Long time no post. Not too much happening worth commenting on. Plus I was in the middle of finals for Mod 1 of the MAC program. That ended on the 10th of October and at 5am on October 12th I boarded a flight for Beijing to spend 11 days in China talking to executives and partners of huge multinational firms including the big four in accounting and GE.
The first 5 days were spent in Beijing, a city that I would describe as being nearly entirely under construction. Much of this recent fervor of expansion is due to the Olympics coming to town in 2008, and it will be truly amazing to see how much the city will have changed in the next 3 years. The other half of the trip was spent in Shanghai, which they say is "five years ahead of Beijing."
In actuality it is more like 15-20. Basically picture a cleaner more modern New York City that's probably twice as big in downtown metropolitan area, only with almost all Chinese people living there as opposed to just a hefty minority in NYC.
I'm not going to get into too many of the details of the trip in this post as I think I will instead post a few pictures and talk about various things we did over the next week (or weeks) as I remember them. To be honest I probably only got 40-50 hrs of sleep during the entire trip, including 2 completely sleepless nights to start off the trip (in hopes of becoming acclimated to the time change via complete exhaustion) and a total of 5 hrs of sleep for the last 3 nights in Shanghai largely as a result of late nights at the bars/clubs and early mornings at the office.
I got back at midnight on Saturday and went to bed around 3am and promptly overslept the next day. I jumped awake and looked at my clock to see 7:59 staring at me and I looked at my door and could see light coming from under it. So I walked into the hallway and saw Ward at his computer and thinking that it was 8am said, "dude, what are you doing up so early?" To which he responded, "uh, it's 8 man." Which I followed with, "Uhhhh..." and he quickly retorted, "at night." "Oh. Shit. Whoops."
Therefore there was no other choice but to call an audible last night and stay awake all night in an attempt to get me back on schedule tonight. So as you can imagine I'm quite jet lagged and my internal clock is entirely out of whack. As soon as things start to settle down, and I get my pictures, I will fill you in dear reader(s) on this amazing expedition.
China is great because they are balls out. Copyright Laws? Fuck that.
