A few weeks back, my coworker Dr. Ying and I were notified that we were to fly to Shanghai in a week to support some meetings with our customer. So, on Monday, November 11, we made our way to the airport and headed to the Far East.
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| Checking out the cockpit of the 747 |
Previously, my favorite ride in the sky was provided by the advanced Boeing 777 - the first commercial airliner to feature fully reclining seats in business class. Prior to the trip, I lamented to our program manager Yifei that my long connections were all on the older 747 aircraft, which only featured partially reclining seating. She assured me that I would not be disappointed, as Delta had upgraded the business class seating on their 747 fleet. As it turns out, she was right - not only are the new 747 seats fully reclining, they are actually bigger and feature nicer entertainment systems than those on their 777 fleet!
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| New 747 Business Class seating |
After about a 30 hour day of traveling, I settled into my hotel room. It was a very nice corner room that, as such, featured panoramic windows on two of the four walls:
While this setup certainly afforded some very nice vistas, it also contributed to an ancillary problem - the climate control of the room was terrible, and I often found myself shivering at night as temperatures dropped! I later learned that the hotel actually had portable heating units available to borrow to mitigate issues such as this - a shame I learned this only after my last night in the hotel!
Each morning, before breakfast, we would take walks in the park near the hotel. One of the coolest things about Shanghai and other large cities in China are the parks - lots of people gather there in the mornings for recreational activities and exercise such as tai chi, jogging, and badminton:
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| The park is at the bottom left of this photo taken from my hotel room |
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| Panoramic view of one of the park's ponds |
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| A nice bokeh shot of some of the horticulture in the park |
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| Another bokeh shot of some Tai Chi in the park |
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| Some Er hu (sort of a Chinese violin) playing in the park |
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| Badminton - one of the most popular activities in China |
The next few days were characterized by all day meetings with the customer at one of two locations - our company's nearby Shanghai office or our customer's impressive, but not-so-nearby facility about an hour's drive away in the Pudong area. Meetings in China also tend to feature large luncheons, and business trips in general tend to feature large dinners, so once again, I found myself eating far too much for most of the trip.
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| One of the huge buildings at our customer's new facility in Pudong |
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| Mandarin orange trees in the back part of the facility! Yum! |
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| Scale model of the facility |
Another side effect that I learned about was my motion sickness. In my previous trips to Shanghai, I was able to take the metro to work on most days. However, since the customer moved their operations to Pudong, there are no longer any nearby metro stations. Thus, on days where we were to meet at the customer's facility, we ended up taking a cab. Due to the crazy driving techniques and the stop-and-go traffic of Shanghai, I found myself feeling absolutely miserable at the end of these days - the effects of meeting all day, eating too much for lunch, being jet-lagged in the afternoon, and getting motion sickness on the way back to the hotel...
After a few hours of rest, it was Google Hangouts time with the family!
And so each day went for the first week of work in Shanghai...
