Travels in the People's Republic of China
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Travels in the People's Republic of China |
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The day after I arrived, finally feeling a little more human, I called the local representative of the training company to let him know I was in Hong Kong and would be ready to teach the course in a few days. He was startled that I had actually stayed at the Chungking Mansions. He had assumed that it was a joke and an idle threat when I had mentioned it on the phone while planning my trip.
It was strange: he claimed to be from New Zealand but he had lived several years in Hong Kong without even crossing the border to Guangzhou. Given how many Kiwis I've run into in other parts of the world, I came to suspect that he wasn't really from New Zealand.
The classes were, well, a bit odd. The public course, an introduction to information security, went pretty well. It was about like teaching the same one-week short course in the U.S., although with a bit less interaction from the students.
The on-site TCP/IP course for the U.S. telecommunications firm was the stranger one, in some ways one of the oddest course weeks I've had. It was a hands-on course, with lecture time interspersed with labs using Ethernet switches and routers, packet sniffing software, and the operating system command-line interface.
One guy only showed up for about an hour a day, and pretty much got nothing at all from the course. He wandered in about 1600 on Friday, only seven hours late, and seemed shocked that the course was over and most of the hardware was in shipping cases.
The course builds on prior material through the week, so I would always wait for half of them to get there before starting the class each day. But that meant we couldn't start before 0930 any day, despite the company's prior announcement, and mine on the first day, that it would start at 0900.
Most all of them wandered in and out throughout the week, and many would take (or place!) eight to ten mobile phone calls during each class day. Meanwhile they asked very few questions and made almost no comments. An extremely quiet group in the class, but extremely chatty on their mobile phones. Oh well, it was their money.
A manager was in the class for reasons I couldn't determine. He would ask for a detailed explanation of a complex topic — "Could you list the specific advantages of the OSPF routing protocol, and compare it to the Cisco proprietary routing protocols?" — and then walk out of the room as I started to respond. I assumed that he did this to ensure that I explained certain things to his employees. So I asked him at a break if he could give me a list of those topics. That way I could prepare something a little more organized and make sure that they came up at relevant times (his questions were pretty erratic, asking about routing protocols when we were discussing Ethernet signaling and vice-versa).
He told me that it wasn't for his employees. They didn't do anything with the specific technology he was asking about. He was just personally curious.
Oh.
Well, I did answer his questions in detail, but he was always out of the room the entire time and so he missed the explanations.
He gave me the look you give someone who is patiently explaining that the sun goes down at night and then it gets dark, and said that didn't matter at all — I should answer his questions in great detail because he could ask his employees for the detailed explanation later.
Bizarre.
The public course, the introduction to information security, went much better. I think the strangeness of the networking course was mostly due to an odd corporate culture. The infosec course had the usual mix — a couple of people from prominent Hong Kong banks, two from a technology company, and eight from ITSD, the Hong Kong city government information technology group.
U.S. Government map of Macao.
Toward the end of one of the trips I went to Macau for the day. It's just a 50-minute ride on a jet catamaran from Hong Kong. Tickets are pretty cheap.
Macau is tiny, the main settlement is the tip of a peninsula being extended by landfill. The economy is mostly based on the local extremely tacky gambling, heavily connected with the Triads, the Chinese criminal gangs. Another shady alleged connection is to Nazi gold, a theory used to explain why China allowed Portugal to administer Macau for so long, and the close connection between China and Macau. From Lonely Planet:
Some claim that huge amounts of gold bullion from Nazi Germany, emblazoned with the stamp of the eagle and swastika, arrived in China via the small Portuguese outpost — the gold being the spoils of Nazi plunder, including that salvaged from Holocaust victims. Portugal was the recipient of vast quantities of Nazi gold in repayment for supplies to the beleaguered Third Reich during WWII and this bullion was, it is claimed, off-loaded onto China up until the 1970's. China denies the allegations, but former employees of Macau's Gold Import Commission point an accusing finger.
Front and rear of a 100 Macanese Pataca (MOP), from Wikipedia. MOP$ 1 is divided into 10 ho or 100 avos. As with Hong Kong currency, there are two series — one issued by the Banco Nacional Ultramarino and one by the Bank of China. But most of the currency in circulation in Macao is Hong Kong Dollars.
Macau was interesting and more pleasant than Hong Kong or Guangzhou. It's an odd mix of Portuguese and Chinese backgrounds.
The buildings are mostly of a vaguely European style. There are lots of signs in Portuguese, so it's relatively easy to get around. Not that I can read Portuguese, but at least I can deal with the character set. And Portuguese looks sort of like horribly misspelled Spanish, so any Tourist Spanish helps. The local food specialty is African spicy chicken, from some other Portuguese colony.
The A-Ma Temple is a Buddhist complex of several shrines built into a steep hill. Its present buildings date back to the 1600's.
Macau has lots more churches than Hong Kong, due to the Portuguese background. And only Saudi Arabia would have fewer than mainland China.
The classic Macau sight is the Ruinas de São Paulo, described in the Lonely Planet as "the greatest monument to Christianity in the east" and the symbol of Macau. It's just the facade, all that remains of a Portuguese church from the early 1600's.
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| © Bob Cromwell Aug 2010. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache. Root password available here, privacy policy here. |
