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It’s been a couple of days since Quentin sailed into Qingdao and for the last few legs he and Rachel (another crew member) have been doing the shopping for the leg ahead.

Each boat has a 15-strong crew and the next leg will be around 24/25 days.  On top of this they need emergency rations for another five days.  Scale this up to ten boats, add the food you’ll find (or rather not find) in Chinese supermarkets and you’ll quickly have problems.

We’ve spent the last two days in two of the big supermarkets in Qingdao… the Jusco and the Carrefour.  We have more or less cleaned both of these places out of tinned meat, tinned fruit, pasta, tinned tomatoes, Frosties, etc.  The only thing they did have enough of was, surprise surprise, pot noodles!

While checking out our six trollies of foodstuffs we had to pay twice… the till wasn’t up to either the number of items we’d had, or the sum total!  In the end we’d still only spent about 300 pounds at the one shop… not a great deal more than two large families might spend for their big shop!

Our big advantage over the other teams was having Xiaoxiao on hand to help with translation… both of packets and to help ask the shop workers if they had more Frosties, pasta, etc.  In the end a lot of the things we ended up putting in our trolly had come straight from the back warehouse.

We had a tough time convincing the store staff to let us drive the shopping carts across the road to our hotel.  In the end they agreed but only on the condition that one of their workers came with us to ensure they got them back.

It’s not every day you get to drive into a five-star hotel lobby with supermarket trollies.  We got some great looks going past the check-in desks and heading into the lifts.

This evening we booked our flights to Seoul at 5.30PM, returning Friday evening.  It’s a very short trip, but we knew this in advance.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the sights, but it’s a shame that some bloke torched the oldest structure in the city just a week ago.

First full day in China and I was woken up by housekeeping at 12PM.  I got dressed and headed to the Crowne Plaza to wake my Mum up at about 12:45.

As it was already quite late, we caught a taxi to xiaoyushangongyuan (xiao = small, yu = fish, shan = mountain, gong yuan = park) but were not terribly impressed with the pagodas.  We picked up four pairs of earmuffs, which cost us just over 25p/pair.

We’d planned to visit a big park nearby, but as it was already getting late (and cold!) we instead walked along the no. 1 bathing beach which was very enjoyable.  Due to season it was very quiet, but we saw some athletic training going on and surprisingly quite a few young couples on the beach (today being Valentine’s Day).

I wanted to pick up some small pads for making notes of newly-learned Chinese words, or to remind myself to check some grammar/phrases out so we headed to the Carrefour where I was utterly amazed to discover that a fold-up bike sells for as little as 350RMB (about 25 pounds).  We both enjoyed the massage chairs, which again were at give-away prices (it looked like around 1000RMB for the top-of-the-line model… roughly 60 pounds!)

There are many nice touches to be found in China… when things get busy in KFC, walkabout sales people come up to you in the queue and take your order.  There’s no fancy electronic stuff going on here… she just wrote it down onto a piece of paper and handed it to us.  This did make things quicker when we were at the front as we just handed it over.  I guess this is what happens in a country where labour is a commodity.

Today I got a chance to flex my Chinese… on the whole it went very well.  I was glad to find that most people could understand my basic questions… my work on learning the tones and pronounciation is paying off, as past experiences did not go so well.  Only one ‘big’ mistake today was ordering in KFC… I asked for a red tea (as opposed to green tea) and a Coke with no ice.  I then pointed at the characters the girl had written for the tea and said ‘and milk’.  Somehow we ended up with three drinks: a red tea (no milk), a Coke (no ice) and a cup of hot milk!  Easily solved and next time I will remember to ask for red tea /with/ milk and not red tea /and/ milk!

Fatema Indian for dinner… a very very hot chicken vindaloo for me and the jalfrezi for my Mum.  Not the best Indian food I’ve ever had, but still good.  The naan was a little different to what I am used to, but this may just be because I’m set in my ‘English Indian’ ways.

We met a number of other Clipper people at the New York Club (more of an expat bar) after the meal, but as it was noisy and we’d only met three people before, this wasn’t an ideal location.

In many bars they play a skill/chance game that involves ten dice and two cups.  Each person gets five dice and a cup to shake them up.  Number one is a wildcard and can count for 1 through 6.  You make educated guesses at the total number of any given number (i.e. I think there are three fours in total) until eventually somebody calls their opponent and you reveal your dice.  If the number you came up with is less than or equal to the actual number then the person who called you up loses.  But if you said there were five fours and you said three… you lose.  The loser takes a swig of their drink and a new game begins.  Tough to explain without demonstration, but very good fun.

We were introduced to this game by two brothers, one of whom was called Angelo.  Angela is studying in Shanghai and hopes to visit either Australia or England to study marketing.

Due to worsening weather conditions the race was ended before the boats reached Qingdao.  The result is that Hull & Humber/Quentin came in forth, which is a good position.  H&H are due to arrive around 9AM on Saturday, so we’ll be on the pier with our St George’s flag to welcome them in.

Xiaoxiao should finally receive her Korean visa tomorrow morning, so she’s now booked onto a flight from Hangzhou to Qingdao in the afternoon.  She’ll have to get from her city (Taizhou) to Hangzhou, but this only takes around two hours by car.

It’s 3:30AM now and having caught up with my blog I think I should really try and get to sleep.  Need to be up at 9:30 tomorrow morning so we can head to the marina for a tour and certain other events.  New York (leg winners) are due to sail in at 2PM.

Yesterday we arrived in Qingdao.  In total we spent close to 36 hours travelling without sleep (well, one hour on the connection between Beijing and Qingdao).

Matt Johnson kindly gave me a lift from my place to Woking station where I caught the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport.  I met my Mum here (who had caught the train from Doncaster at 6AM the same day) and we had a bite to eat before catching the (delayed by one hour) flight to Beijing.

Arrival time was around 9AM, outside temperature -11C!  At this point things took a turn for the worse…

In LHR we’d asked for our luggage to be checked right through to Qingdao.  As we’d arrived at 9AM and our connection to Qingdao wasn’t until 14:55 we quickly tried to arrange an earlier flight… everything looked set for a 9:50 flight up until it came to our luggage… we traipsed to and fro all over the airpot, speaking to different people with varying degrees of fluency in English until we were finally told that Beijing airport does not allow bags to be checked through to internal destinations.  By now we’d missed the 9:50 flight and headed back into the arrival area to collect our luggage which was now at lost and found!  Imagine if we had not tried to arrange an earlier flight—our bags would have stayed in Beijing while we flew to Qingdao!  Very disappointing service from BA when we checked our luggage in LHR!

As if this wasn’t bad enough, when we tried to check in for our 14:55 flight we discovered we DID NOT have e-tickets as lastminute.com had told us.  DHL lost our initial tickets and after three weeks of arguing with DHL/lastminute.com we were issued with e-tickets.  I had lastminute.com confirm three times that we didn’t need anything else for our flights.  Extremely poor service on behalf of lastminute.com and I will be making a formal complaint when I get back.  Had we not had such a long wait for our connection it is not inconceivable we would have missed the flight due to their incompetence.

Finally we were checked in.  Again, bad news… the alcohol my Mum had bought in LHR was not allowed as carry-on luggage on internal Chinese flights.  Why had we not been told this in LHR?  Why, when checking in for the connection, did the attendant not tell us then?  Only when we got to the security checks did we find out, and this meant another wait while we had to go and buy cardboard boxes (glass containers) and check in two more items of luggage!

The last mistake was our own… we believed we were departing from gate 37, and so waited there.  Only when we began to queue to get on did I spot in fact it was gate 47!  A quick walk to gate 47 and they were more or less waiting for us to show up.  Neither of us heard any boarding announcements for the flight, but as we thought we were sat opposite we weren’t paying a great deal of attention.

At around 5PM we’d got a taxi to the hotel (5-star Crowne Plaza near the marina where Quentin will sail into) and my Mum was very impressed with the room.  I decided that I could save myself some cash by staying at the Home Inns (a chain similar to Travelodge in the UK) which was a five-minute walk down the road.  I checked the room out and happy with it, agreed to pay 118RMB/night (about eight pounds)—this is roughly 1/10th of the cost of my Mum’s room… obviously nowhere near the same standard, but the Home Inns is clean and comfortable.  And I enjoy talking to the staff who don’t speak much English… there’s no challenge in a 5-star hotel!

In the evening we met the manager of the Hull & Humber boat Quentin is sailing on and we’ve arranged passes to gain us close access for when Quentin arrives.

This weekend I’ve been trying to get things in order for my flight on Tuesday.  I’ve covered just about everything I can at this late stage.

All that’s left now is to pack, sort my cameras out and get to the airport.  Oh, and hope my visa turns up on time.

I made the mistake of leaving my visa to the last minute… with Chinese New Year this means I am currently due to receive it on Monday before 9AM.  This is okay, except that I fly shortly after 1PM, which will make getting to the airport three hours before I set off a near impossibility.

In other news, I appear to have damaged my back… I can barely stand up straight, my side hurts and so far it isn’t getting any better.  The only positive side of this is that I can’t really tell there is anything wrong when sat down, so the flight should be too bad.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

I finally sat down to watch Match Point last night.

It’s been sat around unwatched for quite a while now, I had it figured as a fairly standard sport comedy film, but it’s far from that.

The first Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, it will serve me as a good introduction to his films… if they hold their own against this film.

The film revolves around Chris Wilton, a retired tennis-pro turned instructor, who uses his charms to work his way into the upper echelons of society.  He has the house, the wife, the job… but ultimately he becomes involved with his friend’s fiancée, Nola Rice [Scarlett Johansson].

Over at IMDb it has a 7.8/10 rating, which is pretty good for any film, but really, I think this deserved a higher rating… I thought I knew what was going on all the way through, but I quickly found out I was way off the mark (not necessarily a difficult thing to achieve).

Definitely worth a watch.

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!

For the past few weeks I’ve been going to Mandarin lessons at Reading University on a Thursday night, right after work.

The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc.  These things I’ve muddled my way through during my time in China.  Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren’t any major revelations.

So far we’ve covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I’m pretty good at…), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation.  Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers… as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.

Last week’s lessons was really good.  I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn… really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.

As I’m at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I’ve been taught.

As ever, no updates recently.  I just don’t really do much that’s worth talking about these days.

The past week has been pretty poor, on the whole.  On Sunday I managed to slip while walking down the stairs in what I now realise to be very impractical slippers… I was walking down with a finished bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and the cereal box.  My feet came out from underneath me, I shot back, landed on my back and proceeded to slide all the way down the stairs at what seemed like breakneck speed!  I reached the bottom at roughly the same time as my now broken cereal bowl and the vast quantity of milk that had escaped from it.

What I find odd is that my back is absolutely fine, but the first few days were very uncomfortable to sit down… presumably my coccyx got a slight beating on each and every step on the way to the bottom.  It’s much better a week later, but still hurts slightly.  I’m hoping this will go away soon.

Otherwise the week has been a time for plans and Wikis… but none of them really played out the way I’d hoped.

Thursday evening I came out from my Mandarin class at Reading university to find some local scally had decided to pop my driver-side window for the fun of it.  I guess it’s my own fault for leaving my TomTom cradle attached to the windscreen… this time the fact that I’d left the glove compartment open to show nothing was in there helped.  Nothing (I know of) was taken, but I had to drive home in the cold.

Yesterday I had Autoglass replace the window through my insurance… a £50 excess and I got a same-day service.  I’m very impressed with this, top service.  I just wish I hadn’t needed to find out!

There’s a truly horrific set of photos of the results of a rattlesnake bite at funnypicturecrazy.info/2007/08/09/rattlesnake-bite/

Looking at the photos of the skin graft reminds me of when I broke my leg after a tree collapsed on me… my leg didn’t look anywhere near as bad as that, but it’s reminded me of how I had those funny scratchy looking stitches, some of the swelling and the crazy chicken-skin leg.

I don’t really notice my scar any more… but I guess it is pretty awesome.  Sorry for the poor photo… not that easy to take, and I forgot to pick a sensible aperture, and ended up focusing on my shoe, or something.

Good news, everyone!

I’ve been looking to sort myself out with a new push bike for ages now… about this time last year I posted a blog entry for the bike I proposed to buy through the cycle to work scheme… it was a Scott Sportster P2 hybrid bike.  Unfortunately I didn’t ever go through with the deal, as Evans the cycle shop could not find the model in my size.

A year later, and I began the hunt again… I spoke to a few cycling authorities… Chris Gerhard and Chris Talbot, and was convinced by the former that I did not need front suspension (I had originally planned to buy the 2007 Sportster P2).

After much shop and soul searching, I headed into London on Sunday to check out a well-stocked Evans store in Waterloo.  Here I cycled around on a Cannondale Bad Boy for about £650… I liked the ride, but I still wanted to try out the Trek 7.6FX and possibly a Scott Sub 10.

After having a nice lunch at the former Millennium Dome with Mandy from my CS course, I prepared to head back home, only to realise I still had enough time to check out another Evans in Canary Wharf.  This time I cycled around on the Trek and was umming and arring when one of the guys in the shop asked me if I wanted to try something really different.

Enter the Ridgeback Genesis Day 03… I don’t really know my bikes, but this was more or less a road racing bike… sans the bendy handlebars and (almost) obligatory SPD pedals.

With a carbon front fork, rear stay and seat post, the bike is really light and very fast… and I was surprised by just how much of a difference the carbon front fork made in terms of comfort (compared to the Cannondale).

I spent Monday attempting to figure out if this really was the bike I wanted… it won’t accept full-size mudguards, I can’t attach a rear rack in the standard way, and it was a little more expensive than I initially planned to spend.  Once I had these settled, I decided to take the plunge, and I’ve just had confirmation that the bike was shipped today and will take 24-48 hours to arrive.

I give you, the Genesis Day 03: