Ciba: Day 6-8
I’m currently in my bed at the Mariott typing on my roommate, Britney’s, laptop. Actually, her mother’s. She’s already gone to sleep and the other roommate, Stephanie, seems to be watching tv (some weird version of the Wizard of Oz) on her TV. We have two TVs in the room, since we have three people. Two people get the two beds and one person gets the pull out couch. Chinese music is blaring through my earphones as I’m listening to “Tu Ran Lei Le” by JJ Lin. It’s 11:45 PM and I’ve been waiting to get online. The Internet’s extremely slow right now. I’ve been waiting around ten minutes and Facebook still hasn’t loaded, which is very disappointing. The Internet speeds up after midnight though, when people start to head off to bed and the hotel’s wireless service isn’t strained as much.
Anyway, these past three days, quite a lot has happened. It’s been tiring so that one day seems like one week rather than a day. Monday seems so far away already! And yesterday seems like weeks away! I’ll try to recount what happened. The most memorable thing is that I’m going to gain at least ten pounds by the end of this week….
On Monday, I arrived around 7:55 AM at Ciba. We were supposed to get there at 7:45 with our luggage, but my dad and I left late. I was the last one to get my breakfast and sit down. But, I didn’t really miss anything. It was only socializing time, and I don’t socialize in the morning. At around 8:20 AM, powerpoint lectures started. The first lecture was extremely long since it was an hour long lecture about the Ciba company and what Ciba creates. For example, we learned that Ciba creates additives in the pigments of red cars (if you see a red car, there’s an almost 100% chance that there’s a Ciba additive in there) and other stuff. I can’t really remember, because I was extremely tired and I believed a yawned quite a lot. But it wasn’t as bad as some other people who weren’t paying attention at all and was texting or doing some other inappropriate things…hehehe. (we got a little scolding about it that night…haha, and I also know someone who was playing games on his calculator during the lectures–he knew Ms. Roberts saw)
Following that presentation, we received a presentation detailing what our group project for the rest of the week was (we were divided into groups of 5 and we had to come up with a product and create a powerpoint presentation that was to be presented in front of a “board of investors”; the “board of investors” are pretty powerful people though, since the panel includes Ciba’s President and the Chief Financial Officer–a guy who takes care of affairs in Canada, United States, and Switzerland–and some other people). After that, we watched powerpoint presentations on the finance, communications, and legal parts of a company. All the presentations didn’t finish until 11:30 AM, after which we boarded a bus (happily) to go to Manhatten College for an activity.
Over there, we learned about environmental science. After lunch, we were divided into groups and each group had to come up with a filtering system to filter out clay water and blue dyed water. My team came in dead last! Hahaha! I found it very ironic, since my sister’s group won last year. After that, we returned to the hotel and put away out luggage (we received our room assignments and finally found out who our roommates were!). We quickly went back onto the bus to go out to eat dinner.
That night, we ate at this Italian Restaurant and there was A LOT of food. I am not joking when I’m saying that I only ate 1/3 of my course. There was bread, more bread, mozzarella sticks, and fried zucchinis for appetizers. Then, we had a salad course, and THEN we had our main course, which I had ordered this pasta kind of thing (it’s popular; I just forgot the name). I moved my food around my plate a lot to make it seem like I ate something…haha, almost everyone else did the same. There was just too much food and if you ate it all, you’d gain 10 pounds then and there. But, I couldn’t resist eating some dessert. I ate some chocolate and vanilla icecream, but I couldn’t finish that because there was just too much food!
When we came back to the hotel, we broke into our groups and got working on the projects. My group did pretty well, but then when we came to the financial portion, we decided to leave that off to another day. So, I went back to my room around 10, watched TV for an hour and a half, and then went to sleep.
Tuesday was the trip to Delaware. I woke up at 6:15 and then at 6:30, I went with Brittany for breakfast. I tried using the waffle maker, but it wasn’t ready yet, and there was no no-stick spray, so when my waffle was “finished,” it became deformed when I tried to rip it from the waffle maker. I did make hot chocolate, which I carried with me on the bus. I also got a bag of breakfast (that Ciba had asked the hotel to prepare), and we set off to Delaware at 7.
On the bus ride, I drank some hot chocolate, but then I didn’t want to drink anymore, so I put it into my bag. I wanted to sleep, too, because I was still tired (I’m definitely NOT a morning person) so I turned on my mp3 player, stuck the earphones in my ears, turned to my Chinese folder, turned on play, and then closed my eyes. Soon, I was asleep, but I woke at odd intervals to discover that my hot chocolate had spilled all into the bag (which I didn’t really care, since I was going to throw it out anyway) and my bagel was soaked in hot chocolate. To say the least, it was very nasty. But, I just went back to sleep.
Finally, I don’t know if it was 9 or 10, but we arrived at Ciba’s plant at Delaware. That day, we learned about pigments, inking, plastics, and spray on painting. My legs were killing me because standing around for 45 minutes each lecture isn’t fun. It’s really tiring and by the last lab place, if I just closed my eyes, I would’ve crashed onto the floor and fallen asleep. But, I made my eyes stay open. The spraying was fun…that woke me up a little. So as soon as we got onto the bus (around 3) to head back, I fell dead asleep.
On the ride back, we stopped at Harold’s Deli for dinner. It’s a GIANT restaurant, in that it serves GIANT food. The cakes are about 10 or so layers and each order is enough for 4 people! But then again, each order is at least $30. So, I ordered breaded flounder with fries for me, Brittany, and Michelle (but, Michelle also ordered something else, so she didn’t each much of the flounder). When the flounder came, I ate one (there were 5), some fries, and I was stuffed so full. But then, my table decided to order a slice of chocolate fudge cake. So, a few minutes later, this waiter came back with a slice of the giant cake! It was so tall, but he flipped it to its side and taught us how to slice it. You had to slice one layer at a time and then slice it in half again because it was so big. I ate a quarter of a slice (and only the cake portion–not the frosting with all the fudge).
Afterwards, my group didn’t want to do the project, so I decided to go swimming. Brittany and I went to the pool, but Brittany didn’t want to come in because she didn’t want to get her hair wet (she’s African American and she has a perm, so she said that when an African American gets a perm, they would have to dry it immediatly after washing it or else something happens. I don’t know…but she’s really tall, and the pool’s only 5 feet deep at the max, so she just walked back and forth across the pool. I found that funny. But, I wanted to do some laps to burn off the immense amount of calories I had put on, but Brittany wouldn’t race with me (I like racing in a pool because that always makes it fun; plus, ever since I was little, I always raced with Tina). So, in the end, I asked a boy at Ciba, Bryan, to race with me. He beat me…but I think it’s only because he’s about a head taller than me. So, quite frankly, it was an unfair race. But then, another girl, Angela came into the pool, and I talked with her a bit and asked if she wanted to race, but she wouldn’t swim much because she was wearing contacts (I was too) and she kept on saying how she would just have to close her eyes in water (yeah, that’s what I do when I have contacts on). But there was once, when I was swimming, for some odd reason I still can’t understand, I suddenly opened my eyes. I closed down really fast because I had contacts in my eyes and they were my only pair for the entire week! I wanted to wear them during graduation on Friday, so I really didn’t want to lose them. Luckily, when my head got out of the water and I was clinging to edge of the pool, my contacts were still in my eyes. I think that’s kind of amazing, but maybe that’s only because I really didn’t want to lose the contacts.
After half an hour more, I went back upstairs. I put on shorts before I went up over my swimsuit, but by the time I got to my floor, it seemed like I had wet my pants. Water was dripping down my legs so it looked kind of funny…. Yeah, at 16, still wetting pants. Great impression to make on other hotellers.
Today, I got up at 7:15 (the teachers told us they set a hotel alarm for 7:30, but it turned out to be 7:00) and I went down to eat breakfast at 7:30. Afterwards, we walkd over to the Ciba building (it’s only a block away) and we got split into groups to go around different labs. For our first lab, we went into this hair testing place. The people were testing formulas for hair products since it’s a giant industry: more than $50 billion dollars goes into hair products per year. So, we learned that without conditioner, hair is terribly hard to comb and it’s easy to tell if someone’s using conditioner because their hair would have a positive charge. I also learned that Asian hair is the strongest while black hair was the weakest because Asian hair is mainly composed of Para cells while black hair was composed mainly of the opposite cells (I forgot what they were called). My hair’s also really healthy, because the scientist took a strand of my hair and put it under this microscope. My hair’s very conditioned, even though I don’t use conditioner much. Haha! I guess these are one of the perks of being Asian.
Afterwards, we went to learn more about plastics and microscopy. I got really bored and tired. At the mircroscopy lab, I was so happy when there were seats that I could sit in. My legs were dead tired and everyone in my group ran for a chair. Finally, we went to eat lunch, after where we listened to a career panel (just a set of people from Ciba talking about their jobs and how they got there) and then we were split into four groups to do lab activities. We tested paper for pH and starch, did chromatography experiments in another lab (to make pretty designs…hehe), played with Shrinky-Dinks, and made blue crayons. We then went back to the hotel and at 6, we went to the hotel lobby because we ordered in pizza. I couldn’t finish my pizza slice because before, I had eaten something and I was pretty full.
Then, my group for the project decided to work and we worked until 9:20PM on the project! I hate the finance in the project! It took overly long…we kept on thinking too much into detail and I didn’t really care nor did I really understand, because the laptop screen was away from me (there were too many numbers that I really didn’t feel the need to go into, since this isn’t a graded project. There’s a difference in the amount of effort I put into projects depending on how important they really are–like, if I get graded, I would work my butt off every single second).
By the end of the project though, I got so bored so I started playing the paper football thing with David, a person in my group. But then, David and Megan started talking about track and they’re both really into it. I really only took track for one spring season at the end of eighth grade, so I’m not really big into it. I just stared and smiled (what else was there to do?).
Afterwards, I went to the pool. There was no one there except this kid (who was extremely annoying, because he kept on going all around the pool), so I swam laps. After about 10 minutes, these two old men came into the pool and acted like little kids. They jumped into the pool going “yahhhh!!!”. These aren’t ordinary men. They’re like 50 year old people with those dark spots only old people get and some wrinkly skin. It was kind of disturbing to me. Plus, no one is supposed to jump in a pool which has a maximum depth of 5 feet! It’s dangerous if not anything!
So, I got out of the pool, changed to other clothes (it seemed like I wet my pants again), and went to the exercise room. I went on the cycling machine for about 8 minutes but then I had to go because Ciba had a rule that we had to be on the fourth floor of the hotel by 10. So, I had to go back into my room.
Now, it’s 12:33 AM. I think the Internet got a little faster. I want to watch something…maybe I’ll finally get around to watching Twins Effect and learn some Cantonese besides “catch that rabbit!”