they showed us the raw jadeite rock.



Apparently there are different shades of jade, from the bright green to a pale green, and other colors like orange and purple as well.



There was a room where some workers were carving the raw jade slabs into figurines. I kind of felt like I was at the zoo, watching these guys through a glass wall. It was cool to see them shaping the rock in such detail though.



Like can you imagine carving a dragon like this? That is crazy! This dragon was probably about 8 inches long.



They make little decorative balls out of jade too, with smaller balls nested inside them. Shirley is holding one like shes in Dragonball-Z. Someone asked me the other day if I remembered that show, as if I'm too old to have watched that and Pokemon haha... I think they forgot I'm asian (^_^)



Then we walked into a showroom where they sold very impressive pieces of jade... like this statue which is life-sized (and a bit scary).



And if you want to buy a few lions for your front porch, you can get them here. Or a great big battleship for your living room.



Then we walked to the gift shop at the end, where they sold jade bracelets and necklaces from glass cases like a jewelry store. All of it was very expensive though, they were asking ridiculous prices like $2500rmb for a bracelet (about $350 usd) so none of us bought anything. But Nik was really excited about their hats.



After the Jade Museum, the bus took us to the Ming Tombs. We drove for about an hour away from downtown Beijing. On the way, we passed quite a few of these gate things along the side of the road. I vaguely remember learning something about these gates in our history class, like they are supposed to serve as a landing point for the sun goddess' son when he returns to earth? Don't take my words for it though, I might have mixed that up with Japanese history.



The Ming tombs are the final resting place of a few of the old Chinese emperors. I think the particular tombs that were open to the public were the one of the 13th Ming emperor. The emperors were buried underground in their tombs with their wives and lots of tribute like jewelery. If the empress died before her husband the emperor, she was buried first. If the empress died after the emperor, then she joined him in the tomb later.

Even the ticket booth was intricately decorated. However, this may have been done after the tombs became such a tourist attraction.



This is the entrance to the tombs, where they collect tickets at turnstiles in the little arches.



I just really liked this guy's outfit, rocking the pajama pants and lime green wifebeater. If only he had a man-purse.



Here is half of our whole group at the tombs (while waiting for the other bus of people from our group to get there). Our tour guide is the petite asian girl in the middle, carrying the rainbow flag. About 3 minutes after we took this picture, I realized we should have turned around and taken it with the red gate in the background... oops.



So Christine and I took a picture in front of the gate.



This was engraved into the staircase, for multiple flights of stairs. Our tour guide said that the dragon was for the man, and the phoenix was for the lady.



Shirley and I sat at the mini elephant tables. I am not sure why they are there but they were definitely made for people under 5'5".



The we walked to the tombs, which they called the Underground Palace. The tombs were 27 meters underground, so we walked down quite a few flights of stairs.



Here is the floorplan of the tomb that we visited. I think there are 3 chambers for the 3 emperors that are buried together in this tomb. Our tour guide said something about the emperors all dying with in a few years of each other, and the workers were too lazy to build another tomb so they just buried them all together.



There was a hole in the stone here, where people were throwing money like it was a fountain. I am not quite sure what the significance of it is, maybe the sign in chinese says why?



These are replicas of the coffins used to bury the emperor and his wives.



People throw money in here too. Maybe its lucky or a sign of respect?



They also built thrones for the emperor and empresses in the tombs.



Here is the exit of the tomb. We climbed a lot of stairs to the top, and somehow we went from being 27 meters underground to being like 3 stories above ground.



The view from the top of the tomb was so green.



Coming down from the tomb was interesting. Notice the two flat parts in the middle of the staircase? That's apparently how they make staircases handicap accessible. All I know is that I would be terrified to be going down a staircase like that if I was in a wheelchair, hopefully someone would grab the handlebars on the back of the wheelchair!



I have no idea what this is for, but it looks cool and everyone was taking pictures by it so I did too... my shorts tan is getting terrible.



And then we hopped back on the bus and drove to the Great Wall. So my next post will be part 2 for the Great Wall pictures!