All right, I got a shot at Kristof’s pictures and there’s a selection in the extended entry below:
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So today I finally have something to write about: I’m just sitting in the back of our car, driving back to Suzhou from Shanghai were we spent the last 24 hours.
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So as some of you know, on Wednesday I celebrated my 23rd birthday. As we had to work on Thursday, us four interns weren’t planning to go an a drinking binge but rather just have a nice evening.

So we went to our favorite (being the only one we know…) Thai restaurant to have dinner, moved on to the Blue Marlin bar to play a couple of hours of pool billiard and then decided to go to a chinese discotheque. Having had a couple of shots of whiskey or beer already, we took a fun mode of transportation to get there:

Aside from Taxis, you can also have yourself driven around on a tricycle bike or a tricycle scooter. The latter ones, however, are probably not meant to be used to drive around 4 people and the driver, certainly not on 4- to 6-lane roads and definitely not up hills. Let’s just say we got there, crammed into the space usually reserved for 2 people or one person with a bag – and this sure was one very memorable ride to have experienced.

Anyway, thanks again to all who sent me e-mails congratulating me for my birthday, I gotta get back to work…

-Jan

So Friday afternoon, everyone in the office got an email, instructing us to come to work today wearing our blue Schott shirts and to bring a good mental attitude to work.
The reason for this was not some weird kind of company-spirit event but rather a visit by the vice-mayor of Suzhou who was planning to inspect our company today.
At first, I was somewhat uncertain about the “good mental attitude”, suspecting they wanted everyone to have a few drinks before coming in to work. It seems as though they just wanted smiling faces when the mayor came by…

Anyway, so everyone’s been dressing up in the company shirts, basically converting our office into an armada of blue-dressed clones. Not that the shirts are that bad, it’s just that they aren’t all that great looking…

UPDATE: Well that’s life: We’ve just been told the vice-mayor cancelled the visit, making all this a very very useless exercise.

-Jan

Just realized I have some more pictures from yesterday’s trip into town. Around 7:30 p.m. the four of us got hungry and I suggested we might go to one of the local Pizza Huts to get some decent pizza. Anyway, these pictures were from the shopping mall we passed through:
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