LUNCHTIME is my favorite part of the day. At 12:00 EVERYONE leaves the office and goes to the cafeteria. You stand on line and pick up plates of various foods. Everything is served in aluminum tins with aluminum chopsticks and aluminum spoons. This makes it seem like a prison line. Especially because the employees in the factory are required to wear full-body blue uniforms.
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To buy the food, you swipe your ID card at the register and it debits your prepaid account. The company subsidizes meals 50% so breakfast lunch and dinner end up costing me about 75 cents each. It reminds me of all the commercials you see that say "Do you know that 35% of the world population live on less than $3 a day?" Well, now that includes me. If you want to include rent and utilities it is about $6 a day.
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The exchange rate here works in my favor. The Chinese government has pegged the Yuan (or RMB) at 7.8 to each $1 USD. The average monthly salary here is somewhere around $300 - $400 USD for office-work. I went to KFC with a coworker and the most expensive meals cost about 24 yuan or slightly over $3 USD. This is fairly expensive for food because when I went out to a restaurant and treated 4 of my coworkers to dinner it cost me about $11.20. The dinner was in a good restaurant and included drinks. Therefore, fast food is not really the "cheap" alternative in countries such as China and Argentina.
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