amdavidson

Getting to Suzhou Part II

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/UWf5

So then I got on the flight and immediately realized that business class is a whole new world... I'm not sure how I'm going to fly economy again...

The seats are large and comfortable, the stewardesses actually pay attention to you, they give you the whole can of soda. It was nice.

For my in flight meal(s), I had the smoked salmon for my appetizer, and the pork with some sort of mustard seed crust, and then chocolate cheesecake for desert. I still wouldn't call it gourmet, but it's about as well as I could have cooked any of it. Then towards the end of the flight I was served a pastrami/turkey/swiss cheese sandwich melt.

The inflight movies were kinda nice, but it was interesting how they ran them... all the movies started at the same time, and then they would just keep them running until the last movie finished, at which point they would all restart simultaneously... this was nice in that you could, in theory, figure out how long the longest movie was and then calculate when movie start times were, but I couldn't figure that out, and it wasn't listed in the "entertainment guide".

But I did manage to read ~150 pages in my book, watch 3 movies (Dewey Cox, National Treasure II, and August Rush, Dewey Cox was surprisingly good and the others were miserable).

All in all, the flight wasn't that bad... I read some emails that I had downloaded to my laptop, and not read yet... got some personal projects on the computer done... and the first 9 hours went by real fast. The last three and change were a little slow... but it was fine, I just read and tried to nap (unsuccessfully) and passed the time however I could.

At the airport we got through security and got our bags and got out to the pick up area quickly... but could not find the guy that was supposed to pick us up and bring us to the hotel. We wandered back and forth looking for someone holding a sign that had our name, or the vendor's name, or something... We called the vendor and our contact told us that the driver was in the airport. Well eventually after wandering around, Matt noticed "Catch..." on a rolled up piece of paper wadded in his fist, and held at his thigh. Matt yelled at the man, and introduced me to the "point back and forth" method of talking to people.

Basically, we don't talk to anyone... there's lots of pointing and gesturing... but it seems to work well enough in my first 18 or so hours here.

Well we got into a car with him, and went on a wild ride back and forth through traffic, passing on the right just as frequently as passing on the left... it was a phenomenally interesting drive, and is the standard... but there were surprisingly few close calls, everyone just expects it and deals with it.

We got to the hotel and checked in, that was easy and then went to my room, and crashed... I barely got my teeth brushed before hitting the bed.

But when I awoke, I did pay a bit of attention to the quality of the hotel, and it's nice... very asian styling, kinda pagoda-y. but the bathroom is all granite, there's an LCD TV recessed into the wall with some American channels, so that will be nice if there is some downtime in the evening.

And after that I went off to go to work at the vendor...

I'll update on how work actually is here after a couple of days because I am acclimating, but the last 4 or 5 days of work have had a great learning curve I'm finally starting to get up to speed with what happens here, and what my role is going to be in making it happen.