the hardworking and the smart

It's hard to get hold of the computer to blog these days as Brent has been hogging it, actually he has been working hard.

The first picture is my college classmate whom I haven't seen since I left China and continuously invited me to visit him in Jinan. Jinan is a city full of springs, and by the Mother River of China - Yellow River. It turned out that he's actually very busy. He works basically seven days a week. He manages large engineering projects and often goes on business trips. However he squeezed time to show us around Jinan. He treated us to dinner the first night, but after he sent us to the hotel, he went on to interview someone whom they wanted to hire, at 11PM at night. It's definitely a different business culture. His colleagues took the engineer candidate to dinner, and they drank beer. When they were half drunk, the candidate signed the contract. As the chief, my friend needed to show up to work out the logistics. Chinese is all about food!

The second picture is hard to see clearly. It's supposed to be that way, as the man is setting up an illegal net to catch the sparrows. The net lines are so thin so it's hard to see. And he set it up in front of the trees because he knows the birds would fly to land on the branches. One sparrow was already caught!

The third picture here shows some workers making a road in the Yellow River park. They do everything by hand. This looks like as back breaking as building the Great Wall. (well, Great Wall has much larger stones actually) The dinner we had the night before probably would cost their whole month's salary.