Day 8: Starting Work

Day 8: Starting Work

Well, today was the big day!  I started working at China Universal Assets Management, a company based in Shanghai that is doing really well so far and is working on expanding into a more international market.  We headed over from our hotel (it’s about a twenty minute walk) at 8:00 and got settled in our own little room with computers and decent chairs.  Getting those dang computers set up took a while though, so we didn’t really do much this morning until after lunch time.  Lunch was pretty good, there’s a nice cafeteria in the basement of the building (if you’ve ever seen a picture of the Pudong Shanghai skyline, it’s the big gold building).  It has all Chinese dishes, of course, so I had to bite the bullet and eat some real food.  It wasn’t so bad, actually.  There were some pretty good dumpling things and I thought about asking what was in them and then remembered my Grandma Ilse telling me that if you like it, don’t ask.  So I didn’t, and I’m guessing I should be glad I didn’t.  We get an hour and a half for lunch, so after we ate we went outside and walked along the river for a while which would be really pretty if you could see more than 100 yards away and the water weren’t so brown.  Seriously, Seattle, be grateful for blue skies and blue water. 

So then we went back inside and got to work! We have two projects we three (Evan, James, and I) are working on this summer: one is researching other similar asset management companies and looking at their strategies for expanding and the other is creating a database for the company that charts the other asset management firms and their clients and what they invest in and that kind of thing.  Both of them require a ton of google searching, made difficult by the fact that our computers were not cooperating and I’m not used to sitting in front of a screen from 8:30 to 5:30.  But it sort of reminded me of my architecture classes in high school (a little shout out to Dave and the boys in my CAD room!) because when everyone gets in the zone we all do different things- like James will start talking to himself and comment on every other thing he reads and Evan will sit there in silence and not say anything until you can pull him from whatever internet world he’s in.  And I listen to their exchanges, which are hilarious.  Which I’m pretty sure is exactly what happened my senior year of high school in the drafting room, no names mentioned haha. 

            After work we went to dinner in this little restaurant in a “hutong” type of area.  The food was actually really good- I got this egg and tomato noodle dish that sort of tasted like pizza in a bowl.  It was actually really good and I was proud of myself for being so adventurous J (I actually didn’t really have a choice, the menu had no pictures and Evan’s translation was only so helpful) Oh and then we saw this fake DVD shop that I HAVE to go back to because I found the most awesome Chinese set of my favorite TV show….and it’s not like I would ever watch the episodes in Chinese but I think I just need to have this.  So overall it was a pretty good day and gave me hope for the rest of the summer that once I’m in a routine it will be easier to enjoy all the weird things about China.