a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s the scene at the ‘restaurant across from the Sheraton’ where we had dinner tonight. There is also ‘the restaurant under the tree’ and the ‘spicy restaurant’ here in Dameisha : our way to simplify the Chinese names. The little group with white shirts by the window is a band that provided live music. My favorite dish of the evening was the eggplant and beef, shown in the picture. And the last picture is just of a hotel with animated neon stripes, close by.
I tagged along with two of my colleagues to Luohu Commercial City. It is a shopping mall right next to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border’s customs building (first picture). Wikipedia says the place is notorious in Hong Kong for its bargains, and that many “one-day” visitors from Hong Kong venture no further into Shenzhen than the mall. Most of the items for sale in the mall, however, are either counterfeit or cheap replicas of designer brands, and the mall has a reputation for selling low-quality goods through high-pressure bargain tactics.
So it’s not for people like me that 1. hate haggling over prices, and 2. want the real thing! But there we were – and it wasn’t long before a ‘guide’ latched on to us, inquiring what we were interested in buying, and then taking us a store owner that sells it. The guide was a nice young kid and I hope he gets money from the shop-owners he brought us to. I am pretty sure he does. We also stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall tea shop, and the owner sat us down and served up green tea, oolong tea and jasmine tea. We loved the green tea and each bought a ‘brick’ of the stuff. Then we hopped in the taxi and came back to Dameisha.
Come end of day Friday we had completed a 7 day workweek that started the previous Saturday. Oof. So Friday night I just put my feet up (on the hotel bed) with some 7 Up I got across the street. The xǐ 喜 on the can means like| love| enjoy| joyful thing. I guess that’s the same as ‘up’, as in getting one’s spirits up. 7 Up was created by a Charles Grigg, who launched his St. Louis-based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. The original Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was launched just two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929! The very cool artwork is from the 7 Up website. The submarine is my favorite!
FTA stands for Free Trade Agreement, of course. Finally went into law on the US side (still to be ratified by Korea). And what is ‘free’? Well, there are no import tariffs on a number of designated categories of goods. So President Obama says he’d soon like to see South Koreans driving Chevys, Fords and Buicks. Well, I’m sure the Koreans would like to see Americans drive more Hyundais, and they will possibly eat more American beef in return (screen shot from NHK TV Wed night).
Speaking of beef, yukhoe refers to a variety of raw dishes in Korean cuisine, usually made from raw ground beef seasoned with various spices or sauce. But in April and May this year, four people died and some 35 hospitalized after eating yukke (what it’s called in Japan) in the Tokyo area. Yukke is now served there under new standards (recent newspaper article from Tokyo newspaper). But they can still count me out. Cook or grill my beef, please!
There is a tropical depression (named Banyan) off the coast of Hong Kong that has produced a steady rain the last three days out here. This is bad news for the already-flooded areas in Thailand as well, I’m sure. The arrow sign is at our turn into Ping Kui Road every day to work, and I wonder if there will be enough light energy collected by the little solar panel to make the left and right arrow flicker at night – there probably will be.
I have munched on the last of my fancy dark chocolate Kit Kats I picked up in Japan (aww). Japan has green tea Kit Kat also, but I steered clear of that. Or maybe I will get some the next time I stop over in Narita airport. My love for Kit Kat goes back a long way; it has been around for 76 years now and I recall the plain red and white packaging shown in the 1969 picture below. Back then it was milk chocolate, and that was it. But it was very good !
One of our US colleagues brought us some Pilão coffee from the States. I have to confess that at first I thought it was Italian! .. but NO, it’s from Brazil. Brazil is by far the world’s largest coffee producer, responsible for around 30% of the world’s supply. Coffeereview.com says ‘Cafe Pilao represents the down-home style of Brazilian coffee. Most North American coffee drinkers will be put off by its almost composty fermented fruit notes, but others may enjoy this ambiguous flavor character’. So I will have to try it for myself and report back. The review site didn’t mention that the coffee is Rainforest Alliance-certified – I hope it is !
Before Germany started shutting down their nuclear reactors, they exported 1,400 GW-hrs per month, says Bloomberg Businessweek. Now they have to import about 2,000 GW-hrs per month, much of that coming from France and the Czech Republic. Aha! I thought so, was my reaction when I saw the article. So it remains to be seen if the Germans can replace their lost nuclear-power generating capacity with wind, solar and other renewable resources.
We are working this weekend – to make up for the extended Chinese holiday weekend. The US jobs report of Friday was also reported on Japanese TV here. (Yes, for a Japanese illiterate person I watch way too much Japanese TV, but it’s fun to figure out the graphics). The symbol 万 man means 10,000 – so it says 103,000 jobs added. In English we don’t have a symbol for 10,000 but myriad means exactly that, actually. So a myriagon is a polygon with 10,000 sides.
Of course the 9.1% would be the official US unemployment rate, unchanged.
Here is the proof coin set I bought at the Japan Mint’s store in Tokyo. The coins range from 1 yen (aluminum), a 5 yen brass coin, a 10 yen bronze coin and a 50 yen cupronickel coin, to a 100 yen cupronickel coin and a 500 yen nickel-brass coin. The ¥500 yen coin is worth big bucks, about US$6.50! And what the little 1 yen coin has going for it, is that it can float on water- wow. What a nice demonstration of surface tension in water. (The picture is from the web. I have some used 1 yen coins and I will try that when I get home to Seattle !).
Wednesday night I had dinner at the Denny’s across the street from the hotel one last time, then caught the Narita Express at 7am Thu morning at Tokyo station. There’s the sleek machine in the picture, gliding in and stopping so that the car doors line up exactly with the markers on the platform. I learned of Steve Jobs’s passing away at the airport on CNN. The picture is from a discussion of the iPhone 4S in Japan earlier in the week. iPhones were previously limited to one carrier (Softbank), but will now be available from a second carrier (KDDI), similar to the at-first-exclusive-to-AT&T and then-also-Verizon situation in the USA.
It was rained all day Wednesday in the Tokyo metro area (picture from NHK TV station) and I had on-line work to do, but I still managed to run out to Akihabara. It is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and located less than five minutes by rail from Tokyo Station. As the name indicates, it is a major shopping area for electronic, computer, anime, and otaku* goods, including new and used items. *roughly translates as geek; a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga or video games. The store is gigantic : 7 floors of Best Buy, Toys-R-Us and Office Depot stuff. The displays in some areas are just overwhelming but the store is very well laid out and run. The friendly guy in the picture explains how to measure your wrist size for watch straps, the blond anime girl is from the floor in the DVD/ CD section – why waste floor space if it can be put to good use to advertise the merchandise? The last picture is from outside. By then my shoes and socks were wet in spite of the umbrella I borrowed from the hotel and I called it quits and went back.
My first mission of the day was to find the Tokyo branch of the Japan Mint store to buy a 2011 Japan coin set, and I succeeded. Most Japanese streets have no names! and the addressing system is quite different from Western ones. It is near Higashi-Ikebukoro station and I had to ask for directions twice. This is the entrance of the store. (I will show the coin set later).
Next stop was Akasaka station. There is a Noritake porcelain show room there that I wanted to check out (sneak picture of porcelain with gold leaf is from there). The Akasaka area sustained heavy damage in WWII and has been newly rebuilt : and it shows. I loved the spectacular curved vanishing-edge building with the diamond window panes. The area is also full of shrines. I walked to the east from the orange area to find the Hie Jinja Shrine (next two pictures). Finally the obligatory self-picture in the subway mirror with my iPhone 4. I see there is considerable disappointment at Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S (what? no iPhone 5?!).
Monday’s weather was perfect for being out and about. This Ginza district lamp post with the Fenghuang (mythological bird of East Asia) on top has a decoration with up-faces/ upside-down-faces on. The Ginza street scene shows Matsuya Ginza, an upscale department store with a design museum on the 6th floor (white building on the right). I love the chess set but didn’t make a note of who the artist was. The Klein & More clock replica dates back to 1956 (a little pricey at ¥ 47,250/ US$600, though). Elsewhere in the store the Issey Miyake jackets went for $400 or so. (Miyake was born in Hiroshima and witnessed and survived the atomic bomb at age 7 in 1945). I ran into the Ichiro picture (from the Seattle Mariners) in the subway. He is promoting Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and yes, that’s a Starbucks store name reflected at the top of the picture. And back in the hotel I can watch high-definition manga animated stories. The artwork is stunning, but of course the dialog is in Japanese!
Here is the Boeing 767-300 of All Nippon Airlines that brought us to Tokyo, at a wet Hong Kong airport. (An ANA plane was involved in a hair-raising incident on Sept 6. Flight 140 with 117 passengers en route to Haneda -Tokyo’s other airport- briefly flew virtually upside down after a co-pilot mistakenly operated a key steering mechanism. Whoah! Amazingly, just two flight attendants were slightly injured, and six passengers reported that they felt ‘unwell’ after landing). Today I sat in coach but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a Kirin beer. Wish I knew what the little sticker on it said ! of course I don’t ! So that was 4 hours in the air. Then I took the Narita Express train to Tokyo (it’s been a long day, does it show in my face?). It helped a lot that I have the Tokyo subway figured out and that I came to the same Marriott I stayed in, in May.
I have a few days off from the project this coming week, and since it’s too short to go back home I decided to go to Tokyo. My short stay-over there in May was just too short to see enough of the city! This time of year the typhoons keep rolling in from the Pacific – another one hit the Phillipines just today – so that is something to keep an eye on. The temperatures in Japan have gone down already from the summer highs. The 27 27 25 at the bottom of NHK TV’s weather map is for 大阪 Osaka, 名古屋市Nagoya and 東京都 Tokyo respectively. (25ºC is 77ºF).
Saturday October 1 is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China. The PRC was founded on October 1, 1949 with a ceremony at Tiananmen Square. The flags are from lamp posts on the way to work, and the other picture is from Baidu’s home page. Baidu is sometimes called the ‘Google of China’.
‘Baidu’ is a quote from the last line of Xin Qiji’s classical poem Green Jade Table in The Lantern Festival saying something like ‘Having searched for her hundreds and thousands of times in the crowd, suddenly turning back by chance, I find her there in the dimmest candlelight’.
We are starting to build our solution in the SAP Development system. That means we are creating transports – little packets of table entries or program code, and pushing the ‘truck’ button on the Transport Organizer screen. 
The SAP screens that make up the user interface sit atop a gigantic database of connected tables. So how many are the Germans up to these days in a typical standard SAP system anyway, I wondered? Well, there is a ‘mother of all tables’ with all the table names by the name of DD02L. So we can check the number of names in that table. Not everything that masquerades as a ‘table’ is a true table though. Some are virtual tables or structures, so those should not be counted. Finally, let’s filter out any custom tables (in most SAP systems there would be no more than a few 100, anyway). And the answer is – drum roll .. – 80, 674. That’s a lot !
On Wednesday we went to the Aloha Beach Club, a place on the water close to work. (They offer pizza for lunch, that was the draw). There was a nice map of the area on the wall. My cell phone picture is a little blurred, but the land mass on the south west corner of the map is Dapeng Peninsula, and the little bay right above it is Dapeng Bay. It is shallow for the most part, making it ideal for windsurfing. The cute little car with the surfboard is a BYD, from the Shenzhen-based car manufacturer with the same name. Its 2010 sales of 519,800 units made it the sixth largest Chinese car-maker by units sold.
Some 20 project team members are staying in the hotel here in Dameisha and we were all invited to a ‘General Management Thank You’ party on Tuesday night. The food was wonderful and there was live music. A singer belted out Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, some Creedence Clearwater Revival songs from way back then and even some country music. Quite a range of genres! But then I see Wikipedia says that CCR’s genres were roots rock, country rock, blues rock, swamp rock and southern rock. Not that I can tell the difference, but swamp rock sounds the best to me !
Photo from Wikipedia : Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1968. L-R: Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and John Fogerty
