Days two and three in China summary:
- More sun
- Less smog
- Costs are really low away from the hotel. 1 hour taxi ride: $12. Multi-course dinner in private room for 7 at former King's residence: $80.
- All food is "traditional chinese" in description. You will regularly encounter: random cubes of gelatinous material, deer meat, jellyfish, duck eggs, meat with copious amounts of skin, frog, ox stomach, date juice.
- traffic lights, lines, and signs aren't rules but general suggestions and guidelines for taxi drivers
- stores and restaurants have an incredible number of people working at them. you'll regularly have 10 or so different people bring you things during a meal. some small restaruants appear to have an army of staff.
So after our customer meetings yesterday the local China office guys took us for dinner at a really cool restaruant at the former home of a King (one of the Emperor's brothers). They've got all the staff dressed in traditional Ming dynasty outfits. Mind you this is NOT a tourist place, it's a normal place. We have a private room and our guests order food from the menu for litereally 5 minutes solid. There seems to be a lot of verboseness in ordering, it typically takes a while. One of the waitresses comes in with a tea list on a scroll. They order something, she leaves and comes back to get the order. But not with a scroll this time. Check out the first image below.
Yes, that's an IPAQ (Click the picture to see a larger image). Quite the contrast. So today we visited a bunch of customers at a high-tech park that was about an hour ride (due mostly to horrible traffic rather than distance) both ways by taxi. Some good data, some validation, but definitely challenging going through an interpreter. He was great but when we were describing new techincal concepts it was slow, repetative going, and you got the feeling at some point you just needed to move on because it wasn't coming across. Oh well. But the folks here are very proud of the work that we're doing. They thought we were really important. When we walked into JustSoft, our last stop for the day, they had this sign in the lobby (check the second image below).
We thought it was funny. It was a good meeting...