[School Post and Personal Post]

It looks like I can only post messages and cannot see what I have posted, nor can I see your comments unless you choose the email option so I apologize if I repeat myself (when i can find an access point). we surmise that there may be some policies over here restricting access to bulletin boards etc. we are no sure though. My roommate brought his laptop and surprisingly the room connection is giving us a 10 mbit sec. link. It is surprising because we are in Hangzhou....a sort of resort city 2 hours SE of Shanghai which we will be going to next. So, i am trying to bang out as many posts as i can right now while i have the chance to write.

Tour stuff:
Beijing traffic is (NewYork x 5) all day long. It seems that the whole day is rush hour! Couple that with the driving style being (Boston x 2) + (Bicycles everywhere!) and you have a bunch of marvelled Seattleite tour members who are used to the tame, orderly (somewhat wussyish) Seattle way of driving and walking. I got a chuckle out off that. I actually got so fed up being stuck in traffic all day that I jumped out of a cab when we were going shopping on the last day. Sorry guys. The cab driver yelled at my friends after I bailed. I have already made my amends to them.

From what I saw, the Beijing people are nice, focused, and want what Americans want: To be happy and to get along. There is a lot of opportunity over here. We are all thinking of business ideas every day. I have made a few contacts - a BiMBA student through my Chinese friend from Seattle U. and a U.S. embassy official through an expat friend of a friend from Boston - thus building my guan xi (network of helpful contacts which you need to do business in China). When you look at China and business opportunities..no matter what the idea...you have to keep thinking of the number 1.3 Billion. That is the number of people who live here. Therefore, any idea may be plausible. Income in the cities is on the rise and prices are still down. That is the only thing that concerns me....whatever you sell here will have a lower margin due to prices that you would need to make up for in volume and low cost. Which means you would most likely set up shop here to take advantage of the workforce and low wages. There is a unemployment issue still happening here but that could change as more JV (joint ventures) are set up here or more investment comes in from abroad. I have a few ideas rolling around right now. I was also reading an English printed Chinese newspaper on the flight from Beijing and it was mentioning issues with pension deficiencies which may force the gov to raise the retirement age from 50 to 55. The fact that the banking system is still immature here and consumer credit is not as regulated or integrated between various banks, still leaves China on a long road up so expect plenty of bumps if you want to do something here. However, the ex-pat execs and the locals will all tell you that the cities are changing so fast and development is happening.


Ok, very quickly...Great Wall last Monday. We got inundated with the local farmers of Simatai who "accompanied" us up the wall. Each farmer grabbed one of the wealthy Americans and became our Moose - (See the M.A.S.H. episode that explains what a Moose is). The woman who latched on to me got me to buy her overpriced books...oh well, these people are poor and it only amounted to $8 US. (The Yuan or RMB - Chinese money is pegged to the US Dollar ~8.3 to 1 by the way).

Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City (Goong-Goon sp?) were Tuesday. More tourist stuff.
Beijing U. on Wednesday, Siemens and Boeing on Thursday. Travel to Hangzou on Friday. By the way, we are in a different hotel here. It is the Eastern Commerce Hotel 86.571.86118888

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to a "Tea Ceremony" to the local tea grower plantation. This was basically: get everyone excited about the tea and soak us with a buy 2 large can get a small can for free fast pitch from a cute, charismatic Chinese girl. They made about $1600 US off of us. It was actually a first hand look at what business is all about should have earned us 3 credits on entrepreneurship. :-)

Good food....Great People on tour. We all sang Karaoke last night...a lot of fun!!
JP