Up until a few years ago, the steel plant was located on the outskirts of Beijing. But the government decided to close it down due to pollution concerns and had it moved to a new location around 3 hours east of the city - right on the coast of China. As a result, we were up bright and early at around 6am on Thursday in order to get there at a reasonable time. We stayed at a hotel that was next to the Avic Aerospace company - they had a J-10A fighter plane on display out the front of the building, complete with (non-functional) missiles. Very cool:
The drive itself was nothing special until we got to the coast where I was able to see a number of offshore oil rigs. It was pretty strange to be driving on a four lane highway only 100 metres or so away from the sea. We passed through a bunch of toll booths on the way (most of the major roads in China seem to be tolled) and at one we actually caused a big traffic jam. When you enter a highway you get a ticket, and you then hand over that ticket and pay your fee at the other end. We got up to the toll booth and were unable to find our ticket...which meant a bit of chaos while we frantically searched all over the car for it. Eventually we were told to reverse out of the line and allow the other cars to go through - there was an absolute storm of beeping going on when we pulled over to the side of the road to do some more searching. We ended up having to take apart part of the dashboard to find that the ticket had fallen through the compartment and gotten lodged in a hard-to-reach place. Not the best design!
Anyway, we finally arrived at the plant at around 10am - it was pretty nice, as far as steel plants go. I've been to three now (all in the top 10 biggest in China) and they're all pretty grimy and dirty. So it was quite different to see one that seemed pretty clean and had quite a nice layout with grassy plains, a pond and even a small stream flowing between the control building at the food plaza. I guess it's all pretty new which is why everything looked reasonably good, although the atmosphere was extremely grey and murky due to the masses of smoke being produced by all the smelting activities.
I spent the whole day on Thursday going through problems with the lead operator, and we then made our way to the closest town with a hotel - a good 40 minute drive away. The town was pretty small, and seemed to contain all of the dirt and grime that I was expecting to see in the plant itself. It was absolutely full of trucks carrying loads of dirt, concrete, steel, you name it. We stopped to fill up with petrol at one of the many petrol stations nearby (strange that there were so many in a small town and yet I rarely see any around Shanghai or Beijing) where I came across another local oddity - in China, you are not allowed to fill up your own car with petrol. We had to wait for one of the two attendants to get around to us after they had filled up all of the other waiting vehicles. I was going to say 'cars', but there were a couple of pretty strange looking vehicles getting refueled - an example of one is below:
Not sure I'd want to drive a vehicle where the fuel tank is directly in front of the steering wheel! The attendants carry cash around with them, so you don't have to go inside the station at all. However, with 4 pumps but only 2 attendants, it was a slow process. We were there for about 10 minutes and only a minute or so was spent actually putting the petrol into the car.
Friday brought more of the same - back to the plant, more investigation of problems...we fixed a few big ones but there's still a bunch to look into. Since the plant is so large, it needs a lot of staff to keep it going. A lot of these staff come from Beijing, but rather than commuting every day they arrive on site Monday morning, stay at accomodation on site until Friday, and then go back to Beijing for the weekend. Just after the lunch break a whole fleet of buses appeared - ready and waiting to take the eager employees back home to their families for the weekend.
Before I knew it it was 7pm and time to go. The other guys deemed it too late to drive back to Beijing at that point, so we made our way back to the small town and had a meal and a few beers. During this meal I did something I've never done before - I put ice cubes in my beer. In China when you ask for beer you need to specify whether you want it cold or at room temperature. When the weather is cold, Chinese people don't like drinking cold drinks. Therefore, I got a few surprised looks when I asked for a cold beer with dinner. They didn't actually have any beer in their fridges as they assumed noone would want to drink it, so their solution was to provide the room temperature bottles and a bucket of ice cubes with some tongs for me to use. It was a dilemma - warm beer or watered-down cold beer? I went with the ice cubes, and it was drinkable, although not exactly tasty.
We left for Beijing early Saturday morning, and after a bit of a wait at the airport and then some further delays in Shanghai waiting for luggage, I finally got back to my apartment by 6pm. Sometimes it's good to be back in Shanghai.
