Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 4:40 AM
Subject: Asia 2007 - Day 7
I am traveling today to China, going through Hong Kong and taking a ferry to the mainland. I am traveling with customers, 5 of us in all, although we are all on different airlines. We needed to leave the hotel by 6:00 AM so we all met in the lobby at 5:45. The lobby of this hotel is always crowded with groups of people presumably waiting for something, probably a bus. There is a convention of Girl Scouts from throughout Southeast Asia here, and they as well as their troop leaders are all in uniform (similar to GSA uniforms, just different colors). They are in the lobby this morning and the sun is not even up. We rode in a van to the airport, pleased to see that there is no traffic for a change. Everyone that I am traveling with has been coughing since yesterday. They definitely have picked up some kind of bug. I am trying to keep my distance, not easy in a small van.
The flight to Hong Kong was uneventful. Since Hong Kong is still fairly independent of China, it has its own customs and immigration rules. It is only a city, so every flight coming into HKIA is an international flight and everyone is herded through several customs and immigrations checkpoints. One of these is a body temperature scanner, which started beeping when one of my companions passed through. He has a low grade fever. If he were not leaving Hong Kong, we would not have been allowed through. Because he is taking the ferry to China, they don’t seem to care.
There is a ferry terminal at the airport which can take you to Hong Kong island, Kowloon, Macau, or Shekou, which is my destination. The ferry ride takes around 30 minutes. When we purchased our ferry tickets at the airport, we gave them our luggage check tags so they could retrieve our bags and load them onto the boat. I was a bit leery about doing this, having just gotten by stuff back, but I was relieved to see them being unloaded. This is my second time coming to Shekou, which is a neighborhood of Shenzhen. Shenzhen has around 4 million inhabitants, and was only a fishing village 25 years ago. China created a special economic zone in Shenzhen in the eighties and allowed foreign companies to invest and built plants. Today, you would never guess the city didn’t really exist until recently. It is one of the wealthier cities in China.
I am staying in a different hotel than on my last visit. I am at the Nan Hai, which seems to be quite nice (no box of condoms in the bathroom) and is next door to the ferry terminal. Raymond (a different one), Larry and Michael, three coworkers from China were waiting for me in the lobby. Michael will be translating for me when I give my presentation on Friday. Went through it to make sure he understood the material, and discussed business in general.
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| View from the Nan Hai - sampans and high rises |
It feels muggier here than it did in KL, about 95 degrees, and very humid. It always seems to be on the verge of raining. We had about an hour to kill before meeting for dinner and I went to my room. The key card did not work. A maid who was about 40 yards away down the hall saw my difficulty and literally ran up to me with her arms stiff at her sides, tried the key, opened the door for me with her pass key, ran again to the elevators, and returned 2 minutes later with a working key, all without saying a word. A couple of minutes later, I called housekeeping for an iron and ironing board. The door bell to my room rang within 30 seconds. A young girl was at the door with the items, which she set up for me, bowed, and ran out in the same stiff-armed style. She had to have been stationed on the floor waiting to deliver things upon request, I can’t see how else she could have done it. One of my customers reported the same experience.
At 6:00 we all met in the hotel lobby to wait for the bus which will take us to dinner. Many of the people attending the conference have arrived so there are about 30 of us on the bus. The bus ride took nearly an hour. We traveled through the city center and beyond. Once outside the city center, all high-rises and glass, the look of the area changes completely. It no longer appears modern and affluent. The buildings are mostly 4-5 story apartment blocks with businesses on the ground floor. These businesses are open stalls which are locked at night with heavy metal overhead doors. At the top of the first floor there usually large brightly painted or neon signs advertising the business below. Above that are apartments with laundry hanging from every open window. The buildings are mostly concrete, although some are clad in white tiles. At one point we passed through what looked like a set of abandoned tollbooths. I asked Larry about these, and he told me this is where the Shenzhen Economic Zone ended. Until recently this was the border crossing into the Zone, and Chinese citizens needed a visa to enter.
The bus pulled into an open plaza with the restaurant located at the far end. The restaurant was very large, maybe 150 feet square, open air with a large pagoda-style roof covering the center, and smaller private dining rooms surrounding on 3 sides. Everything was painted red and gold, and red round lanterns were hanging at the perimeter. This is the type of building I had always expected to see in China, but truthfully appears to be rare, at least in Shenzhen. This was definitely not a tourist destination as the only westerners are in our group, a total of 5 of us among hundreds of locals. The restaurant is Cantonese. Dinner was served in a large private, and thankfully air conditioned dining room, large enough to hold the 100 or so people in attendance (some came on other busses). I was the given the guest of honor status and was seated at the table farthest from and facing the door. As is typical, dinner is family style and there were more than a dozen dishes. Some notable items, a pork broth that was too dark to be just pork, flavored with blood no doubt, fish balls, sautéed mushrooms (the best dish by far), duck breast, shrimp with the shell on and heads removed, and strangest of all, chicken knees! If I were to live in China, I would become a vegetarian. Eating meat here is too much work. Everything is bite sized and contains bone or cartilage. You have to place it in your mouth, work the meat off with your teeth and tongue, and spit out the inedible parts. By the way, my chop stick skills have improved, no dropped food so far. Dinner takes hours with new plates being added to the large lazy-susans in the center of each table frequently. The last course is slices of watermelon.
All during dinner, people keep offering toasts to different tables, saying “gan-bay” which means essentially “bottoms up”, and you are supposed to empty your glass of beer (pee-zhoo in Cantonese – I am learning little by little). As the guest of honor, I am a frequent “gan-bay” target of the Service Technicians and Parts Managers who are the majority of the diners. Few of them speak any English but we seem to have no trouble communicating. There were many “gan-bays”!
It was late when we returned to the hotel, but I was invited for more beer at the local bars. I was pretty tired and would like to have declined, but that would have been quite improper. So we walked 2 blocks to what turned out to be the same “beer bars” from last year, the ones filled with prostitutes and where you negotiate the price of beer. I am actually able to negotiate for myself this time, this pleased me very much. I got the price of beer down to 20 RMB from 40.
It was very late when we returned to the hotel, about 2:30. I had to be up at 6:30 and tomorrow was going to be a bit painful.
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