BJ business trip

(whenever i am in beijng, i always make time to pay mao a visit)

i took my first business trip last week: two days, three nights in beijing (incidentally, SR had a trip to beijing two weeks earlier). i went up with a colleague for a discussion session with google, yes, the same google that hosts this blog. they are cranking up their China business, and sent a bunch of US employees over for lots of meetings and discussions with chinese companies.

i have to admit, i enjoyed the trip. i like any kind of travel, and its fun to stay in a decent hotel and take taxis on the company dime. my previous trips to beijing had been pretty positive, most importantly meaning, the weather was ok. on this trip, however, the pollution mixed in with dust blown in from mongolia (which isnt far away), as well as it being unseasonably cold, made it pretty uncomfortable. and beijing traffic is the worst! just too many cars and some bad freeways. going to beijing made me appreciate living in shanghai. the city is just laid out better, it doesn't take 45 minutes to get everywhere, and the air, though still dirty, is much cleaner than in Beijing. however, one thing i do like about beijing is that everyone speaks mandarin there; there is no shanghai dialect, which doesnt really make my own communicating any easier, but does make it much easier to eavesdrop on other people's conversations.

so paul and i gave a short presentation to the google guy's about china's internet market and then took questions from them (we shared the panel with another research firm) for the next hour. i wore a tie for the first time in who knows how long. it went fine, no major blunders, and nothing too exciting. later in the day i interviewed a chinese internet company similar to youtube.com.
the big event of the trip was the next day, when google was hosting a party to announce the chinese name of the company, which turned out to be a word that means "harvest song", a pretty strange choice in my opinion. but it was a pretty fun party. google CEO eric schmidt was there (pictured on the left), though i didn't get to shake his hand or anything. and "the Chinese bob dylan" (that's how he was introduced) cui jian - pictured below) played 4 songs at the party. and google gave all the guests google lava lamps! so SR has now been introduced to lava lamps, as



have the security guards at the beijing airport, who could not for the life of them figure out what the darn thing was.

so a good trip, now i am just waiting until pacific epoch grows large enough so i can take some business trips to the US.