Tourist day in Shanghai

As we didn’t have any classes on Monday, we decided to spend the day as ultimate tourists here.. I, Ville and Philip from the Philippines went to the Yuyuan Garden right after breakfast. It’s one of the most lavish and finest Chinese gardens and it’s located in the Old Town of Shanghai. The entrance fee was 30yuan so it was pretty cheap also. There was a lot of fancy rockery with cliffs and caves, small ponds and rivers and pavilions. As a grey, late-winter day in February the garden wasn’t surely not that beautiful as it’ll be in the spring or summer. 

After the garden visit we saw a very long line of people waiting for dumplings (xiaolongbao here in Shanghai). We had heard from a friend that they’re the best xiaolongbao in Shanghai so we wanted to try them. After waiting almost one hour we all had the opinion that they were not worth the long and cold waiting. They were good, though. If the line isn’t that long next time I’m close to the garden, I’ll definitely eat them again :) 

In the afternoon Alix joined us and we drove for about 25 minutes with the metro to a district called Qibao. There was a small, really Chinese area with lots of tiny shops and street food places on the roads. We thought it’d be kind of a tourist place too but we seemed to be the only western people there. It was nice to see a place like that after Shanghai’s international centrum. We walked there for a good hour before taking the metro back. Alix and Philip wanted to go home shortly before our Monday evening tradition ‘Malone’s’. Ville and me wanted to walk for a while on the New Pudong area instead of going home for one hour before returning. I’ve to say that the skyscrapers look pretty nice there.. In the evening it was Malone’s time! It’s the best burger place in whole China according to many people and every Monday there’s any burger and 1 pint for 55yuan.. and the burgers are really tasty and big!

Hangzhou field trip

One part of the course called Asian Business Research was a 3-day field trip to Hangzhou city, located about 200km southwest from Shanghai. Compared to Shanghai the city felt quite small but there are still over 4 million inhabitants. We made this trip over a week ago but I’ll write something about it now..

So we started the journey on Wednesday morning at 8am and drove for about 2 hours to the biggest university in Hangzhou called the Hangzhou Normal University where we had a small tour around the campus with the Vice-President of the uni and some local students and after that a nice lunch with them. After the school visit we visited China National Tea Museum. After a short, guided tour we had the opportunity to walk around the tea plantations. Unfortunately the weather was a bit rainy so we didn’t stay there for a long time. During the evening we had quite a lot of free time that we spent at the hotel which was really nice.

On Thursday morning we headed directly to the Xiling Society of Seal Arts that was kind of a museum/workshop of various seal-related learning’s and arts. In the afternoon we made a company visit at Chiatai Qingchunbao Group, a very large pharmaceutical enterprise that produces both traditional Chinese medicines and Western medicines. Having worked a few years back for a pharmaceutical company in Finland the visit was quite interesting. In the evening we went to a Song Dynasty theme park. It was like a small town arranged in the original Song Dynasty style and the evening ended with an acrobatic dance show called ‘The Legend of Romance’.

On Friday morning we visited one of the largest telecom and network companies, Eastcom. The company’s vice-president gave us an 1-hour long presentation about the company and its products. After the presentation we walked around the plant so that we got and idea how the production processes run and we also saw many finished products. In the afternoon we had a cruise on the very long Beijing-Hangzhou Canal. The cruise’s start and end point was a rising luxury resident area. After the cruise it was time to head back to Shanghai..

Sunny day in Shanghai

This Sunday was probably the first really sunny day here in the past 3 weeks. It’s been very smoggy and cloudy for the most part but luckily it hasn’t rained that much. So as it was such a nice day today, I decided to take the local metro and drive from our apartment to the business district in the New Pudong Area. Metro seems to be the best way to get from place A to place B here since the taxi drives can sometimes be very long due to the traffic and one metro ride costs only 3 yuan. We have also a school project about Starbucks in Shanghai and I had agreed with our group members to visit one of the company’s stores located in that area so today was a perfect opportunity to do that also.. 

Right next to the famous Pearl Tower is a big, 6 story shopping mall called the Super Brand Mall in which all the world’s luxury brands have their stores. I just decided to walk around the mall and take a little snack at the Starbucks as planned. After that I walked around the New Pudong area enjoying the nice weather and looking at all beautiful buildings and views there. In the afternoon and early evening I went to the other side of the river to Bund. My plan was to wait until it gets dark to take some photos of Pudong as it’s pretty amazing with all of it’s lights on the skyscrapers. 

ESSCA Spring Program

I’m having some free time here so I decided to write something about the program we’re attending. ESSCA has its primary campus in Angers, France, and 2 side campuses in Budapest and here in Shanghai. This Shanghai campus was founded in 2007 so it’s still pretty new and quite small. The participant amount has increased annually and this year we are in total 45 students all around the world. The most part is still coming from France but the share of international students has been increasing from year to year. From these 45 students I think 25 are coming from France, all from Angers or Paris, so many of them did know each other already before coming here. From us international students me and Ville are from Finland and then there are 3 Swedish, 3 German, 2 British, 2 Canadian, 1 Mexican, 1 Guatemalan, 5 Filipinos, 1 Australian and 3 Moroccan. So it’s quite an international group which is awesome. 

This program focuses on marketing in Asia and especially in business-to-consumer (B2C) environment. In Finland my major is focusing more on B2B-marketing so it’s a nice new aspect for me. Before coming here we thought we would have also some courses focusing on supply chain but apparently here aren’t any of them.  But I’m not complaining. We are also having a Chinese course. I did back in Finland the Chinese 1 course already so hopefully after this semester I’m able to communicate some simple conversations in Chinese :) 

Normally, our school days start at 9.30am with a 3-hour lecture, after that we have a on hour lunch break and the day ends with another 3-hour lecture. Thus, we don’t have two lectures each day, depending on the courses we’ve selected. We were told to have quite many company visits too, which I’m looking forward to. We already visited the Shanghai Volkswagen (SVW) factory in the first week. The factory is located just outside Shanghai’s centrum in the automobile district. The factory was huge and it’s manufacturing VW-cars for the whole Asia being the biggest car manufacturing plant in Asia. It was very interesting to see the compound lines working and in what stages the car production in done. Hopefully we have a lot of company visits in the coming months!

First feelings of Shanghai

We’ve been in Shanghai now for just over 3 days and a lot has happened so far.. We arrived on Wednesday evening and Christophe came to the airport to pick us up. He’s a French guy working at ESSCA and organizing several things here. After the very long 14-hour flight we both were extremely tired as we didn’t get any sleep on the plane. Luckily there were personal entertainment sets for each passenger so we could watch some movies during the flight. On Thursday we had scheduled a meeting with Linda who has organized quite many apartment showings with us and 9 other students. We started at 1pm and came back to the hotel at 10pm so the day was quite long but we had the chance to see 18 apartments to choose our favorites. We picked 3 2-bedroom apts. Our number one choice didn’t go that good because as Linda called the owner that two boys would like to rent it, the owner just said ‘no boys’ and the conversation was over :) The second call went much better and we agreed on a meeting for the next afternoon. The owners couldn’t speak any English so Linda helped us a lot again and we ended up making a lease contract on a almost 100m² flat in 18^th floor with a pretty nice view. I’ll post some pictures of the flat later..

On Saturday me and Ville had to visit the local police station and the household registration authorities. There was the first Chinese person so far who could actually speak English! Luckily she wasn’t the only English speaking person as later that day we also went to the China Mobile store to get us Chinese numbers. The salesman there was speaking surprisingly good English and was all in all very helpful. Because we didn’t have any blankets, pillows or sheets in our apt, we had to take a taxi to IKEA in the evening to buy those.

We haven’t had the chance to see that much of Shanghai yet, but we’ve liked it a lot so far from what we’ve seen. There are many very tall and new buildings everywhere. Yesterday we shortly visited the biggest shopping street called Nanjing road and it is full of western stores. It can be seen here really well that especially the younger population wants to live like in the western world.. The biggest difference though is that everybody pays everything with cash. I haven’t seen any bankcards yet. For example we had to pay the deposit for our apt in cash. As the biggest bill is 100yuan (around 12€) and the deposit is several thousands, the stack of the bills was quite big :) The traffic is also extreme compared to Finland for example. As a pedestrian you have to watch out the whole time for cars and mopeds because the people here don’t really care if there’s a red light or not. Especially the scooters and mopeds drive whenever and wherever they want and don’t look for pedestrians crossing the street. The car drivers aren’t much better. Sometimes in the taxi it feels a bit scary as there are cars and mopeds coming from everywhere and many close situation happen here all the time. But besides that, I really like the taxi. The first 3 kilometers cost 14yuan (under 2€) and neither is it expensive after that. Yesterday as we came back to our apt from IKEA which was about 16 kilometers, it did cost about 5€. 

Feelings from the States

It’s been now a couple of days since we left California and I thought to write some thoughts about our experiences. For the most part the trip went pretty smoothly and as planned without any bigger surprises or misfortunes. Our trip went as follows: 8 days NYC, 3 days LA, 2 days SD, 3 days LV, 3 days SF and 1 day Santa Barbara. Afterwards it can be said that New York and San Francisco were my favorites. NY was literally a city that never sleeps and full of life. I also really liked that it was very easy to travel there with the subway. No matters at what time you want to get somewhere, the subway runs. Although we had the possibility to visit very many places and attractions in the city, 8 days weren’t enough and I want to back there in the near future, most preferably during summer time to see the Central Park like it’s known. In California and especially in LA you can’t do really anything without a car. The distances are so big and there’s like no public transportation. Since there are about 20 million people living there and everybody is driving a car, it takes sometimes many hours to get from one place to another. Being used to queue free traffic, LA was not for us :) We had bad luck with the weather in San Diego as it rained for the most time we were there. Besides that, in our opinions it’s more a summer city and during winter time there’s not that much to do. The beaches are definitely wonderful in the summer and there are many golf courses around the city. So if you’re a surfer or a golfer, the city is perfect!

Las Vegas was a place from which we all had the opinion that it was nice to go there once but there’s no reason to again. The Canyons really saved our Vegas trip because they’re amazing. Next time I wanna upgrade the Canyons and book a helicopter flight :) they weren’t actually that expensive, for example in a 4 hour trip from Vegas did cost around $300/person.  After Vegas we drove through the desert to Reno and after the night continued to San Francisco. We all liked Frisco a lot. The atmosphere there was really cool and the city felt kind of cosy and homely. The only negative aspect was the fact that the public transport basically is closed after midnight so it’s better to book a hotel in the city center and not outside the center like we did.. If I’d move to USA some day, the smaller cities at the Pacific would be nice places to live in. Towns like Santa Barbara, Santa Monica and Laguna Beach all were pretty beautiful with their beaches and small mountains on the other side but they’re not the cheapest places to find a home :)