China

Over the last year, I’ve travelled to Shenzhen in China five times, and I’ve got it down to a fine art. On several occasions I’ve provided colleagues with a cheat-sheet on how to deal with such things as Shekou ferry tickets and immigration paperwork. But on my last trip I tried something new, and I…

Only in China…. My local convenience store now carries Lays Blueberry Flavor Potato Chips. They’re not very good.

We finished our meetings here in Xi’an, and tomorrow morning some of us are flying down to Shenzhen. (The others will stay here with the Xi’an team.) Our last evening here went out with a bang: a team New Year party in anticipation of the Chinese Spring Festival in a couple of weeks. Much 白酒…

So I have seen the Eighth Wonder of the World. And the title was aptly bestowed – it was magnificent, a wonderful experience. You can check out the photographs I took here. I’m not going to give a detailed account, but there were a couple of interesting moments: While we were driving out of Xi’an…

Another month, another business trip. On Monday I’ll be heading back to China for nearly three weeks. First I’m going to Xi’an, flying United to Beijing and Hainan to Xi’an. A week later, I’ll fly down to Shenzhen, before flying home from Hong Kong. It’ll be my first visit to Xi’an, and fortunately I’ll have…

Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now part of China, it is still a separate country for many purposes. You need to pass through customs and immigration to go from one to the other, and you need a visa which will permit this. Even Chinese mainland residents need a visa to go to Hong…

I’ve let my social networking – blogging, FaceBook, Twittering, whatever – slide over recent weeks. Mostly it’s because of the sheer frenzy of life, but the Great Firewall blocking Twitter and FaceBook doesn’t help. So let me recap a bit. Three weeks ago my team and I came out to Shenzhen for two weeks of…

View here, at me.com.

This morning I took a taxi from my Shenzhen hotel (the Pavilion Century Tower) to Minsk World. The Minsk is a Soviet-era aircraft carrier (or battle-cruiser) which was sold off and converted into a theme park in Shenzhen. The taxi ride cost 60 RMB, and took me through a series of spectacular tunnels, the longest…

SEG is a marketplace – a bazaar, really – in downtown Shenzhen. It stretches the imagination in many ways. One floor after another of shops – no, make that stalls – selling every kind of electronic THING you can think of. Cables (power, ribbon, CAT-10, and everything in between), connectors, plugs, sockets, connector locking devices,…