As many of you know, I started work last Tuesday (a week ago), but I wanted to wait until I experienced it a bit before posting. The company I'm working for, which is called in English "CN-KnowHow Intellectual Property Agent Ltd." (http://www.cnkip.net/) is in a building called the Fortune International Center, which incidentally is right next to a building looking exactly the same called the Fortune Building. I have yet to go into the wrong one in the morning, but I'm sure it will happen at some point. The company is on the third floor, and there's a pretty cool view out the window of my office. I'm in a side office with one other person as are the two other interns from my program working here. Avril has already been here a month, and Nathan just started today. The first day, I was invited into the conference room with the company president Mr. Xie who told us to call him Victor, another head guy here (Avril's boss) Mr. Wang, and the woman I work for, Crystal. Victor asked me to introduce myself, which I did in Chinese, and then asked what I wanted to get out of the internship. I hate questions like that! Apparently my answer of wanting to explore patent law as a possible career was good enough. After that, I spent the rest of the day and all of Wednesday doing absolutely nothing. When I asked for something to do, all they told me was that if I "want to learn something" I could read this book, which is just a straight copy in English of Chinese patent law. I managed to get through about 20 pages before dozing off. Interns are a new thing to China, so unlike in the US where interns are given all the bitch work to do, they don't really know what to do with us here. On Wednesday, I called my program coordinator to say I wasn't doing anything, and I have since been given a project. I'm researching a US patent case from 2004 and working on a presentation to give them on it. I've since learned that law is relatively confusing and difficult to interpret, so this has lead to a bunch of debates between myself and the other interns because mostly the rest of the office doesn't speak English well enough to join in.
One of the best things about my job so far though is that everyone here is really eager to learn English and learn about English grammar and also really eager to help us with our Chinese. I was prompted to write this at this moment because Mr. Wang just came into my office solely to have a conversation with me in Chinese about what I did this weekend. It was a great exchange because he corrected my grammar and I taught him words in English like "team" and "frisbee", though they may not be the most useful words in his English vocabulary.
Some interesting things about the office here: Everyone has a cup or multiple cups on his/her desk to drink water or tea during the day. There are water coolers throughout the office since you can't drink tap water. Even though this building is relatively modern and air conditioned, the bathrooms have squat toilets, which I'm solely becoming more comfortable with using. There is also a strainer over a pot in the bathroom for people to dump tea into (it catches the tea leaves). At exactly 12:30pm, everyone no matter what he/she is doing jumps up and leaves for lunch. By 1:30pm, everyone is back, but it's widely accepted to take a nap on your desk for 10 minutes after lunch. Work ends at 6pm, which really sucks because it takes an hour to get back, and then it's already 7.
That's all on work in China (工作在中国) for now!
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