4.02.2013

FIRST WORKING WEEK

I haven't been blogging for a while now but a lot had happened! Last monday we started working at the McGregor/Gaastra office. Wednesday we went to the MM&T, this is a leather material and accessories fair. Max gave us the assignment to search for new suppliers for washable leather and leather patches for the Gaastra jeans. We had a really fun day since our name tags said we were junior buyers so the people treated us like real buyers. We gained a lot of information and luckily Max was happy with it.  

On thursday we were invited to go to a QC (quality control) meeting in Shenzhen. This meeting is once a year; all the production people from Gaastra, McGregor and the QC's come together to talk about how to improve the system and the difficulties they face during the quality control. The meeting wasn't as I thought it would be, since I know that my father has meetings with his company at offices/hotels in special rooms I thought this would be the same. It was the opposite; the meeting was in a fancy restaurant near the Shenzhen train station. We entered the restaurant and indeed it was in a separate room. Everybody was having fun while having dinner, one woman even cried.. It didn't seemed like they were talking about business. Since everything was in mandarin we didn't understand a lot, however they thought we could speak fluently Chinese because we said 'ni hao'. I didn't wanted to disappoint them so I just said yes and no at times I thought I was supposed to and it seemed to work. We arrived at 12 o'clock, had lunch for 3 hours or so (I ate sea cucumber and I even liked it..) and after lunch everybody sat together for 30 minutes to talk about business. If business meetings are like this, I would like to attend some more! However it was a really fancy restaurant, when I had to go to the toilet I had a big culture shock. I was looking for the toilets and couldn't find any. After searching for a while, I saw this hole in the ground.. I just had to share it with you! I think I will have a beautiful but if I visit China more often since you have to squat above this hole.

Because it was our first time to China, our supervisors Jeff and Inez took us for a walk through the city to do some shopping. We went to a huge indoor fake market. I went crazy by seeing all the celine, chanel and hermes bags! Instead of buying these, Ellie and I decided to take a pedicure. A very expensive one, 6 euro in total! It was quite an experience since they try to make money out of everything. If you want orange nailpolish it's +10 dollar, if you want shiny nails its again +10. But since I'm the bargaining queen, I didn't let this happen to me!

Besides my internship at McGregor, I also work as a waitress now for little bao. The owner, May, is a friend of Patrica (the girl we rent the apartment from). I wanted to earn more money since HK is a shopping walhalla and I want to travel around as much as I can in China, so she arranged a job for us. Last wednesday was our first job at Clot, a concept store in causeway bay. There was a Nike air max event where May did the catering. Besides earning 100 hk dollar (10 euro) per hour, we also got a free pair of Nike air max! Apparently she was happy with us because tomorrow we have to work at an art gallery. I really like the job because we meet a lot of new people and we earn money at the same time.

Here are some pictures from last week:

MM&T

MM&T
business dinner

a Chinese toilet

Nike air max
Little bao team with our new shoes

Geen opmerkingen:

Een reactie posten