Class and Internship

We are winding down here in China, as this is our last week of classes and our internship before heading to Beijing. These past few days have been very intensive in the classroom, as we wrapped up all the loose ends on the information regarding the culture and the city of Yiwu. Almost every night (for the past 2 1/2 weeks) we have had a short essay to write, and recently, a group presentation was added to that, the topics including: comparing Christmas to the Chinese Spring Festival, and comparing Confucianism and Daoism. I’ve learned a lot throughout the process, and as our reward, we were taught how to play Mahjong, which is very similar to dominos.

The internship at Lang Sha has been rather interesting, and great to get inside view at the World’s leading Hosiery manufacturer, obviously a very large company. Our first task when we arrived on the job was to edit their main Marketing/Promotional brochure that they give out to all of their guests, and to all potential business partners around the world. This booklet is written in Chinese and English, but the English portion was translated literally, meaning that the grammar and syntax was not written well by any means. We had our Chinese ‘partners’ with us, students from the Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College (YWICC), and many times we had to ask them to read the Chinese text so we could figure out what the English was supposed to be saying. Not too hard of a task, but it was cool that we could use what we knew to help out such a large corporation. Lang Sha has over 2,500 machines used to sew and create their products! Oh, and they also have over 10,000 workers who average a 12 hour day; they say the machines only shut down when they are broken... pretty intense. Their primary business goes to Canada and the United States, but they conduct business worldwide, making products for Adidas, Puma, Nike, and Wal-Mart, just to name a few.

Our evenings our mostly spent exploring Yiwu, and we have found some pretty neat areas that have night markets to wander through. I am amazed every time to see so many individuals and small families ‘setting up shop’ on the side of the road, but that it how they live their life, and it must be pretty successful seeing all of the foot-traffic that goes through the market. Last night some of us guys had the privilege to go with one of our bosses from our internship to his factory, where they have their own basketball court. He said that they have over 20 guys who play regularly, but only a handful showed up so we could play them in some 4 on 4. It was a lot of fun I must say, even though their team dominated us, but fun none the less. I blame the fact that it was about 100 degrees for the loss, but I suppose it could be because I don’t play basketball...