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North China trip.

I’m typing in the back seat of the car at the moment. It’s pouring down rain and we just left Shanghai on the way home to Ningbo. After numerous, though expected delays we are hoping to get back to Ningbo before 2am.
This will conclude a four day business trip to Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, Bejing and few little villages in between.
The highlights of the trip included a fast train from Bejing to Tianjin and back as well as touring through various steel processing facilities, both modern and near-prehistoric. When I say prehistoric… well lets just say that I’m not exaggerating as much as you think I am.

The OHS prize.

This week, it was a tie between  a factory worker and a truck driver.
The factory worker basically picks up 30kg Steel billets with about 8” tongs and feeds them into a steel rolling mill. These billets are seriously hot, having just come out of a furnace -they are about 1000 degrees C. He earns his prize for wearing slippers while working (I should give the foreman a mention too as he also wore slippers).
The other prize winner happened to be a truck driver on the highway. He was driving  a small 8 tonne truck (which looked like it contained about 20 tonne of sand. Well.. at least it used to contain about  20T of sand. The traffic had come to a hault and the sides of his tray busted, dumping a sand road block on the 3 lane highway.

I’m a little annoyed, as we were slowly driving past the other way. I pulled my phone out to take a pic, but as I took the picture, the battery died. I really need to be more diligent  phone charger.

The patience testing award

This was also is also a tie, between a plane flight and a taxi que.
The Shanghai – Shijiazhuang plane flight boarded about 30mins late, not too bad for a domestic flight out of shanghai.  Then we finally got in the plane, we had to wait at least 2 hours before before we even moved.
In Tianjin, we waited 30mins for a taxi at the train station. I should call it a taxi “p” rather than “q” because the cue is backwards. You line up in the cue and then gradually get further back in the line and the waiting time continues to increase…. Actually its not that bad, there are a some people that don’t push in. I think it’s one of those things you need to experience to understand.

Other note-able incidents

These included our interpreter Peter downloading a Maths e-book from a university site which turned out to be a major computer virus.
Poor Ned is a bit crook at the moment. We think it may be from the tap water at a Hotel as he was the only one that drank it.
I’m getting desensitized near miss traffic accidents. But this one is probably worth a mention. on our way to Shanghai from Ningbo, we were driving on the highway and a bus was overtaking us. On our inside, another bus was undertaking us. He began cutting us off, as is acustomed in China (probably to avoid running up the back of another vehicle, I couldn’t see). Any way we basically got squished between two buses to the point were the bus on our outside just clipped us the bus before slowing down.
I think it probably effected Stafford the most, as I was talking to him on the mobile phone in Oz. He heard some commotion in the background to which I replied “we just got hit by a bus”. We weren’t going very fast, and He only just touched us, so fortunately there wasn’t any damage or anything.
We’re just going over the Shanghai – Ningbo bridge now. For those of you who don’t know – it’s the longest bridge over sea – 36km. It’s 1am and raining and unbelievably windy. I’m posting a photo but it doesn’t really do any justice. I can’t wait to get home.