Working in Shanghai

Our week in Shanghai was dominated by work.  Randi would go off each morning with Josh, a PTC Sales guy who we would have breakfast with every morning and would accompany her to the office there everyday.

I stayed in the hotel, except for Tuesday and Wednesday I went to the Oracle office and was hosted by a hardware manager named SK.  He set me up in a visitor's office and pretty much left me there for the day.  However, the one day I went with him and 3 other folks from the office for a classic Shanghai style lunch. This was really the one thing I was hoping to accomplish, seeing as it really was the highlight of when I worked in France.  While it was only one experience, it was a good one.  We ordered 9 dishes for the 5 of us and could not finish it all.  SK paid for lunch and seemed happy to have me there.  I really liked the pork in brown sauce, even though each piece had kind of a gelatin side to  it, whose texture seemed kind of gross to me.   I manged to get a picture of it off the menu.


The second day I was at the office I couldn't find SK, so I went for a walk on The Bund, which was only around 5 blocks from the office.  With some good advice from my neighbor, I really enjoyed the 2 hours I spent just watchin people and shopping for trinkets a little.  He had told me that as an obvious American tourist type you are gonna get approached a LOT to buy this or that.  So what you need to do is wear some earbuds, whether you are listening to music or not and just smile and keep walkin.  That worked great!  Actually I listened to Bob Dylan and really enjoyed the walk. Crossing every intersection was an adventure. I had "no direction home, like a complete unknown"

I got a kick out of the look/style of these young kids, with their big hair and makin peace signs.  That's a boy takin that picture, with a hairstyle that looked like my Mom's, circa 1970.  I smiled thinkin that they are trying to be more American...more like the old man snipin their picture behind them.