On 14 April 2010, Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull (pronounce as “AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh”) erupted. It was mad and deadly, it impacted the entire Europe. The volcanic ash cloud led to the closure of most European airspace.

For me it was entertaining, because it is one of the unusual event that caught my attention haha =) …  not until I received a sms from my friend low kei..

Low kei sms..

I’m now in Amsterdam, the Iceland volcano ash cloud has caused all the plane grounded, Kalen supposed to take off tonight but the flight was canceled. We plan to make a trip to your place. update you later…

This is not cool man, my first instinct prompted me go to Google and search for…

yes Volcano victims… and I found a lot of tragic  photos like

.

.

I cried loudly like a baby at that instant moment . My French boss helplessly asked me what’d  happened?

I told him Eyjafjallajökull volcano will turn Low Kei and Kalen into you-cha-guai 油炸鬼 and Ham-Jim-Bang 咸煎饼..

turn them to…..

Obviously the French don’t know what is You-Cha-Guai 油 炸鬼 and Ham-Jim-Bang 咸煎饼.

My worried now is not how Low Kei and Kalen will turn into You-Cha-Guai 油 炸鬼 and Ham-Jim-Bang 咸煎饼, instead I was struggling to clean my room to welcome the volcanic victims. Because I need to hide…

and

Anyway Low Kei took train and reached Belfort safely…

.

The first thing Low Kei did in my room was to look for…

er… I think he was not looking for things in my room… I think he was cleaning it…

hmmm…. maybe we is not looking and cleaning, he is cooling…

Thanks to him, we cook for me for the last 10 days..

We took the opportunity to celebrate Kalen’s birthday with champagne =)

。

。

Low Kei took a picture of my handsome toy

.

Picture below summarizes all the activities in my room.

making distorting noises, hanging wet-clothing (only Asians will do that), messy stuffs, TV, walking around the room, everyone sardin together.

.

At night, I have to listen to…. low kei

please click below to listen to what I heard at night

zzzzZZZzzZZzzZZz Low kei snores

zzzzZZZzzZZzzZZz

The majority people of the world seems to have very negative thinking about Chinese people. Many thought that the Chinese are creating problems to the rest of the world, Chinese is the problem to the pollution, Chinese are rude, Chinese are smelly, Chinese are cunning, Chinese destroy the economy and etc…

Recently me and Low Kei were humiliated and ill-treated by a French waiter in a French restaurant. Additionally I experienced a series of disgusting Chinese issue in my company that sparked my head to create this post. Furthermore, I was inspired by one of Ahyap.com‘s post with regards to What’s so special About Chinese?

.

Why “Chinese” issue is making  drastic impact on my work and company now?

I’m working for a French power plant provider company as a subcontracting/tendering engineer (the retarded kind of engineer that is not so good in technical know-how) in France. The name of the company is Alstom, which I can proudly say that it is one of the prestigious power plant provider company in the world.

Being a tendering engineer allows me to understand some of the commercial business decisions made by the superiors (the asshole people). I noticed most of the business movements had tuned to be more competent in order to compete against the Chinese. Eventually a few business units were created exclusively to compete with the Chinese.

Now what did the Chinese do?

Not long ago, Malaysia Alstom country president presented the volume comparison of power plants built by Alstom against the competitors. His slides was something like this (not exactly the same).



The power plant built by Chinese Dong Fang is relative more than the sum of power plants produced by the competitors.  Not only Dong Fang  perform exceptionally well oversea, they make the other key players cannot compete in China market (the numbers of power plant erected in china is relatively higher than the rest of the world for the past few years) .

What I found about Dong Fang Electric Corporation 东方电气集团 in Belfort:

According to some of the old people in Alstom, DongFang used to be the subcontractor to Alstom to build mega plants in China 30 years ago such as  nuclear and Steam. From there, they tried to learn everything from scratch to produce their own equipments. Alstom used to laugh at their incapability and Alstom had to complete DongFang’s half successful work and equipments like Generators and Turbines. Now they are the major threat to the key players like Siemens, Alstom and GE

.

My experience with the Guai Loh 鬼佬

We all know that the Guai Loh possess ‘expensive blood’ compared to Asians. They think they are the central of the world, they are the most sophisticated races in world.  Needless to say, their working man hours is very expensive, they don’t really care about cost saving when they try to do business, they have to respect their individual lifestyle and so on… hence their Europe business profit  normally is not good, Asia for them is very lucrative.

Now, their focus is on Asia market now. They even created a funny term for that! It is called… ROA business (Rest-Of-Asia business). Why they called it Rest-of-Aisa business but not A business (Asia business)? ROA means excluding China but include the rest of Asia because simply they can’t do Chinese business anymore. Lately I found out ROA will exclude India further.

Rest-of-Asia market is not an easy market for them. The major challenge now for these European company is to drive down their cost by more than 50%, because China is attached to ROA, and the Chinese sales man likes to knock on customers door and promote their extremely cheap product. No doubt, European equipments and solution has high efficiency, but the customer mindset now is to have cheap model with average performance but bankable solutions.

So, my job now involve in cost savings and apply construction procedures that shows significant cost savings! a lot of time I need to involve myself in the meeting with all the Guai Lohs to discuss the feasibility of different kind of solution

Because I am the only Chinese and Asian in the table hence I always encounter situation like this-

Guai Lo:

We have to compete with the Chinese! So We now must use the cheap CHINESE equipments!

But we know that Chinese people are STUPID and DUMB! if we buy these equipment from them, most of the time they can’t provide user manual for us! they are just too stupid to do good documentation!

Chinese people are lousy, and they are cheap, we can give them little money and complete the work

Chinese efficiency is poor!

after they uttered all the ugly words, then they will turn to me and ask… are you China Chinese?

what do I do? I have to humbly + calmly + stupid  shack my head like this… , to please them

well inside my heart, I remember vividly ……

Yes, It was like a slap in the face to the Chinese….

How I wish I can jump onto the table and scream to them

FireMice:

中国人不是东亚病夫!

Chinois ne sont pas l’homme malade de l’Asie!! (French)

Chinese are not the sick man  (cowards) of Asia!

Their ideas are not really impressive, because they think in order to compete with the Chinese, they have to source cheap materials and equipments from the Chinese. In the end, it is like finding Chinese to kick Chinese Ass… they forgot one thing,  everything is Chinese.

.

The World doesn’t understand us!

Chinese are now hungry of success, it seems that the most of the rest of the world still don’t understand Chinese and its capabilities.

Chinese lived in the dark for a period time when the other part of the world especially the West was growing fast to distinguish themselves as superior beings. But this is only noticeable for the last 50-100 years I think?

But Chinese has 5,000 years of ups-downs. The problem that the Chinese are facing now is only a tiny peak of an iceberg . It can sink the TITANIC down with your adorable Guai Lo Leonardo Dicaprio. Making a drastic changes in mankind history for Chinese is sap-sap-sui easy…

Don’t estimate us because in our BLOOD, we have a series of important stuffs  started from thousands of years ago…. from the Confucius 孔子 to …..  First Emperor of china Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇…. to Journey to the West 西遊記….. to the romance of the 3 kingdom in red cliff…. to the Art-of War by Sunzhi….. to the Legend of the Condo Heroes 射雕英雄传… to Bruce Lee….. 2008 Beijing olympic….. and now Jackie Chan..

.

.

I’m sure we have more to come… thumbs up to Chinese!

A swan is an enchanted bird, it plays its part exceptionally well in portraying elegant and beautiful in fairy tales and legend.

It comes to you slowly, calm, pleasant and attractive… then it glides away slowly with charm…..

It is like a messenger sent by nature to tell you how beautiful is everything around us serenely.

Seeing them moving around you makes you feel everything around you is still..

.

Everyone has different Swan experience, I stumbled upon various interesting swan thingy in internet and I feel that I need to signify my swan experience here!

.

Musical Swan:

The old 007 agent Roger Moore as narrator and Mischa Maisky cellist collaborate together in

Carnival of the animal – The Swan Saint-Saens

also,

Yo-yo-Ma likes to close his eyes and squeeze out his Swan juice out from his brain

Jay Chow tried it in vain =P

.

.

.

Pipi‘s encounter in Interlaken 2009 (Switzerland):

and more……… make her dizzy and crazy

.

.

Pipi visit swan in Belfort during winter 2010:

We walked to the lake  early morning

Cold fresh air and serene sun rise…

she was trying something naughty..

the swans came by..

Pipi wanted to make friends with them

.

but the swan cannot break the ice with pipi, as it was too much icy and snow between them..

Swan get angry and do this.. and pipi LOL

.

.

What did Justin and FireMice did in Strassbourg with Swan?

We made SNOWBALL for them!!!

2 snowball for these 2 swans

3 snowballs for 3 swans

.

and we gave it to them……… EAT IT!!!

until they were afraid of Justin

.

Justin recorded the evidence… nothing is pleasant between swan and us and nothing musical about it.

.

.
.

It is actually scary as I don’t know how to go out.

-11C was the temperature.

It was like somebody painted the entire town into white during the night. Everywhere is.. white

My office is just opposite of my room.

I decided to go out for fresh air..

go through the park..

Cathedral..

cars…

I decided to go on-top-of-Belfort… to have a great view…

So i decided to climb the castle

I managed to make a tough climb… it was too windy and dangerous… I’m the only person there

but it was worth to see all the tiny things around Belfort

Poor lion of Belfort, your sculptor didn’t sculpt you winter clothings

went to the river after that

the bush…

FireMice made a dangerous attempt

I decided to go to the lake near my apartment. This lake is very beautiful during the summer.

I took this previous summer

look how big was the moon during that time.

and now,

I noticed some dog’s foot prints on top of the lake..

and I have a crazy idea.

I decided to

.

.

walk across the lake… dangerous attempt indeed, no one was there… i think it was worth to give myself a try… and stand in the middle of the lake.

after that, I noticed something..

some ducks were playing around the lake… I just realized, the lake was not frozen entirely, lucky me

Everything ends well with a nice sun set view..

]]> http://thefiremice.com/travel/europe/france/belfort-snow/feed/ 1 http://thefiremice.com/arts/journey-to-the-west/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=journey-to-the-west http://thefiremice.com/arts/journey-to-the-west/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:59:12 +0000 firemice http://firemice.wordpress.com/?p=389

Sometime I think my mind doesn’t belong to me at all. I just came back from Paris after meeting a good friend Jackson from UTM. My mind was wandering during the daytime in the office. Yes! It is another unproductive day for me in the office and I don’t know why I keep thinking about Journey to the West 西遊記, one of the greatest Chinese Classical Novels  I read during my childhood.

For some reasons this story reminds me about my presence in The West and my own Journey to the West. Why am I here?

Journey to the West story is about a Chinese Buddhist Monk who set out India to retrieve the Buddhist scripture for China in the 1590s. He was aided and protected by his royal and faithful disciples on his Journey. At the end, they all attained enlightenment.

Am I doing that?

Well, I was told by my boss or maybe it is a little mission from my boss to send me to the West to attain some experience that might help our company new direction. Get pieces of details, trivia about their work in the West.. so that at the end of the day I can crap things to them..

Gosh! Journey to the West is a Big wake-up call for me to be serious and pay more attention to work… so I have to gear myself up and be more competent now.

The mood of drawing suddenly hit me at the end of the day.. I guess I can use some Graffiti again to express myself like what I always like to do..

I decided to draw one of the interesting story in Journey to the West. It is about the punishment given by the great Buddha to Monkey King when he tried to escape from Buddha’s palm . The Buddha trapped the Monkey King under the Wu-Zhi Five Finger mountain for 500 years until someone come and save him!

.

FireMice under the Five-Finger Mountain:

.

.

.

.

.

.

one finger is hidden.

I felt the pressure all the time…. OUCH!

.

Pics up there is my current staying place in Belfort (France). It is called Thomas Edison Apartment. This is my 4th month now. Why do they named it Thomas Edison? Maybe because the apartment is next to GE factory, apparently Thomas Edison is the founder of GE empire.

.

.

Ladies and Gentleman, this post is about to detail another piece of FireMice’s living experience. You are about to witness FireMice’s personal belongings or should I say Properties.

As I was living here alone all the while, I’d invested thoroughly to kill my time and also satisfy the “sins of Gluttony” of mine.  In conjunction to that, I’d owned a series of private collections indirectly and I am about to share everything out.

#1 bottles

I have plenty of beers bottles, red wine, rums…

that’s not all, I have another series at the other table

it came together with these

and of course, plenty of these…

not only alcohol bottles, I have plenty of other bottles… which makes spaghetti, sandwiches, junk, that makes your dung / shit smelly

#2 Magnum

Magnum ice cream is relative cheap if compared to Magnum back  home…

Hence, I have many boxes in my room

Now when I look it back at my collection, It is so sexy… Magum Golden Hazernut, Magnum classic, Magnum Honey Nougat, Magnum Ecuador Dark, Magnum Coconut, Magnum Columbia coffee (my personal favorite), Magnum Pistachio, Magnum Almond…

and of course, Magnums will end up with..

This is what I call 1Malaysia. What PM Najib used to remind our Malaysians. We are one, see different type ice cream actually will become the same after I ate them. All the sticks look the same…. me, you, us, no different