Final chapter

It's been a while now since the semester did finish and I moved back to Finland. It was truly an awesome experience I won't forget and I'm glad I chose China and especially Shanghai as my go-to-place. As anywhere else, you face some difficulties when moving to a foreign country but all in all my almost 6 months stay went pretty smoothly. For the future expats going to Shanghai, I'd recommend using the services of a western based company that helps you to find a flat and organizing all the other necessary amenities such as internet, water and gas. Our partner university suggested us to use a local company, but now that I know the possibilities I would've done otherwise. The level of service in the Chinese standards is - let's say - not that high compared to the western standards. 

Our exchange program consisted of 6 courses we had to execute and they all dealt with the Asian business environment focusing mostly on marketing and supply chain operations in China. The courses were

- Asian business research project

- Consumer behavior in the Asian market

- Cross cultural management and negotiation

- Asian economy and geopolitics

- Fashion sourcing (not sure why this was part of the program :))

- Chinese language course

Compared to i.e. the difficulty and workload of my previous courses in my home university in Finland, these courses were quite easy and not so work-intensive, but we learned many great aspects about doing business in China that are helpful in the future if I happen to work with some Chinese people/companies etc. 

Now I've been over a month and a half back home in Finland and soon it's time for me to start doing my master's thesis, so thanks a lot for following my exchange time and this blog! 

Arrivederci! 

Shanghai F1 GP 13.-15.4.2012

We spent pretty much the whole last weekend on the Shanghai Circuit since the F1 circus was in town! Me and my roommate Ville booked our tickets quite a long time ago because we certainly didn’t want to miss this happening :) the cheapest tickets for the whole weekend were about 340rmb (ca. 40€) on the grass stand but we bought tickets for a bit better stand and those tickets cost 800rmb (ca. 90€) each. Once arrived at the stand, we realized that it certainly was worth paying the money because our seats were right at the end of the finish line with two big curves in front of us. So we actually could see quite a lot from the race and not just cars passing by with 370km/h like on the grandstand for example!

On Friday we didn’t go to watch the training session as we had mandatory lectures the whole day at school but on Saturday we went to the circuit early in the morning. The subway was surprisingly not that full on the way there yet. The circuit itself is pretty far from the city center since it’s the subway ride took almost 90 minutes to get there.. On Saturday’s schedule there was the last training session in the morning and in the afternoon the actual qualification for Sunday’s race. Around the circuit there was all kinds of activities for the visitors. VIP guests had a small circuit where they could test some AMG Mercedes cars, Porsche had a nice and big pavilion and many of the F1 teams had their own stands where they sold fan staff.

On Sunday we went to the circuit way before the actual race to watch the Porsche team cup race and spend some time around the circuit before the race. This was my first F1 race I’ve seen live so far and I really enjoyed it. Of course, you can follow the race much better on TV but it was cool to see and hear the cars. One big surprise for me were all the Chinese people (mostly female) supporting Kimi Räikkönen! The Finnish flag was by far the most popular one in the stands which felt pretty nice :) besides the massive amount of Chinese supporting Finland, there were quite a lot Finnish people too and we saw many of our friend from the Shanghai Finnish Community too.. One development proposal would be to install a bit bigger screens in front of the stands so that you could at least see the standings once a while in between because those what they had there now were really too small.. But otherwise I’m very pleased how everything was organized. Even the subway worked decently even though there were 40 to 50 thousand people leaving the area at the same time :) the Chinese had it, though, well organized and the queue proceeded nicely without any problems. 

Ancient water towns around Shanghai

I’ll continue writing about some hopefully useful topics for people coming to Shanghai either as tourists or maybe to live here and exploring various places around the city. So today’s post deals with few ancient water towns in Shanghai. I myself have been to two of them, to Qibao (七宝) and Nanxiang Guyi Garden (南翔古意园). Qibao is 360-meter long south-north boulevard running across the Qibao ancient town. It is easily accessible with the subway line 9 as there is a station called Qibao too. The street offers visitors all kind of different foods and drinks, whereas the area around the North Square has many shops offering local handicrafts and arts.

Just like Qibao, Nanxiang is also located about a 50-minute metro ride from the city center and it is on line 11. The Guyi Garden itself is regarded to be one of the most important classical gardens in Shanghai. There are many pavilions, ponds, twisted brooks and bridges. Compared to Qibao, in Nanxiang there were no shops for visitors and it was much less crowded. So if you want peacefully see some traditional Chinese gardens, Nanxiang is definitely a good choice and the ticket fee of 12rmb is not bad. Other recommendable water towns around Shanghai are Zhujiajiao (朱家角), Fengjing (风景), Nanxun (南浔), Xitang (西塘)and Tongli (同理). Maybe I’ll have time later during this spring to visit some of them too. 

Shanghai Business District and the skyscrapers

Today I’m gonna write and post some pictures about the Shanghai business district around the Bund and Lujiazui in the Pudong area. The Bund is probably the most famous tourist spot for people visiting Shanghai and there are all the time hundreds of people taking pictures from the spectacular view to Pudong. It’s also the home for many Chinese and foreign companies to have their offices there, even though the Pudong side is way more popular. The Bund is located also very close to the East Nanjing Road metro station and the pedestrian street, which is a very big shopping street that has its other end at People’s Square. 

Me, my girlfriend and our friend wanted to visit one of the three observation decks for tourists on the skyscrapers on one very sunny and clear day. There are three decks you can visit and they all are located close to the Lujiazui metro station. The possibilities are the Pearl Tower, the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC). We decided to go to the SWFC which is the highest tower in Shanghai and its observation deck is the world’s tallest currently with its height of 474m. In total there were 3 decks on different levels but I strongly recommend to pay the extra 50yuan for adults to get to the very top because the view is that awesome, though its very cool from the lowest deck too. However, on the highest deck you can enjoy the view while walking on a glass floor looking directly down on the streets! If you want to enjoy the same view from your hotel window, there’s a Park Hyatt hotel at the SWFC too and it’s just below the observation decks on the floors between 79 and 93. 

Shanghai Ocean Aquarium and Shanghai Zoo

In this post I’d like to write some aspects about two tourist attractions Shanghai has to offer that focus specially on families with children but are still worth of seeing for everybody visiting Shanghai for a longer period of time. If you’re staying only a few days, I wouldn’t recommend to visit any of them, especially not the Zoo. The Shanghai Ocean Aquarium is located just next to the Huangpu River at the New Pudong site very close to the Lujiazui metro station. It is quite expensive with its 160rmb entry fee but the location is awesome and the whole aquarium is very well done and maintained. The aquarium has several exhibits, for example there is an own section for Chinese aquatic animals, South American, Australian, African, Cold Water, Polar zone and deep ocean zone. There are also many educational signboards telling visitors some facts about the specific animals. In its entirety the aquarium is not that huge compared to for example the one in Valencia, Spain but you can easily spend there a couple of hours. One good thing about the aquarium is that it’s completely indoors so during winter time it’s a perfect spot to visit in Shanghai! 

In contrast to the aquarium, the Shanghai Zoo is the complete opposite. It is pretty cheap, costing you only 40rmb to get in, but to get there you need to take a 40-minute metro ride from the centrum. I haven’t been to many Zoos in my life so far but this is clearly the worst I’ve seen. When you step into the Zoo, the first impressions might be quite positive. It looks big and spacious with some parks to hang out and have a picnic in between. However, once you see the first animals, most visitors start with the fish section followed by the lizards and snakes. The water in the aquariums looked very polluted and dirty, most of the lizards looked dead to me and there were some rats running in their cages. In most cases the situation didn’t look any better. Pretty much all the animals were treated very badly, they had nothing to do in their cages and the visitors threw garbage and food towards them. Even the number one attraction, the Giant Pandas looked so bored and unhappy. The zoo would have the potential to be a very good one but it seemed that there weren’t any workers taking care of the complex since it was very dirty. Maybe it can still be successful for the Chinese visitors but it surely is not attracting many foreigners without any improvements. There is, though, one place I strongly recommend you to go after the Zoo visit. We had some tasteful pizzas at a place called PizzaSun located close to the Zoo entrance.  

More stories to come soon :)

Hello readers,

first of all sorry for not writing anything in the past couple of weeks. The reason is that my girlfriend and a mutual friend of us have been visiting me here and we've been on our way all the time around Shanghai so that I haven't had the time to blog.. Have to say that after the rainiest and most gray month in over 3 decades, February 2012, the spring has arrived in Shanghai! In the past week it's been pretty much the whole time sunny with over 20°C degrees and it's getting warmer all the time.. Looking at the weather back home in Finland, it feels quite nice here!  

However, as my guests unfortunately have to leave Shanghai for Finland soon, I'm going to write about the places we visited here! Stories and pics about Shanghai Zoo, World Financial Center, People's Square, Nanxiang water town, Ocean Aquarium, etc are coming, so stay tuned :) 

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€. 

Last day in the States

Today was the last day of our USA vacation as we’re leaving tomorrow morning. The Sandman Inn kept providing positive surprises still today. The breakfast was well better than our expectations. We thought we’d get just some cereals and toast but there was everything from different fruits, lots of breads, eggs, yoghurt, muffins etc. So for once we got a really good breakfast to start the day. After checking out we drove to the Santa Barbara beach to enjoy the nice weather. It was once again sunny with about 20°C. 

After a few hours of walking we jumped again into our Jeep and drove south for a while to Montecito. We found ourselves again on the beach because there were some picnic tables and we had a little snack. During the day we drove in several stages. After the snack we drove to Oxnard, then to Malibu. We thought to find a place to eat there but it was not made for our student wallets. We had the same problem in Santa Monica too so we decided to drive to our next hotel in Los Angeles and look there for a restaurant. That proved to be an excellent decision because we found a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. We asked our waiter to help us to choose a tasty meal and he proposed us to take some egg rolls as appetizers and a noodle soup with a lot of well-done beef. We had no clue how to eat the soup as we got also some salad and sprouts on the table. The waiter showed us how to eat and once we understood the system the food was really tasteful and also very cheap :) Tomorrow morning it’s time to leave USA and move on to Shanghai! 

Time to continue to LA

Today it was time to leave NYC and move on to LA. One week is certainly not enough for seeing everything you'd wanna see in New York although we did see a lot of the attractions and don't feel like we would have missed something really important. One thing we all agreed was that next time we'll come during summer. The city was beautiful during winter time too, but for example the Central Park during summer is something I wanna see in the future! So this wasn't the last time in NYC for sure.. Right after today’s breakfast we ordered a cab to pick up us at the hotel to drive us to JFK for the flight to LA International Airport. We thought we’d get a free lunch or at least a snack on the plane but nothing! All you could eat was some light snacks which cost a lot, too much in our minds :) So we were starving when we got to LA and right after getting our rental car we headed to eat at Jack in the Box’s. Getting no food at the plane was not the only negative aspect about American Airlines. At first we were forced to pay $25 each for the bags since they apparently weren't included in the tickets. I'd be happy to say I don't have to fly on AA again but we're flying to Shanghai with AA. So let's give the another shot to give a better impression..

At Alamo’s the clerk strongly was in the opinion that we wouldn’t manage to load our bags into the Chevy Impala or a similar vehicle and wanted us to upgrade to a SUV. Otherwise we’d taken that but the price was way too high for us and he wasn’t in a negotiation mood and we were pretty sure that we’ll get the luggage into the trunk.. And we were right :) It was quite a puzzle and the Impala wasn’t big enough but the trunk of a Toyota Camry was just the right size! The car has not only a big trunk but it’s big in every way and we’re very pleased with it.

We had some concerns about the traffic here but the way from LAX to Days Inn at Long Beach went well, despite the problems in finding the hotel but finally we managed in that too.. In the evening we went for a drive around the suburbs here to take a first look at LA. Have to say that I just don’t get it how it’s possible to have that many fast food restaurants like it is here. There’s on every corner at least a couple of them.. But now it’s time to get some sleep and tomorrow it’s NHL time as we’re going to watch Ducks vs. Coyotes at the Honda Center in Anaheim!  

Feelings before takeoff

I'm waiting extremely excited for my exchange year since I've been looking forward to having such a chance for many years already. During the upper comprehensive school I spent with my parents 3 years in Germany and after that I've known that I wanna live outside Finland in the future too. And now I have the chance to do it, so I'm pretty stoked! I've been asked several times in the past few weeks if I'm anxious or scared about moving to Shanghai. No I'm not, I don't know if I should be afraid or whatsover but I'm just excited of experiencing a completely different country and culture from that what I'm used to.. 

Of course there will be some issues that might cause problems for us at the beginning but I'm sure we'll handle those things well, and we're not alone there. There will be around 50 students with us who will need help just like us in managing some regular arrangements like getting a mobile subscription etc..Our study program is starting at the beginning of February and we don't have a accommodation in Shanghai yet, and it looks like that we have to wait until we get there. Fortunately, we've been in contact with a agency which is able to provide some apartments for us to look at and hopefully we find a decent crib to live in for the coming six months :) We were also told that we should receive a list of all the participants on this program by mid December - Nothing yet - but since the university is a French one, there's no need to be worried about some delays related to compromised days and deadlines :) but that list would certainly help us because there are many other students dealing with the same problems and roommates are always welcomed! 

But now it's time for Christmas and the New Year's celebrations, so we'll see us again next year.. Happy Holidays from rainy Finland!

Visa & Vaccinations

The journey has still not begun but I’m writing again since I’m having pretty much free time and there are so many things which need to be done before the plane takes off.. Well, I’d use this free time also by reading for my last exam which is in about two hours but I felt writing a new blog post is more useful. I might think otherwise in couple of hours :D Going to China for a long period of time means a lot of vaccinations as we are planning not only to hang around in Shanghai for the six months but also travelling around China and hopefully around Thailand and Malaysia etc. too. Necessary vaccinations are for example hepatitis, Japanese encephalitis, cholera, typhoid fever which are certainly not cheap. I’ve paid over 500 euros in total for all of these but I wanna travel a lot in the coming months without having to have any concerns about my health.   

Another not too easy mission is to get the Chinese Visa. The Embassy in Helsinki is open only 2,5 hours per day, so for people not living in Helsinki it's quite difficult to deliver the Visa application, especially as the embassy doesn’t accept mailed or e-mailed applications for some reason. Luckily for me, my mother was very helpful and not only was able to deliver my application but she’s also going to pick it up once I get the Visa approval. For some reason they don’t allow any Visas for multiple entries to China in Finland, so we have to continue dealing with our Visa affairs also in Shanghai before our first trips outside China. And by the way, we had the exam in our Chinese course on Friday - nailed it! Having studied Chinese for around 3 months now, I must admit that it's the most difficult language I've ever tried to learn :) but motivation is the key and I hope I'll be capable of speaking and understanding some simple sentences when we get to Shanghai..