From Tamara

Blog #4

Since overcoming my initial illness and a bit of sight-seeing I will give a bit of a description of my 1st week at my internship, mostly because I believe it is the opposite of the other members. First, my internship is for an American corporation who happens to have an office in Beijing were the staff is made up of all Chinese but the protocols; procedures and forms are American in nature and often pre-set. The main focus is on IT data collection and analysis, which serves them well in the Chinese market; though they hope to have a slow break into consulting for its more lucrative nature. Unlike others, my work office is silent, with the occasional burst of discussion from workers who cluster around one cubical to discuss a client or file. So far I have only been in contact with 2 people out of the 2 main offices that are distributed across the 6th floor. Everyone here supposedly posses the ability to speak English to a certain level (that is dictated by the company before being hired) but so far few have any desire to indulge in conversation with me. Unlike many others my work is limited and comes in spurts, mostly through an e-mail or by phone call telling me there is work which consists of only editing papers in English. I am here 5 days a week from 9:30am to around 6:30pm and lunch is promptly at noon. Since I work in the area known as the "wall street or Time Square of Beijing", lunches can vary in price and type but almost always spent on my own (until recently). It’s a nice area to work in and I have found that if shopping is your thing, this is the area to do it. Though it appears bargaining is a must, unless you want to be gorged by the status quo of "foreign-looking=instant price jump".