Welcome back, -or welcome to first timers.
We have met another Kiwi guy living here in
Huaian, Peter Morgan, who has been living in China for 10 years. He has an interest in a wool
scouring/processing plant in Xuyi, a “small country town” about 1 hour away
–population 700,000. Peter also teaches
at a local secondary school and we visited for a look around – we were hosted
at the school for afternoon tea and later taken for dinner. Very quickly we
realise they are in recruiting mode and sure enough we get offered jobs – but
at this point not part of our plan but nice to have a back-up!
While in Xuyi Peter had organised for us to
visit several factories. Of course, a
visit through his plant and see them processing sheep skins purchased from New
Zealand and the finished products predominantly being sold into the Japanese
market. Whilst there we leave a large
suitcase and box filled with surplus gear we are sending home with Peter as he
is arranging a container of gear to NZ – a real lucky break for us as we were
starting to wonder how we were going to deal with our stuff.
His Chinese friend, Frank, is a partner in
a large factory that manufactures lathes, all sizes, manual to fully
programmed. Starting with the cast pieces, machining and assembly being done in
a series of factories - it was very interesting to see the different processes
being undertaken. Of particular note was
the lack of Health and Safety gear or facilities – this is not unusual in most
operations here. Ear, eye, hand, foot,
inhalation, fall, crush protection does not seem to be a consideration. In fact when I asked it was openly
acknowledged that this adds cost to the end product that is not wanted. –photos
Another factory made huge rock crushing plants
and were selling them as complete stand-alone units with generators and
compressors to enable them to be set-up in remote locations and operated with a
minimum of external services. They were
trying to have me buy one and take to NZ as all I needed to do was “find a rock
mountain, set this up, and you are in business.
Pay nothing now and when you have an income stream going you pay us off
monthly”. Land ownership, resource
consent, mining rights – not sure if these present too much of a problem in
China. It’s OK, I didn’t order one.
-photos
Next stop was a cigarette lighter factory
–producing around 450,000 a day and all assembled by hand!! Rows of predominantly women at benches
putting these things together in mass assembly lines. One area had ladies putting stickers on the
lighters one at a time, once completed each lighter was lit and flame adjusted
then off for packing. Another area had
injection moulders, all 42 of them!! -running flat out making components. -photos
We were also taken to the Ming Zuling
tombs, which is a tomb complex built in the late 1300’s during the Ming Dynasty
and flooded in 1680 when the local rivers burst their banks and created a large
lake. Over years the tombs were
forgotten about and lay under water until the early 1960’s when a massive
drought rolled back the lake revealing the complex. Was pretty interesting. –photos
The following Saturday was another
organised day out. Started first thing
when we visited our Italian friend Davides’ screw factory –got picked up by his
driver even!! Was most interesting
seeing his factory but even more so getting to talk with him and hear his
experiences of setting up business in China and how the “system” works. -photos
After lunch we met up with our friend Frank
and other friends from EC –(English Corner) and a couple of other expats and went
on a boat trip on the inner Grand Canal which runs through central Huaian and
down to Chuzhou, which is the neighbouring city and part of greater
Huaian. The trip was pretty leisurely
and at Chuzhou we walked into town as Frank had arranged for us to visit the
Grand Canal Museum. This was really
informative and found enough English texts to give a good understanding of the
whole Canal system. Basically the Grand
Canal was a series of canals dug by hand and including joining and widening of
local rivers. Parts of the Canal date
back to 500 BC and were final connected around 600 and is 1776 km long running
from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south –(south-west of Shanghai) Today it is still a complicated series of
canals, river systems, lakes, locks with a constant stream of barges coming and
going. A truly impressive feat of engineering.
On the walk back to the boat we visited an
old village site which is part of Chuzhou, wandered around the alleys and got
to talk with some of the locals with Frank translating for us –was really nice
to be able to communicate and the people were as interested in us as much as we
were in them! Visited a small family run
soy sauce business which has been in the same location for over 200 years and
some of the urns were originals. A very
busy, interesting day out and about in Huaian.
The following Saturday, 24th
May, bought to us that which all people living abroad fear most – the death of
a loved one. We got several calls from
New Zealand during the day advising that Julie’s Mum was not well and resulted
in her passing away on Saturday evening.
A hard place to be when so far away.
After much debate we decide to stay put and arrange to attend the
funeral via a Skype connection. We do
however decide we will head home for 2 weeks at the end of our contract to
spend some time with family before our Summer School commitment in Yangzhou.
The end of the school term was a bit of a
mixed bag with Julie getting told one day she was now finished and I had
another week and a half….kind of. As again the teachers want to take the class
to cram. Also during these last few
weeks the children put on their end of year show –photos. It was really great
to see so many of the kids up on stage performing. A lot of singing and dancing
routines as well as a couple of very patriotic ones complete with uniforms and
flags.
Had a couple of dinners with some of the
teachers that have been extremely helpful to us during the last year as they
certainly made life easier, in fact it would have been damn near impossible! On the 10th of June we were told
we would be all finished and free to go on the 18th so we quick
smart had tickets booked on a direct flight from Shanghai to Auckland. If you ever get to Shanghai you have to go on
the Maglev Train from town out to Pudong Airport – 31kms in 7 minutes at a top
speed of 431km/ h, it is way cool.
We eventually arrived back in Auckland on
the 19th for some time with family.
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