Learning the Ropes

Shenzhen Adventure Day 5

Today we were again mostly in-house.

We kicked off the day with a lecture on how to use Altium (pcb design software) by Bunnie. Afterwards, we got lunch at this super awesome Thai restaurant right by our office (they have very filling lunch specials for 45 RMB / 7.25 USD). I was going to go to another restaurant, but it started to pour (seems to rain most days so far around noon).

After lunch, it was mostly just working time. Artem and I decided to go to Seg, the super large electronics market to get keyboards and mice so that we can easily use Altium. We got super side tracked in segbuy and ended up walking around for hours, but it was good because we also found inspiration in the millions of parts available there.

One funny thing I learned is that if you’re looking for a single item, and the manufacturer is selling high quantity, saying you want a sample is a great way to get one at a low cost, but it feels somewhat dishonest. Then again, Seg doesn’t feel quite honest either…

After burning far to much time visitng all 10 floors of Seg twice, we headed back to the office, did some work thinking about our designs, and then headed to dinner. Saquib and I decided to go to the restaurant we were going to go to earlier – it’s a vegetarian restaurant so we were pretty excited to be able to order anything off the menu! The place was a little bit dingy, but the food was pretty great and not too expensive – 52 RMB / 8.4 USD comfortably fed us both – usually vegetarian restaurants are pricey because of low demand. Was pumped to finally be able to eat the famous ma po tofu! After dinner we went to Gong Cha, a tea chain. Their teas are awesome, I had a kumquat limeade drink with pearls and jelly that was super refreshing. Desipite being cheap already, they had a buy one get one half off thing going so we got 2 large drinks for 22 RMB / 3.5 USD.

I also learned that the word “chisu” I’ve been using for vegetarian sounds a lot like “chizou” which means stall. That explains why everytime I ask for vegetarian food they show me the bathroom. Could have been worse! I think the right word is “su-shi”.