guangrao, china
September 2017-November 2017
Not a lot of people know where Guangrao, China is, so I have attached a convenient map for you. It's located in the Shandong province (which my coworkers affectionately call the 'Dong) and it's pretty much smack dab between the two bigger cities of Zibo and Dongying.
The biggest downside of Guangrao (besides its remote location) was that it did not have a McDonalds. It had a Pizza Hut and a KFC but no McDonalds... How??? Pizza Hut ended up being one of the most frequented dinner places for us while we were there, along with this "French Teppanyaki" place.
There wasn't a whole lot to do in town, so a favorite past time was to bother Eric. Eric is from the customer site, but we ended up seeing a lot of him while we were in Guangrao. He's a little ~shy shy shy~ around the camera but here are some good photos. Photo cred mostly to Michael.
Eric actually took us to the movies when we were there (we saw that Jackie Chan movie, The Foreigner). The best part of this theater was that they offered two kinds of 3D glasses at the theater: actual 3D glasses and clip-on 3D glasses. As we're all glasses wearers, this was amazing. The evidence is as follows:
While we were in Guangrao, we ran into a guy from the States (which is pretty rare for this location) from Utah and he built coasters. Apparently Guangrao has this cultural theme park dedicated to Sun Tzu, the guy who wrote Art of War.
We went on a very smoggy day and there was practically no one in the park. I think we saw about 8 other people? Keep in mind when China builds parks, they build HUGE parks. We rented a 4 person flintstone car on a whim, and I'm glad we did because walking this park would have been exhausting.
In total, I spent approximately 4 months in China. One of the strangest parts about being in China was that people were convinced I wasn't Chinese. I'm ethnically 100% Chinese, but born in the states, an ABC (American born Chinese). A lot of them said I didn't look Chinese? ? ? Why? ? ?
The contractors really liked to take sly pictures of the "foreigners". This contractor was originally at my site, but left after installation. He ended up at a site with my coworker and showed him the picture of the other foreigner he met, me. So here's a picture of a photo of me on some old contractors cell phone.
Anyway, here's a compilation of snaps from and around Guangrao.
until next time,
sc