China - Shanghai - 3/17/2005

Today was the day we established with our Jiao Tong team as the day we would use to finish our presentation for Dell, even though the latest news was that we would be unable to present here in Shanghai. We still wanted to take the time to work on it together in the same room, since working on it via the Internet wasn't as easy or straightforward. We had ironed out some recommendations on the bus ride to Baosteel the previous day, so we started out by putting those into powerpoint and took it from there.
After working on it for a couple of hours we had a presentation that we could use (although I'm still not thrilled with it). Unfortunately, since the Chinese team is not graded on their work on this project they were not very motivated to come up with a better presentation, and they didn't even seem to be interested in working for Dell, thus I did not even have that leverage... In the end I think that we came up with some good suggestions, I am now looking forward to presenting them to see how they're received.
After our presentation Kenji and I went with part of the Chinese team for a very traditional meal of Hot Pot. I had heard a lot about this, described to me as a fondue thing where you cooked vegetables and meats. A closer description is like a soup on your table that you use to stew food in. The things you can throw into the Hot pot range from normal things like noodles and veggies all the way to the bizarre like Bullfrogs and other bugs. I was not very thrilled with the meal, but at least I got to say that I did it.
After lunch we were shown to a DVD store close to the Jiao Tong where we got to explore the results of the widespread piracy in China. Movies that have barely been out in the US movie theatres were available for purchase for less than a dollar each in DVD format. Ironically this is something extremely common in China, while only 52 movies are said to be shown a year in the movie theatres (supposedly those need to be cleared by the government), all the movies are available via bootleg DVDs faster than they would be in the theaters.
From the DVD store Kenji and I went to check out the Xiao Yang market, that supposedly has a lot of counterfeit items and other gifts, while I expected something like the shopping center in Beijing, what we found was simply a very messy flea market. None of the important brands were on display in these stores, but people would keep coming over and trying to hawk these items by showing us catalog pages and asking us to follow them to their "house" to see the real stuff. To make it even worse, these people were VERY aggressive in their pestering. Personally I was very paranoid about following them, so I didn't, but I heard of some other people who did go with them and got some knock off purses and watches, although the deals were not as good as Beijing, and the environment was very shady. It seems that the police cracks down on people selling those brands inside the market, so they have the additional layer of secrecy around it.
After walking around for a while I got tired with all the loud people trying to get me to their homes, so I decided to head back to the hotel. Luckily before I left I managed to find a "North Fake" jacket to purchase for less than 17 bucks, now I can also say I belong to the China Trip group, since everybody seems to have gotten their own North Face jackets, only one of them having been bought in the US.
For dinner we had the Alumni reunion in Shanghai. It took place at a place called Viva Azul. This was a Tapas joint in the Expat neighborhood, and it was owned by a Peruvian guy living in Shanghai who looked exactly like Jefferson Ganoza (a Peruvian in our class), so after many sangrias, beers and even a Pizco Sour and some VERY good food we headed back to the hotel.
I got to see James Ding and Kai Qu, who graduated last year and now work for Dell in Shanghai, and it was great seeing them here living the life. I think there were fewer alumni that made it to this event than the one in Beijing, which makes me wonder how strong the network really is in China, but at least the recent grads did show up.