Somehow, quite a long time has gone by between blog posts! It’s been an intense year or so work-wise. Hopefully things are calming down now and there’ll be a bit more space to talk about life here.
On a trip to a school construction site yesterday, I realised a long-held ambition to catch a glimpse of Huawei’s Ox Horn Lake campus in Dongguan, a lesser city bordering Shenzhen to the north. In contrast to just about all architecture for hundreds (thousands?) of miles around, the campus is not a glittering expanse of steel and glass, nor concrete, nor built in any more traditional Chinese style. Rather, it’s a collection of “villages”, each modeled on a different European city, complete with tram services between them.
It’s hard to articulate how strange and exciting it was, having not been back home for nearly two years, to see Christ Church, Oxford appear out of the blue by the side of the road. According to Wikipedia, the Germanic pile we spotted further on was a replica of Heidelberg Castle, and the tram is modeled on the trains that serve the Jungfrau Railway. The whole thing has the air of a film set or theme park, rather than the main research campus of one of the world’s largest communications companies.
It’s not open to the public, but apparently we are only two degrees separated from someone who works there, so perhaps a trip is not off the cards.
