Thursday, we started the day with a couple speakers in the hotel conference room. The first speaker was Jon Anderson from Kyosay Global. He was interesting, but saying the same thing we already heard many times. One thing I found interesting, being a demand planner, is that the Chinese companies have a difficulty with demand planning because in the past companies were told by the government exactly how much to produce. Now that they have the freedom to produce whatever quantity they want, they don’t have the skills and knowledge to forecast the demand. The second speaker, Lufeng Gu from Hill & Knowlton, was a bit of fresh air. He spoke about media in China. Most Chinese companies are not aware of public relations, only the top tier companies are. He showed us newspapers from the same day, same event, but reported differently from the state owned newspapers and the tabloid newspapers. The example he showed was from a speed train derailment last year. The tabloid newspapers put it as it is with a picture of the train accident. The state owned newspapers preferred to focus on the people being rescued rather than showing the actual accident.
Then we had the rest of the afternoon free for sightseeing. Before we left for China, we watched Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation show in class and he went to a soup dumpling place that he really enjoyed, so I wanted to go there too. I went with a few other people; it was back in the market around the YuYuan Garden. We had some regular size soup dumplings and we also had their famous large soup dumpling that you drink with a straw. It was really good! Afterwards we shopped in the market for a little while and we took a cab to get back to the hotel. Over 45 minute cab ride for maybe a couple miles: that’s Shanghai traffic for you. Walking would have been faster. After we got back to the hotel, a group of us had planned to go eat at an Italian restaurant – little too much Chinese food. So we left the hotel around 4:30 because we had to be back at the hotel at 6:30 for the acrobatic show. We got a restaurant address from the hotel, which was a walking distance. But that restaurant didn’t open until 6pm, which was too late. We walked around a bit to try to find a hotel to go ask for recommendations and we stumbled upon the Waldorf Astoria. The concierge printed out an address of a restaurant, which said it was only a mile away, but we took a cab anyway to try to save time. So we got on the cab and showed him the address. Then suddenly we’re in a tunnel. We’re going across the river to the financial center. Oups… that’s way too far to eat and make our way back to the hotel in a little over an hour. When we saw the traffic going the opposite direction in the tunnel, we panicked a bit. So we tried to tell the driver we didn’t want to go to that restaurant anymore, but instead we wanted to be taken back to the hotel. Yeah, I’m sure we sounded like complete idiots in his head because we couldn’t explain why we wanted to go back. Back at the hotel, we had exactly half an hour to eat. We ran into Pizza Hut and told them we had to be out in 30 minutes, if they understood anything. It actually ended up being pretty fast. We all ordered soda, but the waitress brought soda in glasses with ice, so we explained that we didn’t want ice. While she was away changing our glasses, we realized that we shouldn’t even be drinking fountain soda anyway. So she brought back our ice-less glasses, which we didn’t touch. Poor lady, she must have thought we were idiots too.
At 6:30 we left for the acrobatic show. Like I said earlier about my previous experience with an acrobatic show in China, I didn’t have very high expectation. But, the Chinese surprised me again. It was very entertaining. And dangerous. The show ended with one of those sphere motorcycle cage number. Not something you would see in the U.S. Not because the act itself is dangerous, but because the motorcycles actually drove around the theater seating area and spun around the sphere for a good 10-15 minutes with gas engines. After about 2 minutes, the theater was filled with gas fumes. All I was thinking was if they collide, the whole thing will explode. At one point there were 8 motorcycles in there. After the show, we went back to the hotel and I stayed in for the rest of the evening.
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