November 21, 2009

10/17/2009 – Day 56 – Counting

A somewhat odd day. That’s the only way to describe it. I mean, counting customers at a McDonald’s and Burger King in China? Yeah, strange-sounding. Anyways, Irene and I were assigned McDonald’s while Jane and Christian went to Burger King and it was chaos. We got there around ten minutes early to give ourselves enough time to order food and find a seat. The line was not only enormous, there were also no seats. We almost didn’t get a seat by noon, our designated start time.

Coincidentally, when we started counting, the foot traffic started getting more intense. We could barely keep up with the people walking in and since we weren’t just counting, but also taking down demographic information, we were writing like mad men. For 45 minutes, we were writing and writing and I’m glad the last 15 minutes were relatively calm. We ended up with about 340 people in an hour. I-N-S-A-N-E. Treated myself to a funky tasting ice cream cone topped with honeydew melon syrup afterward.

Got home and compiled the data and actually did some work. For dinner, Joe and I ordered from Hello Pizza, which sells personal pan pizzas. I got a classic pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and for only 22 RMB, it was good and filling.

Posted at 2:58 PM by Ray
Category: School, Shanghai   Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

September 24, 2009

09/23/2009 – Day 32 – Work

Today was finally my first day of work at Ekohe! Even though I was exhausted, I was still looking forward to working. Since it was Wednesday, classes were short and manageable, so nothing to mention there. But after class, I went with Christian, who is also working at Ekohe, to the office. Since it was the first day, we didn’t do too much. We read about screen-printing and I learned a bit about Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR).

Ekohe plans to have me help with the CSS on a site and if I can get a grasp of Ruby and RoR, I might be able to help with the actual coding stuff. I’m actually really excited to learn Ruby and RoR. They were always on my radar and now I have an excuse to sit around and learn it.

Anyways, we were there for four hours. Eight hours a week shouldn’t be too bad, though seeing how tired I am already, I’m hoping I can survive adding in an extra eight hours of work to the week.

By the way, I had a Burger King bacon cheeseburger. I’m going to have to say Burger King China tastes better than McDonald’s China. Maybe McDonald’s will redeem itself when I try it again in the future (if I do at all. I really just wanted to taste it).

Posted at 4:39 PM by Ray
Category: School, Shanghai   Tags: , , , , , , , ,