outside of China, in Romania

The Romanian Flag

Back in Europe for a week... one the one side to see friends & family again and on the other to attend my cousin's wedding ceremonies.

So go to be back home, people are so nice, sky is blue and the food is wonderful and the access to information is not restricted (I CAN SEE MY BLOG, wow!).

Wuxi, 无锡 (Wúxī)

Downtown Wuxi at night

Downtown Wuxi in the evening is very colorful, animated and lively but nothing is more interesting in Wuxi than a visit to a local famous street food street. The street is very narrow (about a car-wide) but loads of cars, scooters, bikes and people still somehow manage to cross increasing the general street noise over acceptable levels at first.

More scooters in Wuxi than any other city I've seen so far

Great video of the ways of the street... couldn't get the street noise to blend in

There are a couple of stands with ready to be made skewers. One has a large variety, from sea food, vegetables, all kinds of meat, tofus to things that I will never understand what they are.

Different from what I saw in the past, all the food from these 2 or 3 stands goes to common line-up of grilling chefs. The result is good street food accompanied draft beer. It can only be very good…

The chefs barbecuing the meet and veggies

Wuxi friends and a Chinese begger

The city silently becomes asleep, with fewer and fewer people on the street. The lights are still and somehow you can see a star in the sky. This is rare for China… what a good night!

From Beijing to Wuxi, work day 从北京到无锡, 白天工作

As planned, I managed to get a ticket from Beijing to Wuxi to visit my friend David, who works there for his internship. While trying to do this, I managed to come across a very good, but expensive service in Beijing to have tickets delivered to my home for 50 Yuan. Given the information gaps in Beijing’s railway system around our house, having this service handy can be a good opportunity.

The train from Beijing to Wuxi was not bad. I meet a couple of interesting guys, got involved with some discussions about money and habits of spending them by the Chinese people and soon went to bed.
The next morning in Wuxi felt like a summer vacation, hot, humid, sunny, blue skies, no noise, mild breeze… all these elements made me think of a summer vacation in a sea resort. Very good feeling…


David and I spent the day working on a filed project visiting two Ingersoll Rand facilities (one office in ShangHai and one in SuZhou) doing surveys and preparing future sign replacements.

Even though the jobs were the same, conduct a survey with the company for a future replacement of the signs, the in-city office didn't want too much trouble and left us to do our job.


The Shanghai office of IR covers 3 floors of a high-rise office building and kinda ignored us as we were doing our work. The Thermo-King factory in SuZhou was very happy to have us on site and immediately asked us if we intend to hold a meeting (simple example of the company’s inefficiencies in communication). We were assigned a chief engineer that took us around the factory and did our job in a professionally.

The lunch break was very interesting as we ate at Hooter’s in Shanghai (with Chinese girls of course). Most of Hooter’s customers were foreigners and the only Chinese people there were the ones foreigners would bring in for lunch. The girls try really hard to keep the franchise up to the standards, but they somehow fail to produce the lively environment foreigners are used to back in th US.

Great Wall number 3

Freshly published, the new 7 wonders of the world will most probably attract a great deal of visitors now. The Great Wall, seems like the only one that one can visit multiple times and every time see something different and unique.

This weekend, for the 3rd time now, i visited the great wall. Every time was a completely different experience. This time, organized by the AbroadChina company we went to a wild, non restored side of the Wall. We started early with a stop in a small Chinese village, which reminds foreign visitors how china is perceived before arriving: rural and dirty but interesting.

Considering the piles of dirt accompanied by new solar powered light poles, one got the right picture.

We had a good lunch with a Chinese family, time to socialize and talk about the cultural differences and worldwide languages.

Just after a short siesta, we started our climbing. Like no other part I've visited before, this one had no real walkway, but was just a chaotic set of stones put together with vegetation forming a 1m wide path, dangerous fall on left and right and beautiful landscape.

For an experienced hiker, this trail would be basic, but it took us some time and energy to get to the first watch tower. From there to the second watch tower one should've used a rope to go down and then climb a wall and that was considered too adventurous and was kept as secret by the organizers. As always the way back seemed to be even more difficult than the climb was.

The day ended at the same family's house with a Chinese BBQ good chicken and lamb kebabs assorted with Chinese beer.

The word of the day is: 睡觉(shui jiao) = sleep; go to sleep