Shenzhen

Wow! Two posts in such close proximity?! It's amazing!

Well, I went to Shenzhen last Thursday for the primary reason of conducting some field research about Wal-Mart and Carrefour for my marketing case. Maibritt was pretty excited since it was going to be her first visit to a Wal-Mart ever!! We left pretty early, met at the train station at 7:45 am, which meant a 25 min. walk from my place to the station..oi. I also realized I forgot my passport halfway there, so I ran back, then walked up the giant hill and ran back down. I thought I was going to trip over my feet the whole way down..but I made it safely! It took us only half an hour by train to get to the border, meaning I'm closer to China than to the central area of Hong Kong. Wow. We crossed the border, and the immigration man didn't think it was me, so he had someone else come look at my passport. At least he's careful? I gave him a death glare though, there was no way I was getting detained at immigration.

We made it through and took a taxi to Queen's Spa to prepare ourselves for the 'rigorous' research we'd have to conduct later. Going into the spa was like walking into a different world. Everyone's walking around in a standard issued set of PJ's. There's also reclining seats with TV's where you can sleep! That's where you can order different services, such as foot massages. All of us went for the 90 minute Chinese massage. I'm fine with a 30 min. but 90 min. was all they had. My body felt like jello afterwards since I was so relaxed! Afterwards we indulged in the free fruit and juice bar! I got tons of lychee! And some weird tasting Taro Ice Cream. We took some time to rest in the sleeping seats. Maibritt and I went upstairs to get our eyebrows done while Svenja and Simone got foot massages! We ended up having lunch/dim sum there too. It was strange sitting in PJ's while eating lunch in the dining area since it was decorated nicely.

We finally left and took a taxi to Carrefour, a French-based hypermarket. Svenja took tons of pics for our presentation! Their live market was more extensive than Wal-Mart's. You could catch your own live fish, prawns, turtles, etc. I saw a woman with a fish still jumping around in the net, she handed it to the man at the scale/register and he proceeded to whack it on the floor, which proved to be an effective way to make the fish stop jumping around. Wow.

Wal-Mart was Wal-Mart, just tailored to the Chinese consumer. We bought some wontons, Chinese pancakes, etc. for dinner and sat outside. How lovely. Check out my pics!

Maibritt and I stayed behind in the Lo Wu Comercial Center. There were so many stalls and people yelling at us to come look at bags, wallets, etc. all fakes. I'm glad I'm Chinese so they don't bother me as much, but at every shop they would say to Maibritt, "Hey lady, wanna look at bag or wallet?", "Hey nice lady! come look!", etc. It's like the papparazzi. Really.

And that's my trip to Shenzhen!

Macau

I guess I'm going to aim for monthly reports! February has flown by, I really don't know where the time has gone...my last exam is April 22nd, so I'm already halfway through! Really? I would say February has been pretty intense with activity. I went to Macau for Valentine's weekend with Jenny, Sabrina, and Maibritt. It's only an hour ferry ride away. We stayed at the Venetian, which I heard has the most square footage of any building in the world? Or something like that. And to explain, Macau is basically the Las Vegas of the east. There are tons of new hotels being constructed, but they already have tons of casinos, such as the Wynn, Sofitel 16, Grand Lisboa, etc. The Venetian is a little further out, but you could spend days in there shopping! Haha. Right when we got to the hotel we were able to check in, and then we took a taxi to St. Paul's Cathedral Ruins. Macau used to be a Portuguese colony, so it was really cool to see European style buildings and streets in an Asian city. It was a nice area with a fortress, tons of almond cookie shops, and Portuguese egg tarts, so we had a sweet lunch there. You could really tell it was all tourists though, so we left around 3pm to head back to the hotel. We got ready for dinner and the Cirque du Soleil show, Zaia.

We took a taxi to a village to have dinner. Everyone stared at us since we were so overdressed and the restaurants there definitely weren't high class, but I was excited about tasting some Asian food with a Portuguese flair! The restaurant we wanted to go to didn't open until 6, and we were half an hour early so we walked around...not much to see, went back to hte restaurant and hovered outside waiting for it to open. A woman was standing inside...not doing anything, so I tried to get her attention, but it didn't work. About 5 minutes til 6, a guy goes in, and it turns out they were fully booked for the night, so we waited for nothing :( Needless to say, we were bitter towards the woman that basically watched us for half an hour. So we went to another restaurant the concierge had suggested called Dumbo. And it actually had a picture of dumbo the flying elephant outside so I was pretty skeptical. But we go upstairs and it turns out to be a nice place with a number of customers already. We ordered the local specialties, such as African Chicken and Fried Fishballs (balls made out of fish..just to clarify). Then we went to another place and got the Sawdust cake, it was really fluffy and whipped with yummy crushed biscuit, making the sawdust part of the cake. Went back to the hotel and watched Zaia. It was amaaaaazing, as to be expected from a Cirque du Soleil show. Before the show I noticed a guy was walking up the aisle and I did a double-take since I realized he was NOT wearing normal clothes. Turns out it was one of the performers from the show and he gave us roses! Ahhhh Romeo!

After the show we went to the casino, I only played slots and lost all my money since I had no idea what I was doing and the instructions were in Chinese. Instead, I lived vicariously through Jenny who played War, and another game called Sic...something. It was really cool walking around the casino, but there were a lot of tourists there, so there weren't many high stakes games going on.

The next morning we had a delicious breakfast buffet at the hotel. There was so much good fruit, scrambled eggs, chicken sausage..mmmmm. I've been missing a hearty breakfast, so I was pretty excited when I saw the HUGE buffet line. Afterwards we spent the whole morning shopping around the Venetian Canal Shoppes, and left around 1pm. We all had work to do :( But it was a lovely Valentine's weekend!

Coming up next, my trip to Shenzhen and the island of Tap Mun!