On Saturday a couple of guests joined
us in the breakfast. After the usual
where-have-you-been-in-China-how-long-you-are-staying-here questions
we found out they were working in Hangzhou for six months already.
She, Polish, works with telecommunications and he, German, is
teaching German. I wonder if “teaching German” is the new “
teaching English” as a excuse to do something useful while you're
backpacking, but who knows.
While expressing our impressions about
China, they gave us a perspective that was unknown so far. Working
directly with chinese colleagues, their opinion about work and
partnership has many more obstacles than the cultural differences per
se.
Communications is a huge problem, and
they tend to do the day to day tasks according on what they think
they know, not necessarily on what was discussed. According to the
Polish girl, her Chinese colleagues didn't ask questions when the
workload was being distributed and even agreeing in doing the task,
it would be complete in a different way. If confronted, they would
give any explanation about the communications problem. The point in
the whole story is: why not to ask? Simple: to not lose face,
according to the couple.
Generally, one-morning conversations
are not enough to make you change your mind from difficult concepts
like this. Even understanding that there is also the other side of
the story, he insight was great to make me think more in cultural
clashes in the working environment. I had experienced similar
situations in my previous work and it took me a long time to change
roles in my mind.
The situation is not different when it
comes to food. Why do they eat snakes, frogs, turtles, crickets and
worms is beyond my comprehension. But we do eat “weird” food in
Northeast Brazilian. Special dishes cooked with blood chicken,
sausages made with pork blood, sun-dried meat and, in few areas, all
sorts of dishes made of goat's intern organs. Not to mention the
goat's cooked brain (bleeergh), delicacy eaten at 6am in one
particular market in the north area in Fortaleza.
In Xiamen, there is a market close to
the pier. In there you can buy all you know and don't know regarding
seafood - and other types. Crabs? Prawns? Mussels? Fish? Sea urchin?
Sea cucumber? Lobster? Octopus, cattle fish, squid? Name it. They
have. And they sell it alive. They also have snails, frogs, turtles
and snakes, also alive and disposed in buckets, normally too small
to store them in a acceptable condition. Close to this market you
can find a long long street cooking the seafood you saw in the
market. Food is fresh, and it is a pity that they not always cook in
front of you.
In our expedition we tried rice and
prawns, cooked in a bamboo shot (good, but too greasy). We also tried
a pork dumpling soup (tasteless) and deep fried “ fresh milk”. I
thought it was cheese, but the girl in the counter (engineer student
working in her “middle-autumn job” . Apparently they need some
working experience, not specified in what) told me it was coagulated
milk. It was ok, honestly. Nothing to die for, but nothing to make
you vomit.
Later on we took a boat to Gulang Yu
and walked to the other side of the island. It remembers me Olinda a
lot, with all hills and colonial houses. Far from the touristic fuss,
we found tiny little charming streets, hiding their secrets to those
lazy enough to climb it.
