Sunday, May 8, 2011

We arrived in Shijiazhuang ( in Chinese: 石家庄 ) !!!

Hey!!!
Today a bus took us to the place where we will spend the next 4 weeks - Shijiazhuang! Our 5 hours bus drive was a bit of a flashback to school days, when you drove somewhere with the whole class in a bus... we were exchanging words in different languages, were trying our newly learned Chinese words on each other, sharing snacks and really had lots of fun.

The hotel had a moving banner saying "Welcome IBM experts to Shijiazhuang!" Wow! Immediately the old  doubts regarding "being as knowledgable as expected" were arising again... but it was very sweet of them and flattering of course.

We got our rooms and our local cell phones now - poor Mukul got the room in the 7th floor while all others stay on the 8th floor. We immediately picked up the open-door policy the China 12 team seemed to have been using, which is really feeling nice though it sucks (sorry) not to have Mukul here. At a point we all ended up in Duli's room sitting on his bed with our notebooks on our knees. This was quite a funny situation and gave an impression how our work will look like in the days to come.

The rooms are very small and lack a wardrobe which frustrates us all more or less as we do not know where to store our business attire. But we will find a way. The internet works fine, as you can see.. :-)
The rooms are not really very clean which stresses me a bit, I think I will go to the supermarket and buy some cleaning stuff to make it more comfortable as I will have to make it work for me the next 4 weeks...

Tomorrow is the great day - we will see our clients for the first time! We will put together all our presentations tomorrow morning, hoping to find the right format to present us to our Chinese hosts..

Stay tuned for more excitement...  - Sue

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