So today was the first day of our mainland China trip. Hong Kong and China are actually separate entities, with HK technically a part of China - but governed by itself. They call it "The Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong." There is even a strict border and you must pass through customs, have a visa, etc. in order to even enter mainland China. We have set out on this 4 day trip as a team - to visit and evaluate a number of different factories in the Guangdong province that could potentially manufacture the solar cooker. Walking outside the train station and entering Shenzhen, some things immediately feel different. We, as westerners, are much less common here, and people are much more prone to stare as we pass. The air is heavier and the spaces bigger to accommodate the massive amounts of people. There are much less signs with english translations. Also to complicate matters, people speak Mandarin here. So the little Cantonese I learned in Hong Kong is out the window.
We leave the station by bus - a crowded bus that someone had vomited on the floor of on the previous ride. We arrived a bit queezy, lightheaded in a town about an hour away. We met Daniel, the manager of a factory whom we had met with previously, and crowded into his shiny black sedan. OK. run red light, run red light, almost hit cyclist, people walking in middle of road,
construction spilling into the road, motorcycles darting across two lanes. Traffic is different in China too, apparently. Daniel was very honest, and said he ran the red lights because there was no one coming and there weren't any cameras, which makes perfect sense. Everyone also uses their horns much more here - not to be rude, but to alert everyone else of their presence. If you're coming up to an intersection, you honk; changing lanes, honk; pulling out; honk.
Oh, hello Chinese tent-making factory. Situated off the main roads a bit; this factory complex was very non-descript, a mix between corporate and dormitory architecture. The workers lived nearby in similar, dorm like buildings. It was an off day, as it grows closer to the Chinese New Year, so there weren't too many people working. Every room is big and in every room, there is a big something. Cutting rooms with long tables, sewing rooms with huge piles of fabric on the floor, mounds of colorful twine and fiberglass poles. People looking up occasionally from their tasks to check us out as we roamed and took pictures. This factory, according to one of our consultants, was pretty darn good in terms of the conditions. Good light, two shifts, no harsh chemicals; a good reference point I guess. After a short meeting over the details of another prototype they would make of our reflector, back into town. Here we would find a line for the bus a block long and we had another meeting back in Shenzhen. With the crowd of tired and impatient looking locals looking on, we crammed into a "taxi" (random guy who offered to drive us) and cruised along the coast.
The restaurant across from the hotel was packed and we used this as a good way to decide to eat there. Whole fried fish, Sichuan eggplant, greens, rice and a couple shots of Bijou later, sleep comes quickly on a hard hotel mattress.
