Lowe’s, Yangshan Deep Water Port, China Solutions

We had another early hotel departure time at 7:30am today. We had lots of visits to get in and rescheduling because of the Dragon Boat Festival so we have a few very full days after that one day off. Our first stop was to Lowe’s where we met with the head of product sourcing. He was another American guy in charge of this office and we just had a little question and answer session where he told some stories and stuff. Then from there we headed on our 2 hour drive out to the Yangshan deep water port. This is the busiest port in the world based on the weight of goods that pass through it (Singapore is the biggest in terms of number of ships that pass through). We went to the overlook and were able to take a few pictures and then we went on a tour to see the operating room with all the cameras looking at stuff going on in the actual wharf. It wasn’t really all that exciting because there was some translating difficulty so we weren’t able to learn all that much. It just seemed like we didn’t get to do all that much for driving two hours both ways.

After our long drive back we went straight to our dinner at the Peninsula seafood restaurant. We met with the CEO of China Solutions who consults with businesses to help them transition to China. He is a lawyer from UVa law school and specializes in doing Chinese contracts I think. He had his clients there who run a company called Bambu and they told the story of how they started their company and a little of hoe China Solutions helped them. The content was interesting but the dinner was probably the worst that we have had so far. First of all, it was seafood (and strange seafood, like I have no clue what anything was) so it smelled really bad the whole time. They also kept bringing dishes out; definitely the biggest dinner we have had so far (also the grossest though). They must have brought everything they had on their menu! Our whole table didn’t even touch at least 5 of the dishes brought towards the end. After dinner I just came back to the hotel after a very long day and I am excited for some more good sleep.