David's Big Adventure in China

I had a nice Christmas and enjoyed two whole days off! On Christmas Eve I had a very nice dinner at a western restaurant with my girlfriend and her son and niece. The kids are both in college and speak English fairly well. We had turkey, ham, beef steak, salmon and crab salad and a bit of wine. It cost about $65 U.S. for the 4 of us, which is a very expensive meal here. They had a special Christmas dinner menu and they were decorated for Christmas as many restaurants and most of the shops are. The restaurant was packed but I didn’t see any other foreigners. Christmas here is becoming more popular. Then on Christmas day we went to a friend’s house for dinner where 12 of us enjoyed goose and home cooked western foods. Dessert was English Christmas pudding with ice cream. The men were all westerners (2 Swiss, 2 UK, and 2 Americans) and the ladies were all Chinese. One of the Swiss guys was the host and chef. I have posted some pictures for your perusal. I took some Santa hats and small gifts to the office on Christmas Eve day and the ladies were very excited to wear them and have pictures taken. The only other man in the office that day also got into the spirit.

As I mentioned last time, I feel like I started to make some good progress at work. Recently I had a meeting with the accountants (3 of them) and my translator to plan what we needed to do to finish up the accounting for 2010 and what we needed to prepare for 2011. We went to dinner in the evening along with our HR person and my gf (also an accountant). I had two coupons for 40 rmb (about $6) off the price and had someone ask if we could use them to reduce the cost. The server said that we could only use one then one of the accountants suggested that she put some of the dishes on one bill and the rest on another bill so we could use both coupons. The rest of the group agreed and started arguing with the server about doing it. She went to get her supervisor who then had to listen to 6 of them all giving different reasons and ways to do it. After about 5 minutes of harassment she finally gave in and said okay. It was so funny to watch them all gang up on her; she never had a chance…..lol. There’s nothing more relentless than a group of Chinese beancounters out to save a few bucks! After dinner I took them bowling. At least 3 of the group had never been and they all had a great time. They suggested next time that we have a cheaper dinner and/or go bowling earlier when it’s cheaper. The dinner cost about $60 U.S. for the 7 of us and the bowling cost about $35 for 2 games for each of us.

Until next time……

I’m continuing to work long hours and expect to do so until February or March. At least now I feel like I’m making progress in some areas. I have two good accountants working for me and still need to hire an experienced accountant who can speak English. I still meet new challenges almost every day. One recent challenge was getting some payments made to contractors. The banks here are to a large degree an extension of the government and there are very strict controls on foreign currency exchange. We have money in the bank in a US $ account but they only let us exchange the money into Chinese yuan under strict circumstances. We are investing a lot of money into the local economy that provides jobs and will provide food but they make it very difficult for us to spend our money. The money we have is all capital and none of it is borrowed from the bank. It was so frustrating when they were making it difficult to spend our money for the local economy.

Our business model requires very close cooperation with the government and we’ve probably had more than 100 government officials visit our sites in the past 4 months. There was a group of 80 that was supposed to visit a couple weeks ago but there visit was cancelled because the local villagers were protesting and blocked the road to our farm by putting boulders on it. Some of our managers were at the site to greet the government officials and got trapped there for several hours. The locals have protested several times but we often don’t know why. I’m just amazed by the number of government officials that come to visit. Maybe they don’t have anything else to do?

I finally got to see part of the mini-series I helped make more than a year ago. It’s showing on tv now and it’s a 25 episode series. I’m in the first episode but if you didn’t know it was me, you wouldn’t recognize me. The scene happens so quickly, you don’t really get a good look at me.

This is probably my last post before Christmas so I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and Happy Holidays if you celebrate any other holidays! It’s starting to get a little cold here now (sometimes in the low 50’s F) so I checked to make sure I had heat in my apartment and found that I didn’t so I bought myself a portable heater as an early Christmas present. I hope all your presents make you warm and happy!