Test Department BBQ

My family went to the Test Department BBQ. Many of the test guys attended the BBQ. Weather was nice although it was not so good in the morning.

Keith enjoying his sausage.


Layer of Bean Curb
Tang Ayi, a great organizer for this BBQ
Chunguang enjoying his food
My wife helping in the BBQ

Playground

Gloomy

today's weather is gloomy. it is affecting my mood now... i will be going out to a bbq that is organized by the test group with my family... wonder how will it be...

Nice Weather

Today weather was excellence. A little warm actually. We walked to the lake and capture some pictures. We are in the mood of jumping... haha

长江三峡游 - The Yangtze Three Gorges Cruise

Make use of the China National Day holiday for a 4 nights Yangtze 3 Gorges cruise. 4 families from Delphi went to the cruise that was fun, bore and exciting, I will explain that later.

Day 1 (27th September 08, Saturday)

As we understand that the boat will not sail off till the next morning 8am so we decided that there isn't a need for us to reach the boat early like 6pm. We started off from our place at about 12:30pm, reaching airport by 2:30pm for checking. The airport was actually pretty quite since the National holiday had not really started. Checking went smooth and the flight took off with a slight delay. We reached Wuhan domestic airport by 6:30om. The local guide took us to a dinner place nearby the airport. Food suck and expensive.

After dinner, we are surprised that the journey from Wu Han (武汉) to Yi Chang (宜昌) will take us 5 hours of bus ride instead of the 3 hours that we were told of. So, now we would have reached the boat by 2am in the morning. If we knew about this, we would have took an early flight. So, by morning 1:30am, we reached the boat and tucked in for an early morning the same day. The room was excellence to my surprise. This is a standard twin hotel room with full facilities such as bathtub, TV, mini-fridge and big window for viewing. It is not the cabin with pot hole as in the cruises in Singapore. All rooms come standard with full length glass window.

Day 2 (28th September 08, Sunday)

The wake-up call music sounded off at 6:15am waking my wife and myself. We were tire as we sleep late early this morning. I was dragging my tire body to the bathroom for a shower, only start to feel the energy after warm water sprinkle on my body. Feel so good.

We had a sumptuous buffet breakfast with scramble egg, fried noodles, toasted bread, salad and many other pastries before leaving our boat for a visit to the dam at Xi Ling Gorge (西陵峡).

The dam was built with 3 purposes, first, flood control, second, power generation and lastly, navigational improvement. The annual power generation is 84.7 billion KWh.

After visiting the dam, we got back to the boat for our lunch and proceed to sail upstream through the ship lock. Boats have to pass through a 2 way 5 steps ship lock to get upstream or downstream. We took about 3 hours to get through the lock after lunch. It was exciting to follow through the operation of the lock initially but it was boring to look at it again and again.

The boat proceeded through Xi Ling Gorge and finally docked at Ba Dong (巴东). After a banquet dinner that were excellent. We proceeded to deck 5 for dance performance by the crews. The performance includes dance, act, taichi and saxophone. I was very very impressed with performers. During the day time, they could be a waitress serving food to us and by the night, they were performing right in front of us.









Day 3 (29th September 2008)

Day 3 was the best throughout the whole crew. We visited Shen Nong Xi (神农溪). There live the last generation of boatmen who make a living on premitive small wooden boat look like "Wang Duo Jiao" (碗豆角 - pea). Generally, each boat has 6 members from the same family and it is used as the only transportation along the river. During upstream when reaching shallow stream, the boatmen become tracker where they need to pull the boat from the shoreline. This is the exciting part of the trip.

In the afternoon, we proceeded to pass the Wu Gorge (巫峡) and the Qutang Gorge (瞿塘峡). Too bad that I slept through the afternoon so I miss the Qu Tang Gorge. Night activities are cultural performances by the crew members. The boat sail non-stop upstream through the night.

Day 4 (30th September 2008)

The boat were a little late today. It reached Feng Du by 8:30am instead of the original time of 8am or earlier. We headed to Feng Du ghost city at 9am. Not much fun for today day activities.

During the night, it was time for the passengers performed instead of the crew members. All four Delphi families' member participated the performance. Adithi sang a chinese song that impressed the whole crew members as well as the audience. Issac and Amada kick in synchronisation in with their Taekwando stunts. My wife and I sang a song 请跟我来 (please follow me).



Day 5 (1st October 2008)

In the morning, we checked out from the boat and headed to Chong Qing city (). Visited a couple of places such as People Theatre, ELing Park, Walking street. Since today is the China National day, the walking street was full of people. It is really (人山人海) People Mountain People Sea.

Overall, this was the most relaxing trip that my family had in China. Most of the morning, we will have offshore activities and back to the boat by lunch time. The afternoon were lazing around on the boat chatting, scenery viewing, card playing. All the meals were so good that my weight increase by 2kg after the trip. My wife and son enjoyed it very much as well.

Blue Sky White Cloud - 蓝天白云

Staying in Suzhou is hard to come by nice blue sky with cloud. Most of the days here are hazy. Not too sure if it is due to contamination or just the humid weather that is causing the problem. Anyway, last Saturday, before we headed for the 3 Gorges cruise, Suzhou had a very nice sky. The temperature also drop slightly to about 25C. This indicated that the autumn is here.