Another hazy day in Xi'an...

The air pollution was bad today. Very bad.


This is the view from my hotel this morning. That's smog, folks. Compare this photo to the same basic view (well, this one's a little narrower field of view, maybe) on Monday, July 24.














Here's a view up the street from the office at noontime. Notice that tall building in the center of the photo. That's only about one block away. And you could hardly see it through the smog.














The smog looked like a dense fog but it was obvious that it was not fog. It smelled like ozone and burned your eyes. Fortunately, I only was out in it to get back and forth across the street for lunch and back. This morning it didn't burn my eyes like it did at lunch, but my eyes were sure burning at lunch.


On to today's update.

This is a photo of the front of the training room. It shows what passes for a white board in the facility here. All the conference rooms and offices have them. It's not white and it's not a board. It's light-blue-tinted glass. That's different! The glass is a bit glossy and so the glare from the lights and window can be a problem. The screen goes up and down EXTREMELY SLOWLY. But there's a cool little remote control for the screen that is just like a car security system remote control!














More office shots. This one is pointing towards the back of the office (that wall with blue doorframes) from the left front of the office, just inside Reception.














This from the corner at the back of the office (from the previous shot) and looking back up to the front corner. I took the previous photo from against the wall where the photos are hanging. There are four rows of cubicles, each twelve cubicles long. At the front wall on the far left is one of two conference rooms. The other conference room is just to the right of the photo's right edge, and the training room is at the front end of the same wall.














All the conference rooms are getting names, and they will be in both Chinese and in English. The English names will not be a direct translation of the Chinese names, but will evoke the "feeling" of the Chinese names. I'll not steal anybody's thunder from the office and actually mention the English names, sorry...


Here's a little navigational tour. This photo shows walking to to the building from the taxi stand on the street. The white at the right edge of the photo is the edge of the guard shack. (Notice the Buick Regal going into the lot. Buick Regal is the best-selling car in its class in China. Go figure.) The entrance to the building that our office is in, is just left of the white car in front of the Regal.













This is looking into the building from the entrance. You have to go down the hallway on the left side to reach our office.













This is the entrance to the stairwell that takes you up to the office. It's really the entrance to Building D, and that's what the sign says, more or less. You go into this opening and take the stairwell that's on the left (immediately inside the opening), up two stories.













This is looking up from the stairwell landing just below the entrance to the office, there on the left. Look for the picture of Reception just inside that door, in Monday July 24's post.













Here's a view of the entire Xi'an Software Park as depicted by a scale model that's inside the entrance to the building where the office is located. At the bottom, you see several buildings arranged in a semicircle that have little pointy blue square roof extensions. Our office is in the one that is second from right. The taxi stand where I shot the picture of the Buick Regal is just around the front right side of the white/grey building that's at the bottom right corner of this photo. See the tall white building at the left center? That's, as I understand it, where our permanent offices will be located when they're ready. Hold that thought while you look at the next photo.













This is that tall white building as it exists today, the one that will be our permanent home for the China ODC. Obviously, it's still being contructed! I'm told it's probably a year away from completion.















This is the "white" board at the end of the day. We worked on problem solving today. You might be able to make out the remnants of a decision matrix that we used to do step 4 (picking the best solution) from the 6-Step Problem Solving model. This session was the best of any so far, and the team was so engaged that when we broke for lunch, about a half-dozen swarmed me at the front of the class for some Q&A. That funny-looking swiggly thing at the right center of the board is my feeble attempt at a U.S. (and Ohio) geography lesson for the ODC team. Read on...














The day ended a little early for the team, as I had rearranged the session today (splitting it from late morning and into mid-afternoon instead of taking all afternoon for training with open time all morning as originally scheduled) so I could assist in some job interviews. After the interviews were over, one of the team members asked me to come to her desk and answer a question. By the time I reached her desk, there were 3 of the team there. 5 minutes later there were 7 or 8 team members there. And within 15 minutes, the entire team of testers and developers (or awfully close to the entire team) was gathered there. I got question after question after question about the training, the job roles, the work, the company, and so on, with many of the team asking about things of interest to them personally. It eventually turned into questions about me personally, what I thought of China and Xi'an, what I saw as differences between China and India, and somewhere along the way somebody asked a question that I decided needed a drawing to properly communicate an answer. So we all hustled into the training room across the hall and I drew my pitiful rendition of the U.S. for them. From there we talked about where the major cities are, where cowboys could be found, time zones, and really fun things like that. This little spontaneous Q&A ended up running for over an hour and finished up almost 45 minutes past the team's normal 5:30 quitting time. It was magic!

Ah, well, off to bed yet again after midnight... ...