It was a whirlwind tour of China the last week of August and first week of September. I flew into Hong Kong Sunday night, having left Seattle Friday morning, then got up early Monday morning to start an intense work week with our distributors first thing. Thank goodness I managed to stay awake for most of the 20 or more hours of the travel time so I was easily able to fall asleep on their time Sunday night. The first week in Hong Kong was pleasant with the exception of the stifling heat. I went running a couple of early mornings during the work week, each time returning to my hotel completely drenched in sweat and so redfaced that the locals probably though I was about to collapse and die right there. The air quality was not too bad as far as air quality in large cities goes. I even managed an 8 mile run on Saturday morning, before continuing another day of work (unfortunately no time for tourism...this trip was ALL business). I ran up the ridge behind Causeway Bay where my hotel was located in the city, to where I could get a good view of Hong Kong, including seeing over the other side of the ridge (below, left)
.It was incredible to see how tall they build the buildings in Hong Kong. I was told that they do not have earthquakes which is why they can build super tall skinny buildings, even for their condos and apartments.
Monday night I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong where the menu had some highly amusing Engrish...(not that I can complain as I was very lucky there was any English at all on the menu, and they certainly know far more English than my Chinese, which is minimal at best). Note the Bastard Mullet on the menu. Rather than a fatherless child with a terribly redneck hairstyle I am guessing they meant a type of fish which had been basted...
Above: the Hong Kong skyline is quite a site at night.Next I flew on Sunday to Shanghai (below).
I would have 2 days in Shanghai, very packed with work. The person showing me around Shanghai in the evenings showed me the location of the very first communist party meeting, a very famous place in China apparently. They are curious to know if we Americans know of Chairman Mao, and of course I did. I asked what they think of Mao, while trying not to convey anything about what I knew with tone of voice. I was told by my guide that evening that Mao was a great man who brought about great change in China. I asked "but didn't Mao cause the death of more people than Hitler and his Holocaust?" (knowing the answer). The uniform response across China apparently is that what Mao did was 70% good and 30% bad (I later heard the same answer repeated with only a slightly different 80:20 ratio from a friend in the US who had lived in China for a couple of years). It was a bit creepy in an *answers this similar can only come from brainwashing* kind of way. I couldn't help but think that the 70% good would have to be quite miraculous indeed to make the deaths of tens of millions of people amount to only 30% of his cumulative influence.
After a busy 2 days in Shanghai, I flew to Shijiazhuang (don't even ask me to pronounce it...even when I thought I finally had it right people would still try to correct me), which is near Beijing. I stayed in the Xiemei Business Hotel, which was touted to be a 5 star hotel and when I arrived after midnight from my flight, I plopped down on the bed exhausted only to find that the bed was rock hard. I sat there in shock for a second then pulled the side of the sheet up enough to investigate what was underneath. It turned out that the bed only had box springs, but no mattress. I went down to the front desk and asked if there was a mistake as my bed had no mattress and was therefore less comfortable than the floor. After trying to speak to several different hotel employees, none of whom spoke English, they said all rooms were that way. I was stunned. I spent a miserable, sleepless night on the box springs then had the hotel put a few more mattress pads on the box springs for the next night. To add insult to injury the hotel allowed smoking so throughout the night I had a constant stream of smoke wafting into my room from the adjacent rooms. Early the morning after my 2nd night there, we hopped on the train to Beijing where I spent a pleasant night in a swanky holiday inn express in downtown (I have to say that Holiday Inn Express is really a great option throughout Asia
for those of us who like mattresses on our beds). My day in Beijing was very busy and the extent of my sightseeing was a quick glimpse of the bird's nest olympic stadium from the freeway. To be fair, our distributor employees tried that evening to get me a closer look, but all was blocked by police for the paralympic games starting up.
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