Fourth and Fifth Day- Culture, Copy, Dragon Boats and NOV

Fourth full day in Suzhou- Culture class, copy bags and dragon boats.

Still raining

Fifth full day in Suzhou-Culture, Marketing and NOV

Dry pavement!

I am realizing that I need to trim down my rambling for a couple of reasons. I will bore my faithful followers to death and I just don’t have the time to keep it up. It seems like any downtime I have, I fall asleep, email the family or work on this.

So, the last couple of days have been some great cultural experiences. We are getting around very well now and amaze ourselves at our ability to separate and find each other again with no phones. Being forced to use the Chinese language is fantastic- Thomas and Omar are both very good at it, Melissa has her book and I keep my cheat sheet in my bag. Most welcome the opportunity to help us but very little English speaking people. The number of people who have stopped to help, try to communicate, give us directions, anything- unbelievable. These are amazing people. I think in general the trip has surpassed all expectations. For sure the biggest complaints are the curfew at night, being locked in and no internet. All other students have internet. It seems just the foreign dorms don’t.  This blog/journal as actually been referenced as “the blog that can’t be posted”. I am hopeful today I will at least get it to Sydney so she can post it for me. We will see.

Some of the events over the past couple of days have included Guanchian Street where we tried our luck with copy bags….no success there. Scott and Kim experience the mall in a city of 5 Million people on a holiday weekend. Tony from South Africa joined us at the Tibet bar. Omar, Melissa and I hit the streets on a train ticket hunt. I finally got my cart food- yum!! More Chivas, more Chenchen and more fun.  The biggest event was the dragon boat races. For such a big holiday event, the festival had no food booths which would not be the case in the states.

We had a couple of Culture classes and a marketing class. They were both very interesting and opened my eyes to opportunities in China- if done right. We could have had more Marketing for sure – that was so interesting. The culture classes were interesting as well but could probably add more value if we had one taught by an older professor and one by a younger one. It would be interesting to see how the view on culture is changing even between just 2 generations- things are changing fast here.

I was curious about what a Chinese corporate office might look like and the NOV tour gave us a view into that. I was surprised at how clean the warehouse was and wondered if they somewhat prepared for our visit. We heard more about fiberglass than we ever wanted to know. We tried to throw in a question or two to reassure them that we are intrigued by the presentation (well, ‘reassure’ is not quite the right word). Cooley is great at that. He is very good at asking questions when the rest of us go silent or just generating conversation.

Tip of the days:

What I would do for a hot breakfast. I wish I would have packed Quaker instant oatmeal but I have not checked to see if Auchan has it.