Even though my first day has yet to happen, my team at work allowed me to join them on an offsite event at a nearby city called Hangzhou (杭州). The city of Hangzhou is known as one of the two most beautiful cities in China, with Suzhou being the other one! The city hosted the G-20 Summit in 2016 and is also the home to e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The goal of the offsite was to allow the team to get to know one another better through a series of games, events, and elaborate meals. Most of the “getting to know you better” time was spent over these meals, so that’s what I took pictures of! OMG was there such delicious food. You can see a lot of the pictures in my Suzhou album on Google Photos. Each meal featured various vegetable, meat, fowl, fish, and crustaceans including items like bullfrog in spicy chili oil, smoked duck tongue, various soups, jellyfish, squash, pumpkin, pork belly “sandwiches”, and this fish that’s seen better days.
Hangzhou has a really nice park & lake area called Westlake. After dinner on Thursday, a number of us from the team went to Westlake to go walk around and have a good time. Westlake was billed as a beautiful area with lots of little shops and a great walking trail; it did not disappoint! The pictures I took at night did not come out all that great as the camera I’m using (an older point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix) does not have the best settings for nighttime photography nor did I have a tripod with me. Most of the shots came out terrible, sans a few like the one below. (Others are posted in the aforementioned Google Photos album.)
The Hangzhou event was a big success as many team members got to know one another better, learned how to work together as a team on non-work related tasks, and we got to explore a place not everyone previously visited. With some now friendly faces known at work apart from my immediate team, I’m quite looking forward to my first official day of work in a few weeks.
No new word of the day today, but look for that list to start up again tomorrow!