Life as a Chinese Tourist

(Note: This documents a business trip I took to China in 2008. I thought it was "interesting" enough for me to post here. Enjoy.)

OK. I could also call this my China Vacation as Mike called it but think "Chevy Chase". Now this is rather long, but I recommend that you read it so that you can experience what I am experiencing over here while you are back, safe and sound, at your desk reading this. After all. I am on my second week in Asia, having spent the last week in Taiwan and weekend in Hong Kong. I deserve a little respect.

I've been in China for 2 days now. I had a very long day with a large manufacturer picking me up in HK on Monday.

I was all set and drove 1.5 hours, through HK customs and then China customs as I made my way to Shenzhen China.

It was great because this manufacturer sent a minivan to pick me up in HK. Turns out that Phil the VP that I was meeting with actually lives in HK.

After spending all day with Phil and the rest of the team, throughout the day they kept on asking me if I was interested in purchasing something. Maybe some DVDs or something. Well, after asking me several times if I wanted some, I agreed. OK. Lets go.

So I get whisked away to a small town outside of the factory where we snake our way through the streets, honking horns, almost running over people...

Amazing. They actually drive like this. There is no rhyme or reason. They ignore traffic lights, stop signs... whatever. It is really the wild wild west of the automotive age. They have perfected the use of the horn honking since they use it at every intersection or every time they are passing a car, bike, person walking, dog...whatever. They honk it at times just to make sure that it still works.

So we pull up to this shop and basically park the car. As I'm getting out, a car is honking his horn cause I'm in the way. No problem. I decide to kiss the van with my body so that I can let him by. That's when the fun begins. I go into this shop and we go through a back door behind the cash register. Oh. The secret room. So I go upstairs with Phil and Candace and here is another room that has the real stash of DVDs. Everything from Ironman that is now coming out to every WII game, PSP game...etc.

I then pick up my collection and we head downstairs to purchase the items at the cash register. Then it hits me. Why hide the stuff upstairs if you have to bring it back down to purchase it at the cash register right in open view?

So after buying $Y200 Yuan's worth ($26) I walk out of the DVD store into the car. On the way back, I ask to stop and get $Y100 (13 bucks) of a phone card so I can fill up my China Sim card. Good thing since I needed it for the calls I was going to get (more on that later). I get dropped off at the hotel and once I get checked in, my hosts leave promising that the driver will come back the next day at 8:30am to pick me up. No problem.

I check into my "non-smoking", smoking room and quickly turn on the air conditioner to air out the room and cool it down. It's hot. Even though I set the air conditioner on 70 degrees, it never really cooled down all night long.

I wake up the next morning to start my adventure; Actually my adventure started earlier than that. Much earlier at around 1:45AM with a phone call on my spanking newly filled up phone SIM card but that's another story.

So I wake up and get ready for breakfast. I go down to have breakfast. Searching for the eggs and such. No such luck. I find French toast (filled with peanut butter), cooked tomatoes (good), lettuce (salad for breakfast?), noodles (too early for that), and a bunch of other things that I would rather not describe.

I put spread on my French bread, thinking it was butter, and it turned out to be banana cream filling of some sort. Yuk. I had enough thank you very much.

So I go upstairs, get my stuff and check out. Waiting for my pickup. The driver shows up and takes me to the factory where we are dodging people like a pinball in a pinball machine.

I get to the door and nobody is there. I get my shoes (imagine doctor slippers that you get when you are going into the operating room) and go up 5 flight of stairs.

Normally, someone is supposed to be there at the guard's desk to walk me up the stairs but nobody is there. So I take my blue "ruby" slippers, put them on,and off I go up the stairs. I arrive to the "locked" door and pull out my trusty cell to call when all of a sudden, here comes Candace.

She opens the door and says that she is glad to see me.

So I spent the day with them and am told that I am going to the airport at 4PM for my 7PM flight. The driver is the same driver that has been schlepping me around for the past couple of days. Nice guy. Does not speak a word of English :-) So I notice that he decides to put on his seat belt as we are leaving the factory and I figure, time for more pinball. I put mine on as well.

The airport is 45 min away and after some more dodging, we get on the interstate (with tolls!) and get to the airport on time.

As I am getting dropped off, I decide to give the driver $Y100 smackers ($13 bucks) for all of his efforts over the past 2 days. He refuses and we play a game of take it/leave it/take it/leave it until I finally convince him to take my money. I say thank you and he watches me go into the airport. Cool. Plenty of time. Or so I thought.

I make my way to the counter and as I'm reading my Expedia paperwork to find my flight, I catch the note that says, confirm your flight 24 hours in advance. Oh crap. I go to the display board to find my flight. Since I'm a few hours early, I figure it is not on there. So I wait about 10 minutes and then the time shows up. No flight. What? Panic sets in. Ok. so I can do this, I walk over to the ticket agent and he says "can I see your passport?" and "sir, your flight has been cancelled but no problem. I put you on the earlier flight at 5:30. Good.

I look at my watch and it says 5:05pm. 25 minutes to get my ticket, check my bag, go through security, get to my gate... I don't even know where to begin. He says go to ticket booth 13 and you can get your new ticket and check your luggage. There is something both exhilarating and scary that happens. I like the challenge of trying to figure this out but at the same time I am really freaked out about missing my flight and not having an alternative way to get to where I'm going. It's 3 hours away!

OK. so I go to 13 and it is closed. 14 is open, and so is 12 but 13 is closed. 12 is for Biz Class, and 14 is economy and it has 7 people in front of me. I have an economy ticket so I just get into the economy line. I wait, wait, wait. and then my turn. No problem. I walk up to the ticket booth and look up. Guess what. I can't understand at all what it says. So I say, "yes, I was on a later flight but it was cancelled. the agent says I am now on this flight". "Can I see your passport?" Ok. NP.

So then I get my ticket and go through the guards and up to the screening station. Panic sets in again, when I have my bottle of water in my hand and there were 3 signs that I passed that said throw it out. So I give it to the security lady, give my notebook and walk through security. When I get to the other side of the x-ray, they decide that I look suspicious and want to check my bag. No problem. Nothing to hide. OH Crap. The DVDS! Oh yeah.

Wrong bag. They pull out every bit of junk in my briefcase (note to self - get rid of the crap in the briefcase) and run it again. No problem. I load up and off to my gate. Wait. What gate am I at?

I can't interpret this ticket. Can't find my gate. Can't see the flight number on the board. OK. Someone helps me and then I look. There it is.

Plain as day. It magically appeared. Gate 36. I go to gate 36 and when I get there it is 5:30 on the dot.

No problem. But no plane. OK I have time to call Emmy cause she has arranged for me to have a pickup at 10PM. But I get there at least an hour earlier. So I have to call her. I dial the phone number from my trusty cell phone (good thing I got that SIM card) and ring, ring, ring, disconnect. Try again. Same result.

OK, I have to get a hold of her somehow. So I try her office line. They don't have voice mail! After several rings, disconnect. Let me see. Maybe the airport has Wi-Fi? OK so I pull out my lap top and behold. Wi-Fi. And Free as well!

So I quickly burst out an email to Emmy and tell her about my flight change. About 10 minutes later, as I finished chomping on a granola bar and loading on a shuttle bus to my plane, the phone rings. It's Emmy. She got my message. No problem, she will contact the driver. Whew. Problem resolved.

So I board my plan and it is a mad rush off of the shuttle bus. Everybody merges like 50 people rushing to the plane and then it goes to a single file at the agent getting the ticket again. Imagine seeing 50 cars side by side merging onto a single lane highway. What, no passport? I'm offended. So I get on the plane and get settled in. We take off.

As we are climbing to 25K feet, I start to think, cool. I can see the great wall of China. I start thinking Mulan and stuff and then it hits me. What if they play pinball up here as well? Oh crap. I'm gonna die. After a while, I relax. No problem. The captain is actually really good.

Note: For those of you that have never been to China, it is smoggy, due to all of the cars and population. Do you know what it looks like at 25K feet?

THE SAME THING. I can't see a thing. So much for my great wall experience.

So, here I am on the plane, eating what I'm being told is "beef" and heading to Tianjin to get picked up by another driver that doesn't speak a lick of English so I can get dropped off at my hotel. It's a holiday inn this time and I am sure that they have a no smoking room. Yeah right. Just wondering what my adventure will look like next.

That concludes my first 36 hours of China. Stay tuned.

(Note: For what it is worth, I had a guilty conscious about the DVD's I bought so I ended up trashing them in the hotel basket before I checked out. It was definitely not worth the hassle nor the risk of getting stopped at Customs for it. But it was definitely an interesting experience.)

But I’ll be dead!

Today, I decided to go over my parent’s house with my son Nick to help them put up their Christmas tree.  So I walk into the house and immediately say, “OK, I’m here to put up the Christmas tree”.  To which my dad immediately responds with a grunt.

Mom say’s “I wonder where it is?”.  Of course, I know it is in the garage and tell her so.  Dad repeats that as well.

I go to the garage with Nick and give him the Christmas tree that is stored in a box.  I then give mom a box with a Santa in it, then one with an angel and then one with Mrs. Claus.   On the way back into the house, mom asks where has she placed the tree ornaments.  She see’s a box, which I know is not it, since all it has in it is wrapping paper.  She confirms what I already know when she opens it up.  However next to the box, is a small plastic shopping bag wrapped up.  I think to myself, I am sure those ornaments are really in good condition, considering they have been in the garage all year, next to Dad’s tools, his car, and of course, the pathway to the house!

We walk into the living room and when I open the box, there is a black widow in it!  I immediately tell them to step away.  Mom runs into the kitchen and comes back with a broom.  I asked her why she did that and she says so that I can kill the spider.  Ok.

So I take the box out to the garage and empty the box.  I look and look and cannot find the spider.  I then take the tree, which is in two pieces and then start to lift it up and down and bang it on the garage floor to see if I can shake the spider out.  I drop it a couple of times and still can’t find the spider.  I continue this but really cannot see because the light in the garage is pretty dim.

Mom shows up with a flash light.  I ask dad if he has any bug spray and mom comes back with a spray bottle of Clorox house cleaner.  To which I exclaim “Clorox?  what do you want me to do, bleach the spider?”  Mom says, I can’t find the bug spray.  Dad of course, then interjects and says, “It’s right next to you.”  I pick it up, and start spraying the tree with bug spray.  I spray and spray and little by little, I expand the limbs of what really is a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. 

I can’t find the spider for the life of me.  So we bring the tree back in the house and continue setting it up.  Once I finish putting it together and expanding the limbs, not that you can really tell I did that part, mom unwraps the bag with ornaments so that she can put them on the tree.  I tell dad that the tree has a very nasty smell.  He comes back a few minutes later with a can of aerosol spray.  He starts to fumigate the tree and trust me, if the spider was not dead by now, I am sure that did the trick :-)  I have never smelled a Christmas tree that was covered in pineapple/coconut.

Mom and dad then begin to decorate the tree with the ornaments.  If you call them that.  I don’t think there was a complete set of anything.  Mom then finishes and ends up with 3 ornaments that are missing the hook to place them on the tree.  She says “uh oh, I don’t have any more hooks”. Dad says “throw them away.”  She responds, “why?  I’ll just use them for next year.”  Dad responds, “Your going to have the same problem next year!.”

It’s time for me to go home so I say to my mom, “if you get bit by the spider, let me know as soon as possible!”.  To which mom responds, “If I get bit, I’ll be dead!”.

My Excellent Adventure

These are the chronicle’s of Kevin (my business partner) and my trip to Asia.

Let us begin….

….A long long time ago, approximately 2 weeks ago, Kevin and I started our world wind trip to Asia.
We first took a detour to San Diego for a wireless conference and that is where it began.
About 40 minutes into our cross continent 5 hour flight, it happened. Specifically, it happened in seat 34E, a row in front of Kevin and two in front of me.

Just as we are getting really cozy with the overgrown galoots taking up more than their fair share of seat space, we were overcome, not with Joy, but Joy’s presence.

You see, it appears that some people have difficulty with either flying, or with a certain type of food. What this lady ate, is beyond all of us. But, the smell was so bad, that the young mother, with her 14 month old infant next to me, who both were sound asleep, woke up in alarm, squinted her eyes, and immediately proceeded to pick up her baby from her lap, smell her bottom, to see if she was the unfortunate creature to have had an accident. That is when I quickly told her that the smell was coming from in front of us. To Kevin’s surprise, the guy next to him asked him if he was the one that produced such gut wrenching smell. All fingers were pointing to him actually.

But, that is when the bells above the ceiling started to go off by the person in 34D who began to immediately send an SOS signal to the flight attendants about the emergency.

It is impossible to evacuate a plane in mid-air so the flight attendants did what they could. They put on masks, gloves and proceeded to clean up the mess from the lady that was apparently leaving residue down the aisle. Needless to say, the rest of the trip, we were trying to see if we can break the windows to get some air or trigger the air masks to come down.

After the long, and I mean long, flight there, we get to the San Diego airport and walk out to the car shuttle bus area. That is when we find out that the car company we used for our rental closed its door, about an hour before we landed. The next time the counter would be open, was at 5AM. It was almost 1. We hailed the first of what would be many taxis.

The next morning I woke up with a severe chest congestion. I am sure it was all of the “crap” I was breathing on the plane. Had several great days in San Diego with a ton of meetings, back to back. Pretty good food as well even if we had to cook our own meal at one point, at the “strip club”. No it is not what you think. Only in California would you pay for the privilege to cook your own meal at a restaurant. Needless to say, for those of us that know our grilling skills, we had to go back several times to cook it because it was undercooked the first time and then burnt the last time.

It was then time to leave beautiful, warm, San Diego to make our journey to Hong Kong. We flew from San Diego to LAX. As Kevin got familiar with the Heathrow airport map as we are arriving in LA, just in case we were redirected I guess, we realized that the fun part of our journey was just beginning and the “crap” was behind us. Wait, what if the same thing happens on the flight to Hong Kong. OMG. Instead of 4 hours, 14 hours! Think positive. Think positive.

So we board the plane and are immediately told that it is packed. They’re not kidding. Within minutes, everybody is falling asleep and I am tossing and turning. Uncomfortable as heck, crammed into a seat next to a guy that appears to be practicing the jitterbug or something. That darn leg did not stop moving all flight long. You don’t know the restraint I had, not to put my hand on it and yell STOP!

We arrive, 14 hours and 40 minutes + 3 movies & 2 meals, if you call them that, later in Hong Kong. Wow. It’s 5:50AM. We are tired and we have ALL DAY to stay awake. That is when we check into our, absolutely comfortable, and, cough, cough, spacious room.

I think my bathroom at home has more square footage than these accommodations.

Next day we were off to China where we played laser tag. OK, we were tagged and could not tag back, with Chinese immigration. They are so concerned about the Swine flu that they hold up what look like stun guns to your head to take your temperature. Kind of interesting when you consider that the last time, they were the ones responsible for the global epidemic. No problem this time. All of the birds are gone! No kidding. In the 4 hours going back and forth, we did not see a single bird!

During our meeting in China with the company we were visiting, there was this nagging question that was constantly being asked by our host. “Do you have to go to the washroom?” You see, Candace, our host, is apparently very conscious about our physical well being. She complained to her boss, that it has been several hours and we had not gone to pee. It was almost like an infatuation but pretty funny at the same time. Finally, after the 3rd time, we gave in to her demands and obliged. Show us the men’s room we proclaimed. Where we were whisked away to another building where the lights were completely off, and we had to find our way until we got to the bathroom. Actually, China was uneventful. We then spent the rest of the afternoon getting lost in Hong Kong. Really, we knew where we were, we just did not know how to get back ;-). It is also not polite to ask so we didn’t.

Hong Kong is interesting though. You get to see some great architecture:

As well as leading edge materials used in building construction:

Yes, that is bamboo used for scaffolding. Hmmm. Doesn’t bamboo rot as well in bad weather? What do they use to keep it together, straw or shoestrings?

And some fantastic places to shop for food/snacks.

Dried squid and other sea life forms. Yum.







Couple of other meetings in HK and we were off to Taiwan for an adventure.

We arrive in Taipei in the wee hours. Ok, it was about 9PM and we take the high speed train to Taichung. Very cool. We travel at about 183 mp/h.

We get off and start looking for a taxi. Some guy yells taxi and we said yes. He says, “follow me”. We start to follow him and the spider sense in us says “something is not right here”. We turn around and go down another escalator till we find the right yellow taxi line. Boy - that was close. Definitely could have been the next statistic. We wonder if the stories, of people waking up in bathtubs of ice missing a kidney with a note attached to their necks, is true?

We get to our hotel and it is nice. Much bigger than the previous one, and this one, with a view.

We schlep around in other taxi’s getting to and from our meetings then head off to another part of Taipei the next day. We made changes to our hotel reservation so we can stay closer to our next meeting point. We got another room with another view.

What the heck is this stuff growing around the window?











Our last meeting is in Taipei. Here is the address we followed:

Even the Taxi driver who took us to the place, could not figure out how to get there. We walked around a couple of blocks, asking everybody we ran into to tell us. All they said was, go right down the street, straight ahead. After we walked around the entire block and then some, we finally walked into a building and someone came out with us to take us to the building. Down another alley. Finally, we got there. Our hosts were actually surprised we figured out how to get there. And then followed up to say, it is easy. We are near the train station. Let me see. We got that part!

OK. So we met with our hosts and then we head back to our hotel.
Along the way, we got to see some additional sites in Taiwan.  We got to see a river:

Hmm. I wonder if this is why Kevin said, “don’t drink the water!”









Some more mopeds:

And a place where you can take off your shoes and just go for a walk.

What the heck???!?!?!?!?

All in all, it was a very productive and enlightening trip. We are glad to conclude it and come back home, though Kevin can’t wait to come back next month….

Here are some tidbits and facts to be aware of:

Number of planes we have been on: 8
…trains: 2
…taxi cabs: stopped counting after 15
…buses: 3
…hotel rooms: 4, how many were bigger than our breakfast area at the office, 3.
…airports: 9
… meetings: too many to count.

What is just as interesting are the number facts for things that we really did not see.

Number of dogs on the entire Chinese leg: 1 – in Taiwan, scratch that, we just saw another, but it looked like it was on its last legs. This could explain why … We saw this while looking around for a restaurant one night!

Number of cats: none!
Number of birds: 2, flying about as fast as an F14 trying to avoid a Russian Mig.

Things we learned – aka useful tips for Mike and Ross when they get to Asia ;-)
1) Windex can also be used as a hand cleaner/sterilizer.
2) Even the Taiwanese do not like the look of a 1000 year old egg.

3) You cannot assume that all hotels are the same. Some hotels have a reservation’s desk on the 4th floor but the restaurant is on the 1st.
4) Everybody in Taiwan is concerned about the flu. It is not an invasion of privacy to have your temperature checked before getting seated for dinner! It is a little bit embarrassing to overanxiously drop your pants in the process though.
5) There is a shortage of mattresses in Taiwan so they have made up for it with doubling up on box springs.
6) It doesn’t matter how much room you may think you have or not have in a 2 lane road @ a stop sign. There is always room for one more moped.

7) In Taiwan, they won’t accept credit cards for payment, if the charge is only $1.86. They just laugh and say “No. It’s cheap.”