百度

So, in case I haven't told you, I'm working at Baidu this Summer. It's a bit of an interesting story: I was originally going be a code monkey for a guy who used to work for Google, but then that company went under (it was a start-up) two or so days before I was to start. After a week or so of frantic job hunting, I ended up here:

The second picture is the subway station five minutes from the 大厦 (building) . The picture doesn't really capture the insufferable heat and humidity, nor the pungent and incredibly recognizable 臭豆腐 ("stinky tofu," a kind of tofu that's tasty but smells awful) smell that's always around. It's a really nice place to work. Baidu, I mean, not the subway! It's not as big a deal to be an intern there, in comparison to being at Microsoft or Apple or Google, though. My friends there tell me that the interns all have activities together and volleyball and get free phones and stuff. My group of six people and I have money to get ice cream from 楼下 to eat together, though, haha. Here's my 工位, with all the sticky notes of characters I didn't know before starting here:

The food in the 餐厅 is absolutely heavenly. I can't even begin to describe how tasty it is. I eat dinner there, too. It's also, like, 11块 (~$1.60) per meal. 's kind of hard to go wrong with Chinese food in China, I think:

And they have these rooms for people to rest in, with the most incredible (and the first one I've ever been on) massage chairs in the entire world in these super-futuristic - looking giant luminous eggs which usually have the lights off inside but are on at the time I 下班, so I could take a picture of the chairs. The chairs! You know the ones, the ones with, like, a control panel the size of a laptop and over forty buttons:

Anyway, that's Baidu. It's awesome. I'm working on an company blog that'll go up in about a week. The blog will be in English, but the work environment is completely Chinese, of course, and all the searching I do to find interesting things to write posts about is in Chinese, too, of course, so I'm getting a lot of character practice. One is never done learning characters, see. There are always more.

I finish work in two weeks, though, so most of my time here will have been spent setting it up instead of writing. Oh, well.