A Weekend Away

This weekend, Horizon took off to their annual company retreat, 4 hours away on the beach. It was a highly scheduled event, of course, with lots of competitions and glamour.

When we arrived, I noticed dimly that the place did not smell of ocean. I did not know why. But the trip over was very exciting and interesting--in the 4-hour trip, I looked out into the countryside and saw bridges, derricks, factories, tractors, backhoes--most of it having arrived after 1978. When we got to the shore, we saw dozens of fishing ships before the horizon: the government had not forbid such things so wealthy Senators would not have to look at them from their vacation homes. Our resort was called the "BTV Training Center--" mostly because it was built by the government before 1978, and to build such things, one had to pretend that they served the government in some way, even though the motive was clearly as a resort for those who intended to pay. To this day, that resort (and many) still hide behind a lie that everyone knows is false. As long as it is not uttered, it is fine.

Anyway, we had a sports competition the first early afternoon, in which I played badminton with one of my many bosses, Zoe. We lost 2 games to 1 in the first of three rounds to the team that ended up taking the whole thing--sad. But the second game we won was a hard-fought 26-24 victory that included a few diving swats on my part that gave me scrapes and cuts but gave us crucial points. Zoe came to hug me at that point (which broke her usual tough-boss demeanor), and I carried her one-armed to the other side of the net, where we then were trounced.

The evening was held in a small theatre-room, and included lots of speeches (of which I understood little), photo contests, and singing, the last of which I participated in at the behest of Zoe. I will say that last night revealed more strangeness about Chinese culture--not bad, perse, but strange:

1) Enthusiasm is appreciated greatly, and rewarded with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a great way to cover-up nervousness or fear, where I think in the West, one is more expected to be calm and composed to cover such emotions.

2) Talking during speeches/performances is allowed. I've seen it a lot, even at the movies. I hear it happens a great deal at Peking Opera, from my guidebooks.

3) Western-educated Chinese think and act very different than domestically educated ones. Dr. Feng, another one of my bosses, is a great example of a man with fundamentally different humor capacity (though not unique, just pseudo-Western) and way of speaking, though he is not in love with either Chinese or Western culture/traditions.

Anyway, I sang Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and then helped Michelle sing "Hey Jude,"--we won second place, and I came home with a portable speaker set that's not even that bad. I think I even sang alright. A mere 20 minutes later, I was a part of a contest that Nicole devised in which I put on headphones and listened to Chinese music (most of which I had never heard before), and then had to reproduce the melody for two groups, which had to jump to try to guess the song. I did not like it much, but their sheer enthusiasm detracted from me enough that I felt like I was alone in the room, and so I survived it.

This morning, I played volleyball and this silly game where we had to run back and forth to the shore and take seawater to fill up a bucket with our hands. My large hands helped us get second in the latter--we were pretty thorougly crushed in the former.

On the busride home, a friendly employee from the Guangzhou office talked to me (in Chinese!) for a few hours, and then fell asleep. We didn't talk about anything gripping, but the practice was good. I am actually getting better at speaking, which I was still pretty lousy at when I arrived.

Three weeks of work left. I am tired--I haven't run around that much in far too long.