time to say goodbye

By Tabea Estermann August 1, 2017 Discover ShuQi project
Our days in China are counted and soon we will finish CHIP. Axel, Adrien and Loïc will travel around in China and Julia and Tabea will go back to Switzerland.
On the weekend we were working but also enjoying China. Despite our initial decision not to work on Sunday, WeChat called us to work. So we decided to quit the swimming pool at Marco Polo and to leave to HuaQianBei to pick up our ShuQi. She is not without fault – the painting was not done on one half as we had expected and the buttons were not graduated as the ShuQi case, but she is nevertheless beautiful. We love her and it was worth the trip in the smoggy (100 AQI), humid and hot (36°C) weather. While Adrien was recovering from the AC and Chinese food, Axel was soldering some components to make ShuQi work.
But we are not only working, we are also enjoying China. Using DianPing (点评)to get some great discount at the hairdresser by paying with WeChat wallet. The Chinese virtually never use cash, all payments can be done per transfer on the smartphone, either through AliPay, WeChatPay, AndroidPay or ApplePay of which the two first are most common. No matter if it is in the small kiosk around the corner, the high end club, the restaurant the taxi, the convenience store, the clothes shop or the spa, all can be paid in this way. This is thanks to the easy set-up, which requires a user to simply have a WeChat wallet and then print out the personal QR-code to receive money.
On Monday, the engineers worked very hard to debug the ShuQi code, which turned out to be a real challenge. We discussed as a team, what could be done and how to deal with this. Even though the non-engineers could not really understand all of the explications, they could still provide some thinking impetus. Until the evening for the after-work-presentation, the electronic worked and we could demonstrate the device to the other teams. There are still some bugs to fix when we get back to Switzerland though.
After the presentation we all rushed back to the hotel, with the help of a young couple, which helped us find a taxi in the abundant area of 南山 NanShan, where xfactory, our working place was. We enjoyed the last 15min in the center of Shenzhenin the swimming pool, with a view on all the towers of the centre.
Today, Tuesday, we are visiting different companies and in the evening we will celebrate the Swiss national holiday with the whole CHIP group. We have agreed to meet on August 2nd for lunch to debrief quickly and say goodbye and then the ShuQi team will split up.
There are a lot of memories we have from this trip. We had some difficult tasks to do at work, we met interesting people and we experiences immersion into the Chinese world. Thanks to Tabea’s knowledge of China and the colleague Yang from team Ticino, we have visited and experienced many typical and traditional Chinese things such as 海底捞 (HaiDiLao) hotpot, a traditional dance show, the Ballenberg of China with the tree of Deng XiaoPing, Temples and more.