Day 5 - The 18 Hour Day!

Our travelers are all troopers. Today we were on the bus at 6:00 am to head off to the airport for our flight to Shanghai. We were all in our business clothes since we had a company visit as soon as we arrived. The flight to Shanghai was uneventful and – compared to a similar 2-hour flight on a US airline – we were actually served a nice breakfast including yogurt, a salad of celery corn and 1,000 year old egg, black rice congee, and a ham sandwich.

In Shanghai, all of our luggage arrived amazingly quickly and we were met by our Shanghai guide Vickie Chen. Not long into our bus ride from the airport, we realized that Shanghai is a very different city from Beijing. It is said that as Beijing is to our Washington, DC Shanghai is to New York. There are SO many skyscrapers in Shanghai – and SO many people. The current population is between 20 and 21 million – about SEVEN times the population of Chicago. The architecture here is amazing from the new Oriental Pearl TV tower to the “bottle opener” building to the older gorgeous buildings on the Bund.

We are quickly learning more Chinese words. One of the first we learned from Vickie is “lingalina” which means wonderful. Vickie also has a charming phrase for asking us if we need to use the washroom. She asks if we want to visit the “happy room.”

Our business visit today was to Lear Automotive in the Pudong area of the city. Lear is one of the major suppliers of automotive seats to the major car manufacturers. We were first met by Mr. Mathew Ma, vice president, who gave us a tour of the showroom, explained the innovations Lear brought to the market, and answered our many questions. In this picture, you can see a picture of Mr. Ma with a seat using foam made from soy bean oil.

We were most fortunate at this visit to speak not only with Mr. Ma, but also with Charles Chang, Vice President & Managing Director China, Mike Shanlikian, Asia Electrical & Electronics Finance Director (and recent Michigan State EMBA graduate), and Dr. Tom Tang who is the President of Asia Pacific. Dr. Tang gave us an excellent presentation and then we had a Q&A session with the other three gentlemen.

After this we were happy to go check into our new hotel – the Howard Johnson Business Club Hotel – unpack and rest for a little while. This is a new, very modern hotel. The rooms are lovely but quite small – real estate is VERY expensive here!

After dinner we went to the ERA acrobatic show. This is a cross between a traditional Chinese acrobatics show and Cirque du Soleil. Everyone loved this performance. Here you can see the group just before the show. We had wonderful seats in the 4th and 5th rows. By consensus, our favorite acts were the motorcycles in a huge metal ball – there were 8 in the ball at one time – and the Chinese “Romeo and Juliet” act in which a boy and a girl flew through the air suspended only by ribbons.

After this, as you can imagine, we went back to the hotel and collapsed. From getting up in Beijing at 4:30 am to going to bed in Shanghai at 10:00 pm – it was a long day. However, Steve reminds me that the students have been doing this for a year...