“After lunch, most of us went across the street to have a massage at a kind of shabby center and were tortured more or less to get rid of our tensions and other problems.”
The woman at the shabby center had some mean knuckles but I’m feeling pretty good as I start blogging after 11 pm. For those of you who said, “I bet Dan’s making up that quote,” and clicked on the link, in order to find it you’ll have to go quite a ways past passages like this:
“Thiago had a very bad headache for days and I did not sleep at all (because I was feeling awfully sick at night), so we were exhausted and did not have a clue how to stop this demanding horror.”
Tomorrow Tom and I have our first presentation to our client. Suffice it to say, our experience has been nothing like this.
Our presentation will be to approximately 200 business students at HEUEB, and among other things we’ll be describing compensation structures in the US and Germany. This is neither of our specialties. Perhaps if it were we’d have figured something out and would be retired by now. But it meant that this week entailed a lot of research. I have one question to all of the old people reading this blog: what in the world did you do before the Internet?
If you are anything like me, you sat around sweating profusely and cursing the network. On Wednesday afternoon, Tom and I spent a sweltering afternoon in the IBM Shijiazhuang office. They are in the process of moving to nicer digs, so things were a bit crowded. In four hours I was able to get about two presentations downloaded from IBM’s intranet (w3), once got Google Hong Kong to come up (couldn’t actually complete any searches), and nearly permanently burned the image of the Firefox download status bar into both of my eyes. Hat tip to social software, as IBM Connections turned out to be the only productive path for finding and downloading a bit of useful information. The people at the office were great, but I left convinced that despite never having seen Layne Staley in concert I don’t want to go back to the 1990’s ever again.
At the hotel, I’m not sure where I’ve gone back to. Accessing the Internet is a different experience in China, you might say. I suspect that most of you have been closely watching the post times of my blog, and have therefore deduced that I rarely post anytime other than late at night. Ok, that isn’t really different from when I do anything, but we typically can’t access non-Chinese websites from around 8:30 am until late afternoon. So during those times we either build slides or walk up and down the halls asking each other what has become the theme of our trip: “Is the Internet working?”
Or, as in Tom’s and my case on Wednesday morning, we visit the University. There we met with Pau and Jack and learned how properly to drink tea, albeit out of a Dixie cup. Four key elements make up the tea experience. First, one must note the frame of the tea. I guess this means you look at it. Second, one must enjoy the scent of the tea. It’s requiring tremendous restraint not to launch into a four paragraph tangent on the scents I’ve encountered over the past week in Shijiazhuang and particularly during yesterday’s trek into the countryside. Third, one must appreciate the water. I’m not sure if you do more than appreciate it, but since you can’t drink the tap water around here it is something to appreciate. And fourth, one must be enchanted by the dancing of the tea leaves. This is especially important in order to plan which side of the cup to raise to your mouth so you avoid getting tea leaves stuck in your front teeth where they’ll undoubtedly remain for several hours while others laugh at you.
You’ll notice I haven’t used the term “demanding horror” in my description of the week. Our meeting with the client was so pleasant that every time we asked a question or offered a suggestion, we got a smiling, “Whatever you think, it’s ok,” in response. Perhaps this is an ideal way to set up some anticipation for what happens when we present tomorrow.
Jack: not Sue's client
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