A Farglorious Return To Qingdao

After two nights in the shady Beijing hotel, sleeping back in my bed in Qingdao was Farglorious (pun intended — our hotel is named Farglory). That was probably some of the best I’d slept the entire time I’ve been here.

Carosa and Jat were still in Shenzhen so we were going to run the morning stand up for them, and Carosa again joined by WeChat. We seemed to regress a little bit from a quick and efficient perspective, so Matthias eventually jumped in and we started over and finished in 10 minutes. That also made it clear that we need to run through things again with her when she gets back… But we’re still not sure when that will be.

As most days do at Han Te, the day itself flew by. I was working on pulling together the final deliverables for my portions of the report and presentation.

After deliberating on several restaurants, we ended up going back to the Chinese Muslim noodle place because it was cooler out today (and they don’t have A/C). Since they don’t have beer, I tried a Jasmine iced tea which was really good. We learned our lesson about having too much food and just shared three dishes. The beef and onion dish was delicious! Maria was saying it was the best thing she’s eaten since she’s been here. The one funny thing is that since these noodles are hand pulled, the don’t really have ends which made sharing them a bit I difficult. Eventually, Katherine got another pair of chopsticks and we managed to slice them into more manageable lengths. On the post lunch walk, we saw peanuts being picked and cleaned — which I personally had never seen before. It was pretty cool!

The afternoon flew by as well and it was really starting to sync in how little time we have left here — and how much more we would really like to do. Matthias ran another session on story point estimation, a way to use abstract measurements to estimate the relative amount of effort it will take to develop a given set of capabilities. I continued writing some documentation and before I knew it, it was time to go home.

Melisa had scheduled by birthday massage for me at the building across from the hotel. Had several of the team not already gone there, I might have been a bit more cautious. The directions I received were, “Go to the first white building across the street, go up to the 9th floor, and take a left.” In the end, I did find the right place and started the massage. The guy was certainly pretty aggressive from a pressure perspective… Almost to the point of pain a few times. He also popped my back a bit, which does make me a bit nervous but it turned out ok. He heavily focused on my back — which was nice, but I wanted a bit more on my hands and feet (there was none). That being said, he made up for it with a good 10 minutes spent on my head (and I love getting my head massaged).

After that, I caught up with Matthias and we went over to the piggy place for a light dinner and a beer. We got a sweet and sour pork dish, some finely sliced cucumbers, and of course, what we have come to call “weasel juice” — which is really just a hot semi-sweet soy milk. Maria joined the two of us halfway through, so we wrapped up the day just as we started — as the A Team!