By Julian Leal

My name is Julian Leal, I am 24 years old and I am working in EMERALD (SINOCHEM) in Bogota Colombia. Since I entry to work to EMERALD I really like this Company very much, I found a lot of interesting things. And this is my Story in Emerald:

I begun to work in April of this year and I found some things very interesting that I want to share. For me is very easy to understand Chinese Culture because I lived in china for almost 2 years, and I speak a little Chinese as well. My major is industrial engineering but I study Chinese like a hobby, and is hobby that has been very helpful to communicate with Chinese people here in EMERALD.

I have also the opportunity to make a good friendship with my Chinese bosses:

In this Company at the beginning we didn’t have our company name in Chinese and this is very confusing because some of our Chinese customers can´t read any English so they get confuse when they come here, they ask : is this “ Zhong Hua”? And the girl in the front desk doesn’t know what to answer because ”Zhong Hua” is SINOCHEM and when you pronounce it you said Zhōng huà so the girl of the front desk get confused and our customer get confused to.

Another interesting thing is that in Colombia we call a problem CHICHARRON and it means the skin of the pork, (something like beacon) but in Colombian context it means a problem and not something to eat, so sometimes my Chinese colleagues get confused as well with this kind of idioms that doesn’t have any translation in a dictionary, only a Colombian can get it.

Another interesting thing is that my Chinese colleagues doesn’t like Colombian food, so when is lunch time they don´t go to regular restaurant because they don’t like the restaurant around our office, so the go together to an apartment near our office to cook some delicious Chinese food maybe some “Kung Pao Chiken” that is a wrong translation in English but this is how we are understanding your culture, sometimes good and sometimes not that good .

But step by step our culture and Chinese culture is getting mix, now we can say HELLO, Hola and ”Ni Hao” and we are very happy about this, because we are learning not only about petroleum business in China but also about Chinese culture, Chinese people drink tea and we drink coffee but at the end both of them are hot drinks.

So we really like the idea to work in a Chinese company and we are producing petroleum with Chinese influence and this is very interesting because we are working together because we are a team, and if we have any communication problem we will solve in order to maintain transparency in our company, and in the day by day we are also friends each other, now is a matter of team work in order to make this company big and good, because big doesn’t mean good small doesn’t mean bad, so we want that emerald can be Big and good but is a goal that only can be achieved working you and me.