10 years

So yesterday I hit my ten year anniversary at Best Buy.  It has been ten great years.  During this time I have worked in Riverdale, Utah, White Marsh, Maryland, Murrary, Utah, China, Mexico, Turkey, UK and Minneapolis.  I really have had many opportunities at Best Buy.  We loved living in Maryland.  It was a great experience for our family and loved living an area of the country with so much American History.  I am looking forward to having my family join me here in Nanjing.  Nanjing is a beautiful city that is full of Chinese History.  On Friday afternoon Adrian Jing, the VP of Marketing and Retail Operations, invited me to dinner that night to celebrate my 10 year anniversary at Best Buy.  I had almost forgotten that it was the next day.  I think I mentioned it when I was introducing myself a few weeks early.  I was really impressed that Adrian had remembered.  We had a great dinner.  It was one of the best dinners I have had in China.  We had Beijing Duck that was delicious.  They know that we like beef so he ordered this beef that was so good.  It was beef cubes that were cooked medium rare and had a great seasoning on the outside.  It really tasted good.  We also had some traditional foods as well like pi dan, or thousand year old  quail eggs.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg .  Here is a brief description from Wikipedia "through the process, the yolk becomes a dark green to grey color, with a creamy consistency and an odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with little flavor."  The eggs we had for dinner actually tasted pretty decent.  I have had some that are very hard to even swallow because the taste is so strong.  They are an acquired taste for sure.  So, I'm not sure if the eggs we had were just a bit more mild or if I am becoming more accustomed to them.

Cake they got for my 10 year
Best Buy anniversary

Work has been going well.  On Wednesday we presented our initial plans to the President of Five Star, Nicholas Wang.  I did my entire presentation in Chinese.  Overall it went well.  It was great to be able to do it in Chinese.  It wasn't perfect but I was able to make the points I needed to make.  I may have said this before but I really look forward to my Chinese improving while I am here.  Conversationally I am fine, but when we get into the details of business sometimes I need a little help.  It will be great to be able to dive deep into the work without help from a translator.  It will take a lot of work, but I will get there.  I am learning new words and phrases every day.  I also bought a couple of kids books to improve my Chinese Characters.  I really enjoy learning Chinese, so it is a real blessing to be here in China and have this opportunity to continue to study and learn.  

Birds in cages in the park.  You can see
a couple on the bushes as well as some
hanging in the trees with the blue
coverings over the cages.  

The weather has been amazing lately.  Spring is here.  There are so many cherry, plum and magnolia trees blooming.  There are a lot of magnolia trees with large white blossoms.  They are so beautiful and are a sharp contrast to the gray of the buildings that you so often see in China.  I went for a walk today and walked by a park.  It was filled with families and elderly gentlemen and their birds.  It is a very common hobby for retired men to have songbirds in a cage and then they take them to the park and hang the cage in a tree or bush and then they will spend a few hours with their friends reminiscing about the old days.  The birds are very beautiful and well taken care of.  You know that the owners have a lot of pride in their birds.   

Cage of pigeons to eat.  

On my walk I also saw other cages birds.  These birds, however, were not for enjoyment or a hobby, they were for eating.  It was a cage full of pigeons.  You could select the pigeon and then they would "prepare" it for you to take home and cook.  I actually enjoy eating pigeon.  It tastes pretty good.  I only struggle eating pigeon because they will roast the entire pigeon, head and all, and then cut it up to eat.  So when you are eating the pigeon there is the roasted pigeon head staring back at you.  I try not to make eye contact.  

Net stretch out just before they dropped
it in the water

In China, as in most places, there is a phenomenon I like to call a crowd attracts a crowd.  It happens all the time.  If there are two or three people doing something, pretty soon there will be 5-10 watching them.  I experienced that today.  I was walking across a bridge and saw some guys with long bamboo poles fishing in the river.  I realized that they actually had nets on the end and were trying to net the fish.  They weren't having a lot of success.  Then there was this group of teenage boys.  They were not experienced fishermen but they had an idea.  They would string a long next across the bridge and have one end connected to the long bamboo pole and the other end they would drop in the water and the fish would swim into the net and they would pull out their haul.  They were figuring it out as they went with each of the five to six boys giving their opinion as to the most effective way to get the net across the bridge and into the water.  The sage old fisherman kept yelling his frustration at them for getting in his way and also according to him making this harder than it needed to be.  We'll after a few minutes and many "this will work" ideas they got the net stretched across the bridge and dropped in it in the water.  They ended up catching a couple of fish, which was two more than the actual fisherman caught.  I asked someone else there if you could eat the fish and they said you could eat that type of fish, but not from this water.  It was dirty.  So after watching the events unfold I headed back on my walk and realized that I had been joined by about twenty other people.  Not only did they stop walking to see what was happening but people actually parked their scooters got off and came over to see what was happening.  

Row of people and scooters to watch
the boys fishing.

I look forward to another great week.  We present to the CFO of Best Buy International, Dave Deno,  tomorrow.  It should be a great day.  We are prepared and look forward to the opportunity.  I am also looking forward to Easter coming up.  One, because it celebrates the Resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and two because Alauna and Mikayla are leaving the next day to come to China.  I am so excited.  This has been the longest we have been apart and hopefully it will be the longest we will be apart in the future.  I am so excited to see them and show then Nanjing.  Take care and have a great week.

Boyd