China Trip

My company is opening an office in China, so I made a trip to meet with some potential partners. The visa was simple to get, I used an online company that got it in 3 days.

I flew out of Spokane at 5:30am so drove up the night before and slept in the Ramada by the airport. The next morning, I made it through check-in and security in 10 minutes, so had two hours to wait for my flight. The flights to Seattle, then to LA were uneventful. In LA I got on China Eastern Airlines. It was quite nice, the meals were good, the service was excellent, and there were laptop plugins at each seat. I was one of three Americans on the flight, two in first class, then me in the back, whereas the rest were Chinese. I arrived in Shanghai after 14 hours of flight time. The airport is very modern. I made my way out of customs and found the people waiting for me. It was the first time in my life my name was on one of those little placards, it was kind of embarrassing, but helpful because I found my contact, Binhua, right away.

Binhua had some errands to run in Shanghai so I got to spend about three hours driving and walking around the city. My first impressions are that is was huge and modern. There were modern high rise apartments and building everywhere. There were McDonalds, KFC's, and Pizza huts on every street. Expensive BMW's, Benz's, and Audi's were plentiful. I was shocked by the heat. It was about 100 degrees and 98% humidity, so it took a while to acclimate.
After running errands in Shanghai, we drove to Nantong. It took about 4.5 hours to get there. It normally takes 2.5 to 3 hours, but we got lost several times. I guess the government has some work to do on the road signs. Nantong is a very nice city of some 800,000 on the southeast corner of China. The government has invested heavily in infrastructure, and has made large wide paved streets, nice new housing apartments, brand new universities and dozens of economic incentive zones.

The food in China was pretty good. Locals eat lots of noodles and I ate a couple of times at fast food places that served huge plates of noodles for about a dollar. It is customary to do business over a formal dinner, so I had several formal dinners.

These were more fun in the variety of food offered. I ate pretty much every body part of every animal imagined. Unfortunately, dog was not in season, I'll have to wait until I go back in the winter for that delicacy.

The hotel was very modern, except there was no non smoking section. The whole country is a smoking section, which I am used to from being in Albania.

I found the people very friendly, but the English was very poor. Most people I met could not speak English. Most young kids spoke English, but again very poorly. Even the best English speakers I met still had difficulty understanding conversational English.

China has huge malls with the latest goods from around the world. I saw the latest fashions, Swiss watches, Nike shoes, Gucci bags, and all were authentic. I was hoping to find the knock-offs, but didn't have a chance to venture out of downtown.

The most fun part of my trip was getting a custom fit ping pong paddle. I enjoy playing pingpong, and wanted to get a nice Chinese ping pong paddle. I found a shop that made them to order and told them I wanted a nice paddle. They gave me a paddle and walked me to a ping pong table in the back of the shop. We had to wait while an intense game finished, then I was hit a ball from an 80 year old man. He watched me return a few shots, then said that was enough. All my shots were going long, off the end of the table, so I was worried. I then watched him make me a ping pong paddle right in front of my eyes, and in 10 minutes I was playing like a pro, and all my shots were staying on the table.

I spent a total of five days in China. During the whole time I was there I didn't see the sun once, but it was never cloudy. The smog and pollution is so bad in China, that you can not see the blue sky.

I flew out of Shanghai and returned through Vancouver. The airport in Vancouver was a mess and I almost missed my flight to Seattle. When I touched down in Spokane, I felt so good, like I'd returned from being gone for years. As I stepped off the plane, I reached down and touched the ground and was thankful to be back in America.