Alan’s Blog

This weekend my two colleagues are heading off to China. I feel fortunate to have them accompany me in the past two weeks. We cook and do shopping together, so we can share the tasks, what’s more, the cost per person is really optimized. Now I need to learn living by myself again in the coming two months. The good news is I am heading to Holland in Xmas week. Yeehaa.

One of the things I really like about France and western Europe is this: nice steak.

I apologize it’s a bit small in this picture. The steak is the brownish looking meat in the middle plate. It’s really easy to prepare and quite tasty hehe:). I hope in the future I can also buy this kind of steak meat in China’s super market.

p.s. two of this size beef steak cost me 3.4 euros which is a bit less than 40 RMBs.

Before I write this week’s post, I want to explain my two previous posts in Chinese. I try to write as much content as I could in English for my blog, because I would like to be as international as possible. But occasionally (I think less than 10%) I will write a post or two in Chinese, since I am a Chinese person and I am proud of that heritage. So the post of First day in Caen was because it was my first day here in France, so I had many things to do, writing in Chinese allows me to quickly summarize things. The 2nd post of 1st Week in Caen, France is because I needed to address a sensitive topic in the post.

So to summarize, I am doing my best to keep this blog in English, so please subscribe or come back if you like it. Of course you are more than welcome to learn Chinese as thousands of international people are already doing it;).

A few food highlights of the week:

1. Baguette: the famous French Stick bread. Tastes much better here in the local bakery shop than the ones sold in Carrefour in China. My recommendation: buy a baguette from a bakery here in France, then walk home with it in your hand (apparently everybody does that here, sometimes people hold 2 baguette in their hands), only then you can declare you have been to France;).
2. Tripes à la mode de Caen： Yes! we found the butcher who sells the best Tripes à la mode de Caen in Caen (according to my dear colleagues here:)). The recipe is here. Fortunately, the tripes is already prepared. We only need to heat it at home and bon appetite! in Chinese it is the famous 卡昂牛肚. Hehe. Quite tasty, though my Chiense colleagues find the taste not strong enough.

It’s a busy day today. The recently hired general manager of my business unit visits China and gives us a town meeting. It took a bit longer than expected for round 200 employees to take a picture together with him. The town meeting turns out to be better than I expected. The major takeaway from the meeting is that I find out, surprisingly and believe it or not, great leaders (successful people) are believers. They all have something to believe in. It’s people, industry or certain technology that they believe. As for our general manager he spoke at length things he believes in. He believes in our CEO who hired him in the first place. He also believes that our company focusing too much in Europe and overlooked the opportunities in other places around the world. He believes restructuring doesn’t mean to cut back but to re-focus. I hope what he said it’s not just management talk. We will see how he walks his talk in the coming weeks. Once thing he promised he will be different from all his predecessors he mentioned was that he will make decisions quickly and he will rely on his people to make right decisions.

Bonus Picture: My crab rice:). I love cooking and I love innovative cuisines.

Saturday, home made spaghetti dinnerRecipe (everything minced)
Meat, Tomato, Onion, Carrot, Red pepper, Mushroom, Garlic, Shallot, Ginger. All bought from local market



And of course CHEESE! (from local Carrefour)