My First Week in Shanghai

I arrived on Thursday night with two other interns. Unbeknownst to all three of us, we had all been on the same flight flying from Sydney to Shanghai! Perhaps, I did have an inkling of an idea, as the other two were basically the only young non-Chinese people on the flight.

Towards the end of my flight, 1 hour before landing in Shanghai, I started talking to the man next to me, who was a businessman from Australia – his company in Australia supplies aerial parts which are manufactured in China, thus he informed me that 11 hour flights twice a month to Shanghai for him were a life commonality to ensure the quality of his company’s products were of the highest quality. We discussed business in a Chinese context, and I of course asked him for career advice for the business sector. The one thing he stressed in China was that it’s not what you know in China it’s who you know i.e. regular restaurant outings with your business partners were a part of your job.

Taking his advice going into my internship, I can definitely see some credibility to his words. The Chinese business workplace is all about relations. On my first day I received next to little no work, starting to take it personally, I confided in the guy who sits next to me in our office, a fellow intern who is Chinese. And he schooled me in the way things work in China, well at least in a legal Chinese context.  He told me that my first few days would be a bit slow with work, as I was new here, and colleagues weren’t familiar with me, and so I had to slowly gain their trust. He and other interns assured me that it had been the same for them when they started.

Regardless, as the days passed by, work has started to come my way. One thing that excites me is working in a multilingual office. I am interning at a German-Chinese-English office, so as you can imagine I have to hide my extreme excitement when I overhear Chinese lawyers speaking German, (I may be considering taking up German now!).

My office is located in the financial hub of Shanghai, new Pudong District, let me tell you, getting to work and getting home from work, despite the sardine canned bus trips are my favourite times of the day because I couldn’t imagine a better metropolis skyline to experience. I spend every second I can, without being run over by rogue cars and buses, looking up at the skyline of Shanghai as I walk. There is something grand about being dwarfed in comparison to skyscraping buildings at every degree of your bearing. My office is extremely close to the infamous Oriental Pearl Tower accompanied by many other tall buildings. The building I work in has at least 20 elevators, that are split into different floors that they travel to and every morning as I walk past, the Starbucks in my work building tempts me with their pricey 30RMB coffees and food when I could much rather buy two sushi triangles for a total of 7.5RMB from the convenience store in the building’s basement car park floor. I am yet to give in to the Western extravagance of Starbucks in China, but I still have just less than 3 weeks to go of interning in this grand skyscraping building, so we’ll see whether I give in.

 

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