Work Update

Last week marked the end of the hotel project for Brad and me. We gave the final elevation design to the rendering company, and the principal architect of the project, Jun Li, has approved the design to be forwarded on to the clients. Brad and I have not seen the final rendering but hopefully will sometime soon. I think we are both a little unsure about how the final design turned out given the rushed schedule, the lack of information provided us, along with being given limited design flexibility but we are hoping for the best. At any rate, it was a really great learning experience. We have now moved on to a large hospital project. It seems that all construction projects in China only come in size Large, XL and Gigantic. Brad and I have been given two days to again design elevations and to each build a 3D model of a large hospital based off of nearly finalized floor plans. The project has been in the works for about 6 months now and is now in the design development stage (schematic design is over). I am amazed at the design process and how little thought is given to the appearance and form of the building until the floor plans are almost finalized. Brad and I are working hard to meet the deadline of tomorrow evening so that we can enjoy our trip to Wuzhen this weekend! 


Between work projects Brad and I felt very lucky to be invited by Jun Li to join him and a van-full of Xian Dai employees when they traveled to nearby Hangzhou for a client meeting on Wednesday. Hangzhou is similar to Suzhou in size and is a popular tourist destination because of the beautiful West Lake and it's surrounding parks and hills. After dropping Jun Li and the others off at their meeting around 9:30am, Brad and I were pleasantly surprised to be given the day off to tour around the city with our fellow coworker Pamela and the Xian Dai driver as our chauffeur! Pamela was also happy to have the day off as she has been working very hard on the hotel project with us. She had been to Hangzhou once before and was a wonderful tour guide.  Our first stop was Tiger Spring, which is a natural spring and is surrounded by peaceful gardens and forest. Apparently the residents of Hangzhou can come here free of charge to get fresh, clean water and we saw a line of people with their plastic water containers waiting at the spicket. We also visited the historic Qinghefang Old Street were we were treated to a fantastic lunch of local dishes and also enjoyed some window shopping. The street is famous for its traditional medicine shops and we stopped to tour the Chinese Medicine Museum which still has a thriving business selling traditional Chinese medicine. The museum housed all sorts of stuffed animals and jarred specimen with labels describing their various medicinal properties. My favorite part of the day was touring the China Academy of Art, a university campus built about eight years ago. The buildings were designed by a Chinese architect named Wang Shu whose work is characterized by his use of local materials and his interesting use of masonry. His work seems very modern yet rooted in the local context and I greatly enjoyed the campus. 


After our sightseeing, we took a drive around the famous West Lake, which is quite beautiful and quite large. It was soon time to pick up Jun Li and rest of the Xian Dai crew and all thirteen of us enjoyed a delicious dinner together before heading back to Shanghai. It was quite a long day and everyone was asleep in the van on the way home. 


In other work news, I was extremely excited when one afternoon a giant bag of ice cream goodies was brought into the office! Along with some standard carmel cones and chocolate covered  ice cream bars, there were also some frozen treats I have never seen before such as frozen pea popsicles. Yes it's green and has frozen peas in it but it is actually really good! I was again elated when a few days later it happened again, more ice cream at work! By the third time it happened I was finally told that the whole office gets ice cream every time the temperature hits 35 degrees celsius, (95 degrees fahrenheit). It has been so incredibly hot that we have had ice cream a number of times so far. I must say it does make me feel better about putting up with the heat. It rarely gets below 85 degrees, even at night and the humidity is so high that the heat index is a good 10 degrees higher than the temperature. Brad, Misha and Guillaume have been troopers so far and we all still walk to and from work. We have a routine were we leave at 8am, stop and get bananas from the fruit stand around the corner, stop again along the way for some dumplings, pastries, or other street food, sit and eat in the shade at the palm tree park, then continue on to work. Between the stops and walking slow due to the heat it takes us about an hour but we enjoy observing the street life and getting some exercise. After almost four weeks, the walk is still interesting and amidst the familiar faces and shops, there is always something new happening.