Jet Lag and Things on Sticks

Hello again from Beijing! Needed to test if blogging would work, so please pardon the previous post!

After our long day of travel starting Tuesday morning, we arrived uneventfully in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon. No quarantine... phew! A few changes to our itenerary though: we are not able to stay at the Chinese National School of Administration (CNSA) as we were scheduled to, nor will be visiting GM Shanghai. We are staying at a hotle across from CNSA instead. There is a significant amount of sensitivity surrounding the flu, and we each received a gift of a thermometer to check our temperatures upon arrival.

Yesterday was our first day of company visits, and a full one it was. Our first stop was RBC Bejing where we heard about the Chinese banking industry and RBC's involvement in its development and reform. We were frotunate to hear from the leaders of all of their divisions, on topics including their new China focused balanced mutual fund product for the national market, and also the rise of insurance products in China. Cool... Beijing's financial district! We also visited Lenovo, which was an awesome experience. We got to see a massive multimedia display about Lenovo's history, operations, products, and future. We got to see some amazing concept and prototype products... I think we all picked out a few things we want to buy in the future!

Later in the afternoon, we were really feeling the effect of the jetlag. Around 2pm we all get a bit quiet when our brains are telling us it should be night time. The wierdest part of it is that you go to sleep at night and are wide awake by 2am since your brain says it should be the afternoon! We really need to find a good source of coffee to get us through the afernoon sessions until this wears off. Ater a little nap on the bus while the driver battled with the Beijing traffic, we went to CNSA for a lecture about China's economic policy since 1992 when the idea of a socialist free market was implemented. I imagine the China of 2009 is incredibly different than the China of 1992... the country has come so far, but is still rushing headlong into the future.

In the evening we went to to the famous Wangfujing night market, where you can get everything on a stick. Scorpions, silk worms, baby sharks, sea horses, starfish... all beautifully displayed under rows of red lanterns and deepfried to order! I didn't try any of the crunchy morsels but few brave souls did!

Well... I'm outta time, more next time I get a computer.