Day 11:
Well today I found out something that made me feel really embarrassed. So, my friends showed me the video of the knife “throwing” from the acrobat show. It turns out that no knives were actually thrown at me, and the whole thing was fake. I felt really embarrassed because my friends kept it from me for an entire day and I did not find out. They made me watch it with the entire bus of students. It was awful. Props to them for being able to keep it though. It was a good joke.
Today began the same as always. Early morning, good breakfast, and a bus ride. Sleeping on the buses has become a common thing for me. Apparently, everyone else expects it too because every time I fall asleep people take pictures of me and use snapchat to draw weird pictures over top of me. On the bus today, we were introduced to a man who worked for Tol Global Forwarding, which is a logistics company. He asked us to refer to him as Mac. Mac was a nice person and gave us some insightful information on logistics-based information and on China in general. He speaks some mandarin but not enough to be fluent. This is pretty amazing that someone who has lived in the country for 8 years, has a chinses wife and family, and works in a china-based company can function in such a major country not knowing the language. We were informed that there are a lot of logistics jobs in the market, and that the shipping industry is becoming even more prominent in China.
Mac led us to the Ocean East International Logistics company Headquarters. We had an insightful conversation with the General Manager of the company. He was telling us all about the industry he thrives in and about shipping in general. He spoke how soon most things will be automated and the need of human labor will not be as prominent. The company has already taken this thought and put it to practice the automotive machinery. In their warehouse they have implement a few person-free forklifts. They said they aren’t quite as efficient as a person operated forklift, but they are looking into the future of logistics by operating under this platform already.
After this visit we went to the Shanghai deep water shipping port. The entire thing is manmade and meant only for shipping. The port has a 13 km long bridge to even get to the island. 3 of the zones within the port are human operated and one is automotive. This was an unreal thing to see. The huge barges were enough to see but seeing all the cranes and boxes within the island made me think how many items there actually are in the world. This port was only made for boxes too. The shipped cars and vehicles are handled at another port.
At the end of the day, a bunch of us went to get noodles at a local noodle place. It was really filling, and even though it was good it was probably one of the worst meals I had while in China. Then in the night time we all explored the old French part of town of which our hotel resides. It seems like every night we just explore a new area. By the end of the trip we might just cover every area.