We all met for breakfast in the hotel restaurant for my
first officially Chinese meal. I had heard mixed reviews about the food in
China, but this meal was quite good. One thing that was definitely different
was the variety of things accepted as mainstream food items. I decided to make
a plate only of items that I did not immediately recognize or that you wouldn’t
find in a US hotel restaurant and give it a whirl. Most of it was quite good,
especially the different kinds of fruit that they had.
My "all Chinese stuff" breakfast plate. It was darn good! That white, puffy things was filled with a sweet, black jelly of some sort, and that pear-looking thing was crisp, refreshing, and delicious! I ate one every chance I got.
A street-cart vendor near our hotel selling grilled corn-on-the-cob and grilled sweet potatoes. Yum! Later in Yiwu there were a lot of similar vendors selling long wedges of a Chinese variety of cantaloupe on a stick, which were delicious!
It was great getting to know everyone after a much needed
night’s rest. It turns out the guy who slept through his flight was getting on
a different flight and would be joining us later that evening. We were kind of
taking things easy as the training technically didn’t start until tomorrow, so
I took some time to go and wander around the vicinity outside our hotel.
Everything was very clean, but at the same time there was so much construction
going on everywhere that things seemed kind of chaotic as well. It was quite
humid and overcast, but the infamous Chinese air quality didn’t seem too bad to
me at first blush.
We checked out of the hotel and loaded up in several
mini-van cabs with all of our luggage to make our way to the train station. I
had the chance to talk to Trish, from Arizona, who was there with her two
daughters. We swapped real estate stories as I marveled at the endless expanse
of high-rise commercial and residential buildings that just seemed to go on and
on as we drove the 30 minutes or so to the train station. We got our tickets
and boarded the high-speed mag-lev train in Shanghai and headed to Yiwu.
My closest view of downtown Shanghai's recognizable "bottle opener" building, the Shanghai World Financial Center building. For a while it was the tallest building in China (1,614 feet, 101 floors above ground), until it's neighbor (also pictured), the Shanghai Tower was constructed.
A pretty cool bridge over one of the Shanghai area's many, many canals.
The Shanghai/Pudong train station. Very clean, very nice, very loud, and very very busy.
I ended up next to a Chinese guy who was watching some
melodramatic action-drama on his iPhone at full volume without headphones. He
even mimed to me at one point to switch seats with him so he could sit closer
to the power jack. Behind me, Matt sat next to Kerry and the two recorded an
interview for Kerry’s podcast collaboration with Mike and Matt called “Easy
Residual Income.” I listened in while I stared out the window trying to take in
as much of the Chinese scenery as I could. As we zipped along at almost 300/kph
I noticed that I never saw a speck of land that could be classified as
“undeveloped,” for agricultural, residential, or commercial purposes. It wasn’t
until we were about 30 minutes inland from Shanghai and started reaching some
of the more mountainous terrain that the steep hillsides and rocky outcrops
resisted the comprehensive use of the land. We passed so many canals, a
sizeable river, and high-rise after high-rise after high-rise. It seems they
build high-rises in bulk as it seemed if you ever spotted one high-rise under
construction you’d quickly notice 5-6 more right next to it. Oddly, many of the completed high-rises
looked utterly vacant, and I spoke with Matt and Kerry about the rumors of
China’s “ghost cities.”
An impressive-looking mosque in a wide, green area within one of a seemingly endless collection of high-rises. According to the internet there are about 21,000,000 Muslims in China as of 2015.
More high-rises being built in bulk. Views like this were a constant during my trip. It boggles the mind!
We passed by this massive downtown-looking area on the banks of a large river somewhere between Shanghai and Yiwu. We wondered if this was the Chinese Manhattan look-alike that some people had heard of. However, a Google search indicated that the official Chinese Manhattan is closer to Beijing up North, so who knows what this is.
My first taste of China's famously picturesque mountains, about an hour inland from Shanghai.
We arrived in Yiwu after about 90 minutes on the train and
made our way to the street to rustle up some cabs. Mike and Matt explained
that, unlike in the more cosmopolitan Shanghai, we would be unlikely to find
almost anybody that spoke English in Yiwu. This proved very true with our cab
drivers and, since we had to spread out across 5 or so cabs (with Matt and Mike
being the only ones who had ever been to the hotel we would be staying out),
most of us just had to cross our fingers and hope that there wasn’t more than
one Marriott hotel in Yiwu. After a fairly long and anxious cab ride, our
cabbie pointed to a giant hotel looming in the distance that said “Marriott” on
top. “Maria? Maria?” he seemed to ask, pointing at the hotel and looking for
confirmation. We gave the thumbs up, hoping that was the right one, and our
cabbie cut into oncoming traffic, weaving through 5 lanes of cars, and pulled
us into the drop off at the Yiwu Marriott. Driving in China is an amazing
experience, and no one seems to take the rules of the road anywhere near as
seriously as we do in the US. Perhaps that’s because there’s so much traffic
that no matter where you are you never get going very fast. Perhaps it’s just
that people are used to driving a different way, paying attention to the other
drivers more than to lane markers or traffic lights, and using their discretion
to get where they’re going as quickly as possible. In any case, it was always
an adventure and sure made you feel alive.
In a "Hindsight is 20/20" moment, Mike and Matt had Jing write up some English/Chinese instructions to use with Yiwu cab drivers after the somewhat nerve-wracking adventure of trying to get everyone from the train station to the hotel in 4 different cabs.
We got checked in and my room was AMAZING. This was probably
the nicest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in as an adult. We all met in the hotel
restaurant again for dinner and, as seemed to be something of a pattern I was
noticing with Chinese restaurants, our food took a long time to get to us. When
it arrived, it was great, but man, almost everyplace we ate in China was slower
than slow when it came to actually getting us our food. Who knows why.
Mike and Matt told us all to meet for breakfast in the
executive lounge on the 32nd floor in the morning and then we would
head down to the conference room to start our first official day of Amazon
Secrets training.
