Good morning, all. Got up early today (6:something!) to wrestle with our Internet connection and link to the outside world in order to post to the team blog here in my more subdued and refined tone. Professional Manager Tom and I will be spending some time with students at HEUEB today in preparation for our next major “lecture” (I’ve told Tom to play up the German accent a bit more and try yelling at them, but he’s only agreed to teach them a few helpful phrases such as, “Can I get your phone number?” in German), which takes place on Monday.
You might also want to read Tom’s unedited version here, in which he and/or Google translations calls me a “womanizer.” I think this is a poorly translated way of saying that women in China find my nose utterly fascinating, and therefore frequently point at me while laughing.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Happy Birthday Maya
In this file photo, Mikey strangles Maya at Maverick's
May 23 is Maya’s birthday. She’s 12. I’ve been accused of missing her more than anyone else while here in China. That’s probably not true. I guess it might be true, but if it were I certainly wouldn’t say so on this blog.
The other night while headed to a dumpling dinner our crew came across the Samoyed pictured below. In the universe of Samoyeds I think this one looks more like Maya than most, so it was a nice moment for me to remember her while Tom took pictures and Thiago goaded the dog into barking at all of us. (It must have been a female dog, because Thiago has been getting that reaction from all the girls in China.)
The other night while headed to a dumpling dinner our crew came across the Samoyed pictured below. In the universe of Samoyeds I think this one looks more like Maya than most, so it was a nice moment for me to remember her while Tom took pictures and Thiago goaded the dog into barking at all of us. (It must have been a female dog, because Thiago has been getting that reaction from all the girls in China.)
Shijiazhuang's version of the Iditarod
As we were seated at the restaurant my mind wandered. I wonder how Maya’s doing. I miss having her distract me from work by throwing her stuffed Athlete’s Foot toy at me in the office. I hope now that Kristy’s home she’s stopped pooping in the house (let me be clear: “she” refers to Maya in the previous sentence). I thought it would be good to come back to reality in order to specify that we’d like our beer to be served cold when I noticed that Tom was trying to order dog meat dumplings.
“No way, dude.”
“Come on, we have to try things while we’re here!”
“This isn’t a good time.”
“It’s not your dog!”
At that moment an extremely drunk older local sidled up to our table to try and tell us a joke in English. Being a boat racer, my usual reaction when a drunken old dude appears is to pull a chair closer to him because it’s gonna be a good one. But it was clear that Susanna, our Canadian colleague who speaks a bit of Mandarin, was getting uncomfortable. The guy started to insist that she translate the more difficult passages of the joke. As Carlos cleared the Lazy Susan of the beer bottles, I began to scan the room for a restaurant employee who could escort this guy out. But I saw only frightened young waitresses.
Then Tom stood up. “Enough!” he bellowed, but this word must not have been part of the joke because the guy appeared not to have the slightest idea what it meant. An intense stare-off ensued. Tom was staring at the guy, eight of us were staring at Tom, and the guy was not really capable of staring at any one thing at all, so he sort of stood there and swayed before asking Susanna again if she could translate the joke.
Thankfully the man’s friend dragged him away, and we celebrated Tom’s heroism by ordering pigs’ ears. What was served looked like multiple floor plans of an incredibly intricate oval-shaped labyrinth, with cartilage used to indicate the vast majority of passageways and important rooms where treasure might be found. The consensus was that they weren’t that bad.
I think in my family from here on out we’ll leave the pigs’ ears to Maya.
She would gladly eat them
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Senses
[Note: am posting this hastily as it's the first time in days that I've been able to access the blog from over here. And it's slow... Will update with pictures later if I can. Note that any references to "today" in the below are actually about 4 days ago, if it matters to you. Update: pictures! Thank you IE6 (yeah, I know...).]
China is an all-out assault on one’s senses. Everything is at a level of intensity rarely encountered in the daily life of a mild mannered work-from-home-in-Northern-California fellow, even one who occasionally races powerboats, yells at the TV during Raider games, and loves Alice in Chains.
The most obvious day-to-day example is the way that traffic patterns work. There are no discernable patterns. It’s every person for his or herself. I’ll give an example. When the light turns green, the oncoming traffic that wants to turn left just turns left. If you are going straight, you honk at them and jam your way in between two of the left-turning cars. If you are walking across the street you just walk part way so you don’t get hit by the first left-turning car, and then you hurry the rest of the way across in parallel with one of the cars going straight that found a gap. And if a bus is involved, forget about it. The most useful thing I’ve observed thus far is that buses don’t stop. If a bus is coming, just get the hell out of the way.
China is an all-out assault on one’s senses. Everything is at a level of intensity rarely encountered in the daily life of a mild mannered work-from-home-in-Northern-California fellow, even one who occasionally races powerboats, yells at the TV during Raider games, and loves Alice in Chains.
The most obvious day-to-day example is the way that traffic patterns work. There are no discernable patterns. It’s every person for his or herself. I’ll give an example. When the light turns green, the oncoming traffic that wants to turn left just turns left. If you are going straight, you honk at them and jam your way in between two of the left-turning cars. If you are walking across the street you just walk part way so you don’t get hit by the first left-turning car, and then you hurry the rest of the way across in parallel with one of the cars going straight that found a gap. And if a bus is involved, forget about it. The most useful thing I’ve observed thus far is that buses don’t stop. If a bus is coming, just get the hell out of the way.
A game of Frogger begins
Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for the horn. It is past 11 pm here and in the time it took me to write “horn,” I heard two horns honk. Every morning I wake up a bit after 7 to excessive use of the horn by local drivers. (This morning I actually woke up at 6:30 to fireworks, multiple explosions, or gunshots, but in any case I always fall back to sleep). Our Indian colleagues are entirely unimpressed by such local traffic habits. My colleague Shruti explained it nicely when she said that in Western cultures, horns are a sign of aggression. In the East they are just helpful warnings that you are about to be crushed under a large steel object that is likely to drag you several blocks until your disintegrating carcass is knocked loose, where feral animals will eventually pick clean your unrecognizable skeleton.
One thing I rarely pick clean around here is my plate, mainly because you can buy a plate of food that would feed four for about $3, but also because everything is so flavorful and covered in spices that you just can’t go on. Don’t get me wrong, the food is fantastic. Even the “Trumpet She’ll Flesh” that Tom and I ate the other night (at that link you’ll see me both presenting and “getting in the zone” for presenting) was edible, and as far as we can tell that’s some sort of snail that lives in the sea (i.e., a mollusk, but “snail that lives in the sea” is much more fun to say). But it is intense. In my ongoing effort to eat Dan Dan Noodles as often as possible (Admittedly, I’ve had them only three times. Twice they were quite good. Once I’m about to explain.), we visited a nearby Sichuan restaurant with the team. Sichuan is sort of the Texas of China. Ok, I totally made that up but food from the Sichuan province is friggen spicy, as I learned with my first bite of noodles. It was really a bowl of chili oil with noodles lurking somewhere under the surface. Before I finished chewing the first bite I ordered two of the coldest item they had in the restaurant. Thankfully this was beer.
As the fourth glass of beer (for the record, they use really small glasses around here) evaporated on my scalding tongue, the rest of the team started taking pictures of me while laughing heartily. My face was redder than my red shirt, which was more red than usual due to the fact that it was soaked through with sweat. When I started to lose my hearing a little bit I set down my chopsticks. “I can’t go any further. Mukul?”
Mukul took a bite and said, “The noodles are not spicy. The lamb is spicy.” These Indians are really difficult to impress. I took a bite of the lamb that was about the size of the point of a ball point pen and I didn’t think it was that spicy. Actually, it tasted like taco seasoning.
On most days you can quite literally taste the Shijiazhuang air. It has a tannic, almost gritty taste like the aftertaste of too strong tea. There is dust everywhere, like the Central Valley of California if you picked it up, turned it upside down, shook it for about two weeks, and then placed 20 massive coal-fired power plants onto Highway 99. To keep down the dust, Shijiazhuang employs a highly entertaining method that I’m sure would fund itself if they would charge a few RMB for foreigners to have access to the schedule. A water tanker truck drives down the street at full speed, water spraying in every direction from underneath. Cars swerve out of the way. Pedestrians run for cover. Scooters take off in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of the spray. Meanwhile, the driver, as is the local custom, just honks the horn incessantly and never breaks his pace. I’d like to think he laughs maniacally but he probably is just bored. The bicyclists, however, are the ones who are worth the price of admission. To see a bicyclist’s face when recognizing the water tanker’s horn is to see fear in its purest form. It’s a moment of utter panic, followed by a frantic search for an escape route, seldom found easily on the streets of Shijiazhuang. Watching one man swerve hopelessly until careening into an alley and half falling from his bike, I began to wonder just how many bicyclists these guys kill every night.
You might taste the dust, but it is not usually what you smell. That honor is fought for by thousands of aggressively competing smells best appreciated when walking through a street market at lunchtime. Onions, bread, chili, exhaust fumes, some crazy spices, BO, they hit you in waves. It’s similar to when you are driving a boat across a lake and you suddenly hit a real cool spot, only here you just keep hitting a new smell. With each breath you’re not sure whether your reaction will be, “Ooh, where are they cooking that?” or “Did I just fall head first into a porta potty?” or something in between.
Deep breaths
Our guy cooks a mean sandwich
Despite all of the adventures on the street, I actually spend a significant amount of time seated at my desk in my hotel room in front of my laptop, fighting to get onto the Internet in order to do the proper research needed to build good presentations for my client (yes, or blog…). It’s well known that accessing the sites so popular in other parts of the world can be a challenge from China. Last Friday I noticed a new sound coming from the streets outside my window. It was a chant being played over a loudspeaker that sounded like an insane aerobics instructor or a highly amped up rapper practicing one line for two hours straight. As it wormed its way into my brain the walls of my small and “less than US business standard” room seemed to move a little closer, and I imagined it to be a repeated warning from some authority not to visit Google properties. Over the hours the sound evolved from intriguing to annoying to unsettling.
Today I happened to walk by one of the source machines for this noise. It was yelling at the world to buy meat on a stick.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Diverting Traffic
At first glance many of you will say, “Finally, a post of reasonable length.” At second glance you will see that I’m sending you elsewhere to read quite a lot more.
One bit of reading material is my inaugural post on the team blog. I have a lot of trouble avoiding editorial comments, tangents, embellishments, sarcasm, etc. so my ratio of personal blogs to team blogs now stands at 16:1. But given the absolutely incredible day we had at the client on Monday, I thought it was a good time to drone on endlessly somewhere else.
The second is to a team intro post by Mukul, of “Club Mukul” fame, on his personal blog. There you will find the nose that makes Chinese girls lose control. Through the magic of photography, Mukul somehow made my chin disappear. Too many Dan Dan Noodles, perhaps? I recommend this blog if you’d like another good view of the experience in Shijiazhuang.
Enjoy.
One bit of reading material is my inaugural post on the team blog. I have a lot of trouble avoiding editorial comments, tangents, embellishments, sarcasm, etc. so my ratio of personal blogs to team blogs now stands at 16:1. But given the absolutely incredible day we had at the client on Monday, I thought it was a good time to drone on endlessly somewhere else.
The second is to a team intro post by Mukul, of “Club Mukul” fame, on his personal blog. There you will find the nose that makes Chinese girls lose control. Through the magic of photography, Mukul somehow made my chin disappear. Too many Dan Dan Noodles, perhaps? I recommend this blog if you’d like another good view of the experience in Shijiazhuang.
Enjoy.
The fish was so big it wouldn't fit the frame
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Some Other Happenings
Taking a break from writing up my speaker notes for today’s presentation to fill in a few blanks of what went on in Shijiazhuang last week. Tom just stopped by to say he’s starting to feel the nerves in advance of being on stage in front of 200+ people. I told him if he screws up, he can play it off as nuances of the English language that the audience hasn’t yet learned. He said he’s German, with his nervousness he has a stereotype to maintain here. I’m wearing a surfing T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, and saying “awesome” as often as I can. There’s not much more I can do.
Last Monday, before Phil departed, he took us to what he calls the “Runway Restaurant,” so nicknamed because of the catwalk that extends the length of the interior (see below). With Right Said Fred in my head throughout the evening, we had an exceptional dinner for about $10 per person. One interesting aspect of this restaurant was the bathroom. Every single wall in the bathroom was a mirror. Even the stalls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors inside. Think about that. And when you add the fact that most public toilets in China seem to be nothing more than glorified holes in the ground, you can get a sense for the level of concentration necessary to avoid stepping right in the toilet.
I'm a model, you know what I mean
I previously mentioned that I had a less-than-stellar meal at the KFC near our hotel. To acquire this meal, Tom and I stood in the slowest line in all of China. Others came to KFC, got in line, ordered, enjoyed their meals, got back in line, ordered dessert, and left before we made much progress at all. Tom insisted that this was the line for us. Based on his previous experience, this cashier was the only guy in the place who spoke English. At long last we reached the front of the line. “Chicken,” we said. Only a blank stare in response. We said it more slowly. Nothing. “Well, he looks like the guy who spoke English…”
Then a high school girl turned from the other line and asked if we needed help. “Yes, please. We’d like to order some chicken.” She said she could translate for us. It was at this moment that she turned to me and started laughing uncontrollably. She covered her face in embarrassment and was laughing so hard that tears began streaming down her face. After some time went by, she managed to point at my face through her tears and say, “Your nose!” She then composed herself and spoke only to Tom for the next 30 minutes.
One night during the week a group of us went to some tower that looks a bit like the Eiffel Tower trying to swallow a pair of giant diamonds. “This is not the Eiffel Tower,” noted Denis, our colleague from France. We ascended the tower for our buffet dinner to find that the top diamond held a rotating restaurant inside. I asked Denis if they were planning to build one of these at the top of the Eiffel Tower, since that would make it even more awesome. At this point he pulled a Pier 39 on me and said he’s never actually been to the Eiffel Tower because only tourists go there.
Well, not many people at all go to Shijiazhuang’s Eiffel Tower, and when we took a bite of our food we knew why. The view might have been nice, but we couldn’t be sure because the windows of the diamond obviously had never been washed. The one saving grace was that I recorded a video that I’m ready to declare one of the greatest of my life. I can afford such hyperbole because I’m not sure how to upload it and share it with all of you. When I figure it out I’ll provide a link and tone down the language.
Denis's place
Ok, back to my speaker notes. Other things I may or may not get back to regarding this past week include the sights / sounds / smells / tastes of the streets, the art show we visited at HEUEB, and our epic Saturday journey to Pingyao.
Last Monday, before Phil departed, he took us to what he calls the “Runway Restaurant,” so nicknamed because of the catwalk that extends the length of the interior (see below). With Right Said Fred in my head throughout the evening, we had an exceptional dinner for about $10 per person. One interesting aspect of this restaurant was the bathroom. Every single wall in the bathroom was a mirror. Even the stalls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors inside. Think about that. And when you add the fact that most public toilets in China seem to be nothing more than glorified holes in the ground, you can get a sense for the level of concentration necessary to avoid stepping right in the toilet.
I'm a model, you know what I mean
I previously mentioned that I had a less-than-stellar meal at the KFC near our hotel. To acquire this meal, Tom and I stood in the slowest line in all of China. Others came to KFC, got in line, ordered, enjoyed their meals, got back in line, ordered dessert, and left before we made much progress at all. Tom insisted that this was the line for us. Based on his previous experience, this cashier was the only guy in the place who spoke English. At long last we reached the front of the line. “Chicken,” we said. Only a blank stare in response. We said it more slowly. Nothing. “Well, he looks like the guy who spoke English…”
Then a high school girl turned from the other line and asked if we needed help. “Yes, please. We’d like to order some chicken.” She said she could translate for us. It was at this moment that she turned to me and started laughing uncontrollably. She covered her face in embarrassment and was laughing so hard that tears began streaming down her face. After some time went by, she managed to point at my face through her tears and say, “Your nose!” She then composed herself and spoke only to Tom for the next 30 minutes.
One night during the week a group of us went to some tower that looks a bit like the Eiffel Tower trying to swallow a pair of giant diamonds. “This is not the Eiffel Tower,” noted Denis, our colleague from France. We ascended the tower for our buffet dinner to find that the top diamond held a rotating restaurant inside. I asked Denis if they were planning to build one of these at the top of the Eiffel Tower, since that would make it even more awesome. At this point he pulled a Pier 39 on me and said he’s never actually been to the Eiffel Tower because only tourists go there.
Well, not many people at all go to Shijiazhuang’s Eiffel Tower, and when we took a bite of our food we knew why. The view might have been nice, but we couldn’t be sure because the windows of the diamond obviously had never been washed. The one saving grace was that I recorded a video that I’m ready to declare one of the greatest of my life. I can afford such hyperbole because I’m not sure how to upload it and share it with all of you. When I figure it out I’ll provide a link and tone down the language.
Denis's placeOk, back to my speaker notes. Other things I may or may not get back to regarding this past week include the sights / sounds / smells / tastes of the streets, the art show we visited at HEUEB, and our epic Saturday journey to Pingyao.
Fast Forward (well, sort of)
I expected to spend part of my Sunday catching up on the blog. Instead I worked during the morning, wandered around and bought some fruit next to some live chickens that were hanging around in a cardboard box and large live fish that were somehow swimming around in what seemed to be another cardboard box. Then in the afternoon I had a lovely massage across the street. I quote my Austrian teammate Sue:
“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
“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
Friday, May 13, 2011
Meet the Clients
At long last my blogging comes to the purpose of our trip: to contribute some value to local clients as volunteers from IBM. By Monday we’d each worked long hours to prepare a single slide – or perhaps two – describing who we are. My slide had a big picture of a D Stock Hydro and another big picture of Maya. I was sure this would clearly demonstrate to the clients what sort of value I could deliver.
In the afternoon I donned my new gray suit and joined the other ten CSC members as we piled into small taxis for the trip to the kick-off meeting. We drove for some time through busy city streets with little regard for the color of traffic lights or the presence of oncoming cars, buses, and scooters. The horn was used liberally. Shijiazhuang is quite a big city by most standards, and the provincial capital of Hebei Province. But it seemed to contain approximately 11 foreigners.
Once on site we walked into an old school board room for the kick-off meeting. A Chinese flag stood at the front of the room alongside a massive vase. The main table was enormous, flanked by long and narrow backup tables of sorts. Cameras seemed to be everywhere. I expected to be given a number of pens to sign something into law. After some time of polite seating and arranging, our host kicked off the meeting with a formal speech that one of our Australian Business Volunteers (ABV) volunteers, Emily, translated into English. Next, the local IBM team did their presentation, explaining that Sam Palmisano was here. A few of us were momentarily amazed until we realized that “here” was Beijing, where he was giving some sort of speech to people who were not us. Nevertheless, the meeting tone was quite formal. As the first clients began to read prepared speeches, I noticed that my palms were getting sweaty. This was at least as likely to be due to the fact that I wear a wool suit about two times per year as it was due to nerves, but nevertheless.
Then it was time for the client from Hebei University of Economics and Business to introduce himself. His name was Pau, and he was my client, shared with a German fellow named Tom Treuten. The tone of the meeting changed. He spoke excitedly. He laughed a lot. He addressed Tom and me by name. He spoke terrific English. In short, Tom and I were in luck.
It was with this spirit of optimism that I took to the stage to introduce myself. I started by butchering the Chinese pronunciation of my name that I’d put on my business card that morning – Hao wen si – hoping to get a laugh. Not much. Then I went for a joke about my birthday given that much of the early meeting talked about IBM’s 100th birthday this year. Ooh…not funny when I heard it out loud. I went on to mangle some Chinese I’d learned from our guides on The Great Wall. This was the first time all meeting that Pau wasn’t laughing. Tough crowd. I noticed I was sweating again. Thankfully I wrapped up with a picture of me eating Dan Dan noodles. Good old Dan Dan, always comes through for me in a pinch.
The meeting wrapped up and Tom and I joined Pau and his student Jack for a conversation on our scope of work. We noticed some immediate problems. The first presentation was to take place in less than a week. The second was scheduled for a Saturday. They wanted us to talk about HR issues in our home countries. But once we spent a bit of time discussing the scope we felt good, and soon we would visit campus to nail down the topics and schedule once and for all. And Jack is a big fan of F1 car racing. Perhaps I’d get a chance to introduce him to F1 boat racing and the legend of Fast Freddie. After all, there are three F1 boat races scheduled in China in 2011.
In the afternoon I donned my new gray suit and joined the other ten CSC members as we piled into small taxis for the trip to the kick-off meeting. We drove for some time through busy city streets with little regard for the color of traffic lights or the presence of oncoming cars, buses, and scooters. The horn was used liberally. Shijiazhuang is quite a big city by most standards, and the provincial capital of Hebei Province. But it seemed to contain approximately 11 foreigners.
Once on site we walked into an old school board room for the kick-off meeting. A Chinese flag stood at the front of the room alongside a massive vase. The main table was enormous, flanked by long and narrow backup tables of sorts. Cameras seemed to be everywhere. I expected to be given a number of pens to sign something into law. After some time of polite seating and arranging, our host kicked off the meeting with a formal speech that one of our Australian Business Volunteers (ABV) volunteers, Emily, translated into English. Next, the local IBM team did their presentation, explaining that Sam Palmisano was here. A few of us were momentarily amazed until we realized that “here” was Beijing, where he was giving some sort of speech to people who were not us. Nevertheless, the meeting tone was quite formal. As the first clients began to read prepared speeches, I noticed that my palms were getting sweaty. This was at least as likely to be due to the fact that I wear a wool suit about two times per year as it was due to nerves, but nevertheless.
Then it was time for the client from Hebei University of Economics and Business to introduce himself. His name was Pau, and he was my client, shared with a German fellow named Tom Treuten. The tone of the meeting changed. He spoke excitedly. He laughed a lot. He addressed Tom and me by name. He spoke terrific English. In short, Tom and I were in luck.
It was with this spirit of optimism that I took to the stage to introduce myself. I started by butchering the Chinese pronunciation of my name that I’d put on my business card that morning – Hao wen si – hoping to get a laugh. Not much. Then I went for a joke about my birthday given that much of the early meeting talked about IBM’s 100th birthday this year. Ooh…not funny when I heard it out loud. I went on to mangle some Chinese I’d learned from our guides on The Great Wall. This was the first time all meeting that Pau wasn’t laughing. Tough crowd. I noticed I was sweating again. Thankfully I wrapped up with a picture of me eating Dan Dan noodles. Good old Dan Dan, always comes through for me in a pinch.
The meeting wrapped up and Tom and I joined Pau and his student Jack for a conversation on our scope of work. We noticed some immediate problems. The first presentation was to take place in less than a week. The second was scheduled for a Saturday. They wanted us to talk about HR issues in our home countries. But once we spent a bit of time discussing the scope we felt good, and soon we would visit campus to nail down the topics and schedule once and for all. And Jack is a big fan of F1 car racing. Perhaps I’d get a chance to introduce him to F1 boat racing and the legend of Fast Freddie. After all, there are three F1 boat races scheduled in China in 2011.
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