Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Retreat to the Country
After a long week at work our small party of expatriates were invited to join the local company office on an overnight retreat to a corporate training ground about 2 hours outside of Beijing. So off we went after 5pm through the village of Shunyi to a facility run by Sinochem (Pictures are in the album). My first shock came when we reached the village of Shunyi. It is huge. It turns out the village of Shunyi has a population over 1 million people. There are overpasses, expressways, a central business district, etc. My definition of village is quite a bit smaller.
The facility is huge and an eclectic mix of architecture, but it exceeded all of my expectations. I had envisioned a yurt with no running water and got a French Provincial Room. There were some interesting construction techniques used, but very pleasant.
The place had a bowling alley, so some of us did that. I had to prove that a size 12 shoe (their largest) would not come close to covering my US size 14 feet. Bowling in socks is not as fun as I remember as a kid…
There was an indoor virtual shooting rang done with an HD projector. The attendants kept rebooting the machine in hopes that the focus would clear up. I finally jumped the counter, focused the projector manually and we promptly got an hour’s worth of free “hunting” on the virtual range.
And my favorite adventure came when we joined our Chinese colleagues for Karaoke. They put “Take Me Home Country Roads” on the box and handed me a mike. Well, the video was showing 2 ballroom dancers and the words were all wrong. I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t sing. My colleagues were not amused. I finally turned away and sung from memory. I think they were whispering that “the American doesn’t know the words to the song..”
We explored the property and found many interesting items the next day in this architectural experiment!
The facility is huge and an eclectic mix of architecture, but it exceeded all of my expectations. I had envisioned a yurt with no running water and got a French Provincial Room. There were some interesting construction techniques used, but very pleasant.
The place had a bowling alley, so some of us did that. I had to prove that a size 12 shoe (their largest) would not come close to covering my US size 14 feet. Bowling in socks is not as fun as I remember as a kid…
There was an indoor virtual shooting rang done with an HD projector. The attendants kept rebooting the machine in hopes that the focus would clear up. I finally jumped the counter, focused the projector manually and we promptly got an hour’s worth of free “hunting” on the virtual range.
And my favorite adventure came when we joined our Chinese colleagues for Karaoke. They put “Take Me Home Country Roads” on the box and handed me a mike. Well, the video was showing 2 ballroom dancers and the words were all wrong. I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t sing. My colleagues were not amused. I finally turned away and sung from memory. I think they were whispering that “the American doesn’t know the words to the song..”
We explored the property and found many interesting items the next day in this architectural experiment!
