Back at Work

So I know I haven’t exactly been posting regularly, but can you blame me? I’ve been pretty busy. I had a very nice last few days with my mom and Marie-Eve. We did more shopping, visited the 798 art district and even went to a cooking class.

798 was interesting. It was full of wacky statues and some modern art galleries. It was free to enter the area, but they charged for all the galleries so we mostly stuck to the gift shops and saw the art on postcards. It was quite hot so we didn’t spend all day there, but we had a nice time and it wasn’t quite as complicated to get to as I thought it might be.

The cooking class was amazing. It was at a place called The Hutong and we learned to make baozi (stuffed buns). We made 3 kinds of fillings (lotus root and bok choy, pork and brown sugar), learned about all the ingredients and the history and even got to take home leftovers and a recipe. The only sad part was that we overdosed on buns and thus decided not to go to our favourite bun place for lunch the next day.

I eventually caught my mom’s cold and got quite sick with a fever yesterday so I wasn’t up to doing much. We packed and went for lunch before taking a taxi to the bus station. My mom accompanied me in and then she and Marie-Eve left for the airport.

They tried to catch a plane yesterday, but the odds were not with them (since they were flying stand-by), so they are trying again today. Keep your fingers crossed for them!

I was back at work today and put the finishing touches on my Excel booking calculator. It is now completely usable and easy to update and comes with simple instructions as well as a document detailing its inner workings so somebody else can update/modify it someday.

On a different note, anyone reading this should a) like the Schoolhouse at Mutianyu Great Wall on Facebook and b) Enter our caption contest.

Week 10 Begins with French

I always enjoy confusing French guests. There are just sitting there, talking and having their meal thinking that nobody can understand them when I suddenly pop up and ask them how they are doing in French. I actually had someone say, “we will have to be careful with what we say now” today. We get a huge number of guests from France (probably one of our three most common countries along with Germany and the US) so it is actually quite useful to be able to speak with them in French. On the other hand, I never know if when I hear their accent I should switch to French or if that might insult them.

Jim tried to kill my calculator project this morning saying that it has become too complicated to use. I agree to a certain extent, but there are so many different situations he wants it to be usable in that it is hard for it not to be complex. I’m working on figuring out how to use different date functions in excel so hopefully that will help. I have at least managed to save it for the time being. I think it either needs to be complicated to understand (for guests), to use (for staff) or to program (for me). Unfortunately Jim wants none of the above because he wants everything to be clear for guests, for there not to be too much training needed and for it to be simple to update. I still hate excel!

I had night duty at the brickyard tonight but it is still raining so there weren’t many guests. I started reading a new book that my sweet mom sent me as an unbirthday gift (the joys of ebooks) this morning and sent some e-mails.

I have 2 days off starting tomorrow so I get to sleep in. On Wednesday I am going to go into Beijing to try to get my visa extension paperwork submitted. So far, getting our company stamp onto the forms seems to be the most complicated step. Apparently there is a long chain of command. I’m glad I started early!