Next stop Ulan Bator

I was one of the first people out in Forbidden City even before it opened. And it was cold, I bought a jacket and lost it three days later again leaving it at the coffee bar close to the office. Everybody else had winter jackets on. But there is a nice warm place in the Museum where you can even have good coffee. It is really cool, they have maps which you can rent, they have gps on and they guide you through Forbidden City. And the guide talks about what is interesting but you are free to choose where you want to go and it only tells you the story once and marks it green after you were there. It has GPS in there. I love technology. Probably next year they will have a wireless station where you can download the app so you don’t even need a special device anymore.

 

It is funny. Whenever travelling alone, there a good chance you meet people. While strolling through some random Hutong close to the “Forbidden City”,  I didn’t even react anymore when somebody called after me. Obviously, on tourist places they are always trying to sell something at tourist spots. Especially in the morning at 8:30, there are not so many victims around.  But this time it was different, the person wanted to get my attention, because he wanted to let me know that my shoe needs some maintenance. As it needs every time I am running in the forest as well as this week on the treadmill every morning. So now I can start paying attention to people again in this area, since they don’t only try to sell caps with red stars and handbags with Mao on it anymore. Here is my favourite person one looking out of a café with his breakfast in his hands.

 Then again I met somebody on the street. And now I have friend from Mongolia. We ended up going to a tea house chatting for more than an hour. Now I know what milk wine is, horse milk mixed with some liquor. It seems that it sells pretty well in Russia and China, since that was his job, making business with big hotels and other distributors. When I get home tomorrow, I can glance with new knowledge about Mongolian horses now. Seriously, as the tea ceremony did last Sunday, that made my day. You can see spectacular things, as I did that day, but it was even more fun talking and walking with Baisa over the Tian’anmen square. We exchanged email addresses and promised each other we will meet next time when we visit each others country.

School class in the garden of the temple of heaven

 

 

In the afternoon I visited the temple of heaven. The park is next to a market so I was able to get some great stuff for my kids, hopefully with that, the pictures and all the sweets I just bought at the airport, they hopefully don’t think anymore that everything is poisoned in China. This was a great journey and I leave the “Great Firewall” behind me and fly back home.

Sun and Sand

Breakfast

Farewell with Fish

  Food, again. I know what you are trying to say, this was the first time I had breakfast in the hotel.Then a colleague left IBM and we had a farewell luncheon. Actually, apart from the fact that it was delicious, the whole Restaurant was full of Post-Its with feedback. A good idea, I thought. One comment: "I feel sorry for the Fish, but I am a cat."

Feedback in Fish Restaurant

 So look, how sunny it was in the morning. And now its dusty and all the sand from the desert blows into the city. 

On my way to work

  And after working until 8pm, we got "Hot Pot" at a 70s style Restaurant. So I am stuffed like a chicken. I need to go to bed, if I get up early I have a couple of hours to go to Forbidden City and Tian'an Men Place. My plane leaves at 7:25pm. As much as I did like it ere and I amde a lot of friends, I am looking forward to get back home to see my kids.

 

Peking Duck

You can just imagine by watching the traffic, how crowded the city is. We didn't get a seat on the shuttle so my peer from Shanghai and myself took the taxi. Huge blocks with appartements left and right, IBM is north of the city in a new technology park. It is surrounded by previous settlements as you can see here.  Hard to imagine how it was there before. The surrounding area gives a hint.
Then into the technology park, all high tech. It is nice, warm  and windy. But the air is incredibly dry.

View from the hotel room this morning

Hard to imagine how it was there before. 

The surrounding area gives a hint.
Then into the technology park, all high tech. It is nice, warm  and windy. 

But the air is incredibly dry.

Housing around the technology park

IBM Bejin

Getting to IBM, I realized I didn't have a coffee yet, so I got one and guess 

what I saw next to the cashier. Two famous chocloate brands next to each other.

Cafeteria

Grüsse nach Waldenbuch

 As you can guess, it is about food again. Traffic is really heavy in Bejing, you can feel how crowded the city is. IBM is outside north of the city, in a huge technology park, most of the buildings are really new.
And, besides the technical reviews, we had great meetings, that closed with a session in the most famous restaurant in Bejing, that if famous for Peking Duck.

See the duck? One of ours.

duck, pork, chicken paws in mustard sauce ....

 At night, before the "afternoon meetings" start at 8pm I am back in the hotel. I am so stuffed. The food was great, but I am so stuffed, I can hardly concentrate, finally I got those famous chicken paws, duck liver and great fish along with two peking ducks. And you actually eat it like fajitas, There is bread or salad, where a soja sauce along with duck meat and vegetables is being placed, wrapped together (no rules, I was assured).

Sorry for the bad formatting ...

Kung Fu Panda vs The Dragon

This is so cool. Kung-Fu Panda at the annual kickoff meeting This fell off a wall this morning accompagnied by the statement: "well the meeting was long time ago". You will be able to see this covering my office door starting next Monday. At 11:00pm I arrived in the hotel in Bejing, after another great day in the Shanghai office. Here is another myth. People and habits change, the book says "never talk about politics". The people I talked to had very reasonable opinions and very funny saints about whats going on, things change, people change.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

2nd day at work

This morning I got up, originally I wanted to go running outside, but there no way I couold get up quick. But the view from my hotel window helped. I am on the 22nd floor. So I ended up again on the treadmill. I still haven’t been able to switch time-zones. I have no idea why it is so difficult this time. I can’t go to bed at all and when the alarm goes off it feels like a truck ran over me.  I think who wants to get up at 1 am CET. Still, this morning I really enjoyed going to work, I had a little bit of time got the “intercontinental breakfast” at the subway station. This is much better than taking a taxi. Walking around your own pace to and taking the subway actually allow me to “feel” the city.

There actually is a button for english

But again at work it was great, we had great meetings, met a lot of smart people, they teach me a lot of stuff. And tons of good ideas. This is fun. I am just so tired. And the lady at the restaurant already knows that I want an extra shot espresso in my cappuccino.

View on the office, IBM is next to Marvell and Nvidia.

Thin slices of pork with cucumber

Hard to read, but the english text reads as  "duck ass"

Here is something fun for a change. Yeah, I know, it i about food ... again. I have been assured, this is not duck ass. But we still didn't order it.

As you can see, they took me out to a great diner. Amazing with a show where they had somebody dancing and changing masks all the time. And knowing that I will start to be boring, there was much more great food, I got to try, however, while it was a bit difficult for the rabbit heads and the stuff from the middle of a pig (I didn’t ask for details), there were 20 other dishes which were really great (of course,  pictures will follow).

There are tons of remarkable things, for example if you hang your jacket over your chair, they put a cover on top of it, they explained to me that they want to protect our clothes, but I guess they want to also make it look nice. 

 And again, my workaround to access very normal web pages and applications was broken.

The „Great Firewall“ is what they call it. Got it to work again, again meetings. I am soooo tired.

Have a good night. I need to pack. 

And thanks everybody for being with me on the journey.

Back online

This probably feels like it did sitting in Karl-Marx-Stadt 25 years ago watching TV broadcasted by stations in West Germany. Not allowed but everybody does it. So I got picked up at the hotel this morning after running on the threadmill .... Not tomorrow anymorrow. Tomorrow I'll go outside, the weather was really nice outside around the office there was a really nice breeze and noise and smog isn't really bad there. I had a real nice time too, I met a lot of great people. Very refreshing since they are very young and the oldest one received his master degree and joined the team in IBM right after that. So everybody is there 2-5 years ago, 40% woman-60% men, very very talented team. I am very impressed by the motivation and talent. And everybody is very nice to me as well. How wever at 5pm the revenge for being up over 30 hours and only sleeping 5 hours after that came like a hammer. So I had to take a walk for a coffee.
So guess where they took me today, since we had a conversation about spicy food yesterday. "Red pepper" is the name of he restaurant. Take a look what we got. 

Starters:  cold Noodles and Chicken

My favoriute tonight: Freshwater Fish with hot pepper and hot chili



Veggies: Tofu and some green vegetables in egg suace

Frog with lotus root, bamboo shoot

Sweet rice with lotus seed

This was all very good.

And now I need to run to a late night meeting. I can only imagine now how much the team sacrifices with the time difference especially to the US.
Have a good night
Bodo

Arrival

I got picked up at 8 in the morning at the airport and we are taking a taxi into the Pudong (meaning east of the river). It is very western style you could think it is NYC except thjere are wide open spaces for people to walk and cars to ride. But the shops, the malls, even the new buildings look very close. So you can have a grande latte at Starbucks, go shopping at H&M and so on ...  

Amazing. So getting around with the Subyay is very easy, we went to the financial centre. Being on my own in the afternoon, I just got off the subway to visit Yundun garden, new building in the very clssic style. built and two females students asked me to take a picture, one being from Shanghai one the other one visiting her from the south. 


Foodstore

 Since it was very crowded in the garden, they decided to go to a tea ceremony, since this is the month f the tea festival. Very local thing, I would probably never recognized that in this street there is a tea festival going on. Some scenes from the street.










Mahjongg

It was a lot of fun I learned a lot about the god of tea of what kind of things you can make tea of, the tea of god, the different meanings of numbers nd how you can represent them with one hand up unitl at least twelve (six is luck (the handsign looks like the “Hang loose” greeting in Hawaii) and eight is becoming rich, that’s a s much as I remember. And tons of other things there was a lot of enternainment and stories provided. After telling me all the stuff around Konfuzious the four beauties, the gods, the meaning of the numbers, which tea is goodfor what, they kept asking me what more tradition and culture we have (whether we also have beauties we admire).

And I have to admit I was tired but still a little ashamed, either we don’t have that kind of culture (does beer drinking and humpdada in Munich really count?) or I don’t recall. Anyway this was a lot of fun meeting random people. Anyway after that I picked up where I left off, going to the garden.

And again, food and people became more interesting than anything else.

Surgar-glaced fruits (mostly strawberries)

you can smell it by looking at it

So, going out for dinner. Again, it is pathetic to go out for dinner on my own. I still decided to do it. I went to the soup experts. It turned out they have much much more then just soup.

They have a category that is called “Enhance masculinity and kidney”. And what you find there are mainly suche dishes like “double boiled deer penis with 10 treasures”. And of course there was a picture going with it. In the morning, my colleague laughed at me when I said I like spicy food. Such as Indian food. He said you don’t know how hot our food is. Anyway I went for the lamb (marked as spicy sand I was being asked two times whether I really wanted this) and … it is not really spicier than Indian food, just more chillies than other hot spices.

Another thing to mention, there was a couple sitting next to me, it took me half an hour to find out that they don’t talk to each other. Each of them looked in their smartphone. I thought, sure modern times, ut then the food came, they put the phones aside and they still weren’t talking.

She made two attempts, but clearly it was not welcome. I know I should not do tha, but I couldn’t resist, if you sit there on your own it’s really hard to not look around. So the stupidity of the men not communicating with their girlfriends is a worldwide problem. Even with such friendly and talkative people. She actually talked more with me than with her boyfriend, because she realized that I got the bill instead of the rice after the dish and nobody was speaking English (which by the way happened rarely to me today).

And now coming back to the hotel and finally thinking about why not only facebook is not reachable but also all links with the word “blog” in it are blocked. Unbelievable, censoring all blogs? So amazingly google+ works, facebook doesn’t all blogs don’t. So I dont give up, hopefully you can read this and somebody (i.e. Carsten) was so nice and able to post it for me ….

In Transit

Ok, we are late, but somehow we got work around the Great Wall of the Internet, and now that blog comes a little late.

As promised, Lisa took a picture of me in the morning, so I can be easier be recognized at the Pudong aiport.

At the train station, I remembered that you bring small presents, when you are for example being invited. And typically it is kitschy stuff. So the only possible solution to this was to get 18 kinder-eggs along with six purple milka chocolate easter rabbits. And at the security gate, I experienced the first small cultural difference. Somebody behind me in the line eructated loudly. I couldn’t resist, turned around and one man looked very contended.

Goodbye

Yeah, I know what you will tell me, but still ... please listen to "Visions of China" by Japan while reading. It's such a beautiful song.



It's very unfortunate, the only thing my kids make a connection with China is poison. Thanks to all the media and teachers. Poisoned toys, poisoned whatever. It's sad.
I have finally packed  at least part of my stuff. And did say goodbye to my kids. It's so hard, I don't know they may get to the age where they realize that you are gone for a week.or it's because they feel it is far away and dangerous. I don't know why but this time it seems really hard. For all of us. I am not even gone but already miss them. Just in case you haven't seen everybody yet, here we are....


Something else I didn't think of before if you are going to a big airport and somebody wants to pick you up who haven't seen you yet you can take a picture of yourself when leaving the house or at the airport and just mail it. And even on Shanghai airport, you will be recognized.
See you tomorrow.
Oh and if you find a little package in Breuningerland, its the birthday present for my father, .... which was today.

This is the start

At home. This is my first blog. Ever. Two days away from travelling to Shanghai. Now I start thinking about the trip. Can  I charge all my devices? Here is the first difference, whereas in the western world you travel with adapters, in China you find a harbour for every power plug. Very convenient.

My peer in Shanghai asks me "Where have you been travelling so far in Asia?" "Japan and India", I answer. "That's it?" A pause, accompagnied by a silent smile on the other end of the phone. Then I am assured that "This will be definetely a different experience then."
This is the first time that I start questioning whether I really need to carry along my running shoes. According to a (Disney!) Web page from March 12:
"The quality of air in Shanghai today will be "very close to 'slightly polluted,'" according to Shanghai Daily."

Well, I'll take them anyway. There will be an opportunity. I can't stop running for a week, the Hamburg Marathon comes up end of April.