The Western Bubble of Wuhan is just across the street from the hotel … the local Starbucks store. Stepping into it feels a bit like stepping back into Western culture, suddenly the cacophony of sounds is changing to relative calm with only subtle music in the background. The outside hustle and bustle changes to a relaxed atmosphere, food is Western, desserts are sweet and sugary – and eaten with forks rather than chopsticks.

Entering and leaving the place has somewhat the feeling of crossing an invisible and sudden (cultural) border … from China into the West and vice versa.

For me this Western Bubble feels a bit like a double-edged sword … on the one hand we are here to experience Chinese culture, so spending too much time at Starbucks will not support that experience … on the other hand, it is nice to know there is place nearby, one can go to when one needs a break from China or just some proper afternoon cake.

In any case – we (i.e. the manufacturing sub-team) crossed that border today once more and made it into Starbucks country to discuss how to proceed with our other customers (after the first final presentation yesterday) – and to dig into some good cheese cake.

A busy working week is close to an end … we have worked hard this week, most days only leaving the hotel for food – or to continue work with slightly more bandwidth and better supply of hot (and cold) coffee or tea based beverages at Starbucks.

Today we have finalized the first presentation for one client and handed it over to the interns for translation. Tomorrow – Friday – will be a short day; I plan a couple of hours in the morning to review and prepare for my part of the presentation – the final presentation meeting with that client is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Around midday we then plan to leave for Yichang – and the Yangtze river … and a weekend on a cruise boat. I had done that before – more than six years back, before the dam had been finished, I am really curious to see how the scenery changed.

See my photos from six years back – dam (under construction) and the big and little three gorges. Current photos will follow on Sunday or Monday.

Getting there … job-wise

Today was a busy day; in the morning we continued with the work on our individual bits of the presentation for one of our clients. We then spent (once more) most of the afternoon at Starbucks to start reviewing slides and putting the overall slide deck together.

We also involved the interpreters into that effort to ensure we convey the correct message and meaning, when the slides are finally translated to Chinese.

Getting there … weekend-plan

Today was also a milestone in the planning for the upcoming weekend (in PM talk one could call today ‘Plan Exit’) … we signed the contract with the travel agent and will leave Wuhan on Friday to go for a Yangtze cruise over the weekend.

Getting there indeed was a milestone … the steps to come to an agreement over the final contract included extensive discussions within our team, numerous visits to the travel agent, review of several options, detailed study of the proposed itinerary and proposed contract – including a final discussion down to footnote level.

Given my travel arranger role (that I somehow got assigned in the first couple of days), I found myself at one stage today with an amount of cash (11.4 K Yuan) that I would consider huge even from a European standpoint …

Overall we are getting there … our first presentation should be ready for translation tomorrow – and the weekend will be there to celebrate and relax on the Yangtze 😉

Today we had one of those typical working days; spending most of the morning working on research and creating presentation with a level-set meeting in between.

In the afternoon my sub-team headed for the office of the local IBM branch – mainly for connectivity reasons (the bandwidth in the hotel is shared … so during the weekend it was acceptable, while now it is not reliable at all). On top of that most things outside the Great Firewall come in slowly (independent on where one connects … hotel, office or Starbucks) with unpredictable blocking occurring (e.g. yesterday I could not access ibm.com from the hotel; facebook remains a 50:50 joker, some also have issues with wikipedia and google).

So we decided to use our connections (or guānxì / 关系 as the locals say) to get into the IBM office to at least do our research without excessive waiting times … we were still behind the Firewall though …

In the late afternoon we had a meeting with the local IBM management to get an introduction to IBM [Central] China and the situation of the region.

After the meeting we had dinner before heading back to the hotel.