Day two of my trip to Beijing and this time I was on one of those Chinese adventure tourism group things. By Chinese adventure tourism things I mean going on a Chinese tourist tour is an adventure, rather than it including bungee jumping and the likes. The previous day I had bought a ticket to go and see the Great Wall of China with a tour and was now (8am) anxiously waiting for the tour bus to pick me up from the hotel.
So having overcome my shock and horror of missing out on the solar eclipse of the century!!!!! I know! I thought I’d report back on my latest travels. Went to Beijing last weekend, well, the weekend before, to see what Beijing has to offer. I had always been of the conviction that for some reason I would not like it there and that Shanghai was much nicer, so I finally, the weekend before last, I had the chance to find out. And guess what: I do like Beijing … just not as much as Shanghai … it’s a Chinese city thing.
well … it’s been in for a while, and they have even started organising official tours to see it: Shanghai and Ningbo will see a full solar eclipse on Wednesday the 22nd July 2009. This solar eclipse is special not only because it will occur in a place that I actually know and live in, but because it will be the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the 21st century. It will last up to 6 minutes and 39 seconds and guess where I will be to see it? On the other side of the planet! Yeah trust my luck to be in the right place at the right time … nothing exciting happens in this backwater that calls itself Ningbo for decades and then the one time that something exciting, monumental and in fact historic does happen … I’m not around to see it! Cheers, thanks for that … Below a picture of the solar eclipse from the NASA website, in case you’re interested:
Ningbo Postcards – early summer edition
Following the old cliche: Ningbo is a little bit like a box of chocolates … you never quite know what you will find when a) you open your curtains in the morning and b) when you leave campus.Â
Seriously!? This is your brand name? … do Chinese businesses realise that their made up brand names are strangely hilarious to foreigners? Don’t they care about meaning in a blind race to signal international-ness? If these brand names really are all their own doing why don’t they ask some professional marketer for help to avoid being the laughingstock of us laowai? Or maybe they have and some foreign consultant has just been incredibly obnoxious? Who knows, but the debate on that one has been going on ever since I arrived in China …
Last weekend I went on a short trip to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors. Xi’an itself was not the most exciting of places that I have been to; the most interesting sites were the Muslim quarter, the city walls and the Terracotta Warriors which were all quite spectacular, but the city itself was just like any other big city in China: a mixture of bad air and dusty, grotesque, grey and unfinished skyscrapers.
After searching endlessly on the internet for a picture of one and finally giving up and coming to the conclusion that I might just have to go out and take a picture of one myself, I do feel the need to make another marketing related observation of China:Â
Airing clean laundry in public …
Despite all the signs pointing towards spring and a turn in weather, my last entry might have been a little preemptive.
Oddities and paradoxes of China …
brands are such a great thing. As a marketer they make you go weak at the knees when they are well designed, eccentric, idiosyncratic and well marketed, when they have something distinctive to say and when they manage to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside…
I have reported of the elusive hills just outside campus before (here). This time I went into the opposite direction, i.e. southwest, to explore the hills further, to a place called Xikou. Xikou’s cultural significance comes from the fact that it is birth place of Chiang Kai-shek, who’s ancestral home has now been made into a tourist attraction.