Orient Orientation: Welcome to the family!

After looking at apartments on Wednesday morning, I went to the office to meet my new work family.

The office is on the 17th floor of this building.

Yes, that's a Starbucks. This little area is right next to the
building where the office is.

Whenever a new employee starts at the JV, they have a “welcome meeting” with the newbie and everyone who is in the office that day. The “veterans” introduce themselves to the new employee and then the new employee introduces him/herself. Everyone is so friendly and happy to have me with them in the JV! I was very impressed by their ability to transition seamlessly between Chinese and English, especially when it comes to more than just introductions and saying hello. I am anxious to start up my Chinese lessons again so I can chat with my new friends in Chinese and learn from them. We took a group photo at the end of the day even though we were missing about 10 people due to travel. They made me sit in the front (but it’s not that hard to tell which one is me anyway).

About two-thirds of the current JV family.

Thursday was my first full day in the office, and since I was there at lunch time, I was able to go out to lunch with four of my new friends. We went to a Sichuan restaurant close to the office. This is us:

我的朋友. (My friends.)

At this restaurant, you can serve yourself rice porridge any time during the meal—it’s somewhat like free bread at Western restaurants. It’s pretty good, but it all depends on the “toppings” you put on it—peanuts, crispy noodles, onions, chives, eggs, pickled vegetables, etc. I had my first bowl of porridge with peanuts and crispy noodles.

My first rice porridge.

On Friday, I went out to lunch with three other friends at Ajisen Ramen. Yes, there is an Ajisen Ramen in Xi’an too (there are probably more throughout the city, but this is the first one I’ve seen). This one was better than the one in Shanghai though—it offered a much cooler option for vegetarians:

Noodles with more than just mushrooms this time.

More friends!

Friday also happened to be the last day for Stan, the JV’s General Manager and the man who has helped move the JV from idea to reality. Stan is an expat from the U.S who has been in Xi’an since 2009, and now he is returning to the UTAS facility in Rockford, IL to be the GM of another division of the company. So as a last hurrah, the JV team planned a fantastic send-off evening for him—a Chinese banquet at a very nice local restaurant followed by karaoke at KTV (karaoke + TVs showing the lyrics and music videos).

We had three large tables in a semi-private room in the restaurant. Each table had various dishes on a large glass “Lazy Susan” in the center. This looked like a lot of food to begin with, but then the wait staff kept bringing more and more dishes, moving dishes and taking some away so it would all fit. You can have a little bit of everything this way just by spinning the Lazy Susan around and picking out what you’d like. It was pretty easy to tell what had meat in it and what didn’t, so I stuck to veggie/tofu/fish/noodle dishes. However, I did try a little bit of roast pigeon. Stan raved so much about how good roast pigeon is that I had to try it. It looked and tasted a little like stringy dark meat chicken. It was okay. The tofu dish and honeyed lotus root dishes were better, in my opinion.

First round of dishes. The one that looks like chicken is the roast
pigeon. The lotus root dish is at 12 o'clock; the tofu is at 9 o'clock.

More dishes added. The dish at 10/11 o'clock is fish wrapped
in bamboo leaves or seaweed (I can't remember) baked in a hard
bread crust. In order to get to the fish, someone must break the
bread with small mallet--being the newbie, I was given that honor.
The bread is surprisingly tough to break!

The inside of the "breaded" fish that I broke.

Chinese banquets are not just about food though. The other big part of Chinese banquets is the toasting. Stan started it off with a great toast to the JV team and to Ira, the new General Manager. Then toasts would happen sporadically throughout the evening. You’ll be sitting down eating something, and all of a sudden someone will stand up and start a toast, so then everyone else stands up, glasses in hand. People moved from table to table to toast each other, to toast the table, to toast the JV. You can toast with just about any drink—the most popular is báijiǔ (白酒), a clear spirit that looks like vodka and is served in what looks like a very tiny wine glass (Stan and Ira are holding the glasses in the picture below). I toasted with orange juice, tea, and Sprite. There was so much toasting it was hard to keep my glass full!

Stan (left) toasting the JV and Ira (right).

So after three hours eating and toasting, about 13 of us went to KTV for some karaoke. The great thing about KTV is that you get your own “party room” so you’re only singing with friends and not with a whole club or bar full of strangers. I made a deal with Kevin, our IT manager, that if he sang something, I would too. He was one of the first people to sing, so then he helped me page through the lists of songs on a touch screen podium (there is an option for English, and there are quite a lot of English songs). I really wanted a Tom Petty song, but there were none to be found, so I settled for Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” If I couldn’t have “American Girl”, “Free Fallin’”, “Learning to Fly”, or “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”, at least I could have some party music. It’s funny though, I thought I knew more of the words to “Just Dance” than I actually did.

I know people took pictures, so I’ll see if I can get copies to put on the blog to prove that I really did sing karaoke. In the meantime, here are some of the rock stars from the JV. Unfortunately, all of the pictures I took looked better on my iPhone than they do now on my computer. These are the clearest ones out of the about 30 pictures I took: