Beijing & Suzhou
About
This collection is special to me. China has always had a special place in my heart. This collection follows my journey to Beijing for a consulting project as part of my graduate program. During this experience, another opportunity came up: a sustainability conference in Suzhou, which was held only weeks later. Having a reason to visit China is rare and these show all the beautiful moments captured on film.
Shot on Olympus XA
Part 1: The GCL Project
View from the Wiseasy Office
Wiseasy POS Terminals
Outside the Wiseasy Office
I was assigned a company in China, (yay I didn’t minor in Mandarin for nothing) and we were tasked with helping them research the global payment trends for the future. This company, Wiseasy, makes point-of-sale terminals and then sells them to customers. Kinda random, but that’s how it works. For the next three weeks, this was our office.
Meet The Crew: Ella (Yung Chieh) Chang, Annie Roan & Isabel Aluzzi
When you get thrown into a group project, usually, it’s really annoying. Questions come to mind such as, can I trust them? Are they hard workers? Will they do the work? Thankfully, these wonderful people were all on the same page. We are there to work and also check some cool things out while in Beijing. Annie Roan and Ella Chang are both Taiwanese students who come from the same university in Taiwan as part of a 1+1 program. They get a master's at Thunderbird, then return to Taiwan and finish a thesis, and get another master's. Isabel Aluzzi is a bay area that is head-through and through. She is from Livermore, where her parents work at the Lawrence Livermore Labs, we stan, she’s a homie.
Beijing Views and Encounters
Great wall (duh), Tiananmen Square (I hope nothing happened here in May of 1989), Summer Palace, Beihai Park.
Special Guest, Forest (like Forest Gump). One night we went to get dinner at a Japanese place across the street from our office, we assumed it would be a normal dinner with the Taiwanese girls ordering for us. Yet, this night was different and there our server started speaking to us in English. It was obvious that he was trying to learn and made such a great effort to practice with all of us.
Part 2: Bridge of the Future
During my time in Beijing, Thunderbird alumni in our WeChat group asked us if anyone wanted to go to Suzhou as part of a sustainable development program in about two weeks after GCL ended. In his message, he said to fill out a Word document and send it back to be accepted, and once accepted, they would help me get a flight booked back to China, all paid for by the program. I was initially skeptical as all communication was done through WeChat, and I could not find any information on the web about the program's name.
A few days after submitting the Word document via WeChat to the Alumni, I was accepted and put into another group chat with the head of the program to book my flight. They said they were still looking for Americans and I said I knew someone else, this someone else was my identical twin brother Parker. With that, I had him get WeChat and join our group chat, and they also booked him a flight so we could go to Suzhou, China. The crazy turn of events was a state-sponsored trip to learn about the sustainability development goals Suzhou had achieved.
The City of Suzhou
Suzhou City Center
Tongli Energy Town
Nike Wind Turbine
People From the Program
During the program, we met a few other Americans who all happened to already live in Suzhou or elsewhere in China. We all got to joke around and spend time together as we were shipped from each location to learn more about the sustainability practices in Suzhou.
