China - Shanghai - 3/16/2005

Today I woke up feeling a bit better, after a very long night of sleep.
We went in the morning to meet up with the Jiao Tong team, and we finally got to be all together to do a bit of field research for our project.
We split into two smaller teams mixed between the UT and Jiao Tong students, and we managed to go visit a small business in Shanghai to ask them about their computer purchasing behavior. We managed to get some interesting feedback for our project, especially as to the importance of the computer malls and system integrators for these companies. The description of the system integrators in China is very similar to the way they are in Latin America, thus raising some significant questions as to how can Dell fulfill the needs of this market segment successfully.
The only drawback to our trip to visit these companies, was that since it was cold and rainy it was very tough to get a taxi on the street, and I ended up standing out in the cold without my heavy jacket (I was wearing my suit) for around 40 minutes, I'm sure this will screw up my cold again.
From interviewing the employees at the company we went to another "Lazy Susan" lunch that was unremarkable.
After lunch we drove for almost two hours to visit a State Owned company called BaoSteel. This company produces many steel pieces, and has seen significant growth because of the economic development and expansion in China. The presentation was extremely dry and boring, with people actually falling asleep during it (yeah, they were even snoring and all!), the speaker didn't even notice the person sleeping, but then again, his charts were boring enough that he probably needed to focus on them a lot to avoid falling asleep.
After the boring presentation we toured the steel plant, unfortunately due to the cold weather we were unable to see too much out the windows. The only interesting part was a visit into one of the factory buildings where we saw a coil of steel being rolled, it was interesting to see the process.
Ironically during the presentation and the tour, the guide kept mentioning that they were "highly ecologic" and how "green" they were, yet they're producing steel, and their safety mechanisms seemed to leave a lot to be desired, since we were able to see the burning hot steel moving through the whole process. But i guess if it makes them feel better they can fool themselves as much as they want to.
That night we had dinner at a Brazilian BBQ restaurant, that was an all you can eat steak place. Finally a place where I could enjoy the food in China :)
For less than 10 bucks we each filled up on a lot of meat cuts, and FLAN!!! Yes, they have Flan in China too. I was VERY happy during this meal, so much I was unable to stand up from all i ate. This seemed to be a popular hangout amongst the expatriates living in Shanghai, since I think the only Chinese people in the restaurant were the Jiao Tong students.
Once again I passed up the drinking outing to go spend a nice night with my Nyquill... rumor has it was a very fun night for those who went out, since they got back around 4:30 am.