It’s been a busy week at work. Monday morning, after drinking my milk tea from the market downstairs and arriving at work, I had my first official review and project meeting. The head architect, our project head, and a few other fellow designers gathered around my desk and we went over the two design options I had been working on. Throughout the week, I developed several more iterations. Unknown to me, there had been a meeting between a few members of my department and some representatives from the Baotou government over the weekend. Several changes had to be made to the overall urban scheme, and we’ve all been working this week to make changes to the design. After my morning desk crit, the other members of my project team and I gathered around the city plan to discuss the meeting with the Baotou government. The meeting was held in Chinese to be more efficient with time, but Zeng explained some of the key points, especially the information that pertains to my portion of the project. All that the Baotou representatives said at the meeting was that “the geological museum is very important to them,” but they didn’t give any direction in terms of what they are looking for in a design other than that it needs to have a lot of green space around it. Between designing in Sketchup and AutoCAD, I’ve been trying to do my own research on Baotou and China as a whole.
For some reason, the topic of marriage always seems to be brought up by my younger coworkers. Actually this is probably because one of the designers in my department is going to be getting married in the middle of August. In China, they explained over lunch, a man must buy a house for a woman if he wants to marry her. Nowadays, however, a woman will still marry a man if she loves him, even if he doesn’t buy her a house. The parents wouldn’t approve, however. They asked me if I will need to buy a house when I get married. I explained that in America, it used to be the dream to buy a single family detached house and settle down, but now there are trends towards living in apartments or multifamily housing.
After work on Monday, Avik, Reina, and I returned to Yang’s Fry Dumpling on the way back to the hotel. That place is fantastic in every way! The waitress behind the counter is the sassiest woman I’ve ever seen! She apparently recognized us when we walked into the restaurant and just burst out laughing at us. I happily ordered the dumplings right away and picked out a table to sit down at. Avik was set on getting some soup, and took about 15 minutes trying to order the pork wonton soup, which the waitress finally declared they were out of. He then tried to explain to her that he would just take the soup that was above it on the menu and she couldn’t figure this out, so he finally gave up and ordered the dumplings like Reina and I. Fantastic dumplings, spectacular sassy atmosphere!
At 6:00PM on Tuesday, my department had a traditional Chinese social meal. I had to taste everything, of course! Some new, interesting items I tried were duck tongue, cow eyeball (still in the skull which was on a huge platter), the smallest egg I’ve ever seen, jellyfish, and much, much more. Everyone got really excited when I joined them in eating some “traditional Chinese food” that I cannot even describe. It consisted of some small white sphere things in a soup that had a lot of rice in it and everything tasted very sugary. At the end of the feast, we took a full department photo. During the meal, I learned that I’m actually the youngest person in my department.
Tomorrow, we’re headed to Suzhou, and Reina, Avik, and I had a bit of a misadventure Thursday morning trying to buy train tickets for the trip. Luckily, our “Chinese fairy godmother” was at the train ticket office and helped translate our order without even hesitating to help us.
I met this morning with the head architect to go over my design before it was sent to be rendered. A guy from the rendering company came over, and I explained the model and design to him as well as I could and gave him some of my sketches to assist. In the afternoon, our project team gathered in one of the conference rooms to look over the compiled city design with all of the massing and buildings we have been working on. We discussed different options for some of the more lackluster portions of the city and I was able to learn a little more detail about the project and the city of Baotou as a whole. We had some ice cream halfway through the meeting, and I finally got to try the sweet pea Popsicle. It was actually very good! After the meeting, Zeng took me one block kitty-corner from the Xian Dai office to visit C & P Group, the small firm that builds models and generates renderings in 3ds Max for Xian Dai. Apparently, Norman Foster exports a lot of his renderings to this same firm, because they are much cheaper and quicker than British rendering companies. Speed was the name of the game in the small office. I’ve never seen someone operate 3ds Max as quickly as the workers there did! This week flew by, and we’re all excited to see Suzhou tomorrow!
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