The Cirque Du Soleil of China...ERA

We're trying to take advantage of the time that we have here in Shanghai this weekend, and really the time that we have here in this great city for the rest of our trip. There's not much time left, only a few weeks!

Today, Paul, Ibbi, Venice, and I made a last minute decision to go see the ERA show here in the city. ERA: The Intersection of Time, is quite similar to Cirque Du Soleil...amazing acrobatics, aerial walking, bowl balancing, trampoline stunts, high flying trapeze acts, and caged motorcycle riding. It's got some great multimedia, technology, lighting, sound effects, elaborate costumes, and live music. But, it is different in the fact that it brings together the vast history and culture of China into a portrayal of the country's past and future. It was really magnificent, all of the mastery and skill of the entire show. I'm very glad that we had the chance to go see it.

They did not allow pictures in the theater, but I tried to sneak as many as I could :-) Check some out below. I also strategically taped a video of some ring acrobatics during the show, but so far I have been unable to get the upload to work...

^^Motorcycle cage stunts...they fit a total of 8 motorcycles in that cage, it was wild.
^^This act was a very seductive and sensual combination of acrobatics and strength. A man and woman were hanging 20-40 feet in the air suspended by only two long pieces of fabric that they held with their legs/arms. No help from wires or anything, and the guy often held the girl by only his foot or head. It was very impressive.
^^In this act, they were doing all kinds of crazy flips on the trampoline, and then launching onto the long piece of bamboo on the left side being held up by two men. They would land on the wood and the men would lift it up and down to shoot them up flipping and spinning, then landing back down on the wood and going again. It was awesome.
^^Lots of crazy flips happening here. They launched off of teeter totters and onto a bamboo landing pad. The guy in black was like the 'ring master' of the whole show. He did some great pot/bowl balancing, as seen below. The funky wooden star shaped thing in his hand is some kind of Chinese boomerang. He threw towards the audience and it would fly around the entire theater and then land right back in his hand. I was blown away.

^^This was some kind of 'futuristic' spinning wheel that guys did flips throughout.
^^These were the guys doing the flips in the wheel.
^^Wild contortionists stacking up.
^^'Ring leader' guy doing some balancing of a quite large pot.
^^All these dudes were running around flipping through those circles. I have a video of it, but again, the upload won't work.

^^Opening act. No flips, just dancing and wild costumes.

We're going to try to go to the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium tomorrow afternoon. I'm a huge fan of aquariums, and apparently this one has the largest underwater tunnel in the world, as well as the massive gold fish named Bruce, as in Bruce Lee...As read on Wikipedia. :-)

2 soccer games tomorrow. One at 5pm, then one at 7pm!!

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PMM

Ahhh, live and learn...

Well, we messed up. I wouldn't say it is entirely our fault, but we probably could have prevented this problem...

Paul, Ibbi, and myself missed our train to Beijing. Why? you may ask. Well, #1 we apparently do not have the most common sense in the world, and #2, we hit the worst possible traffic EVER in our taxi ride to the train station. Ugghh. Disappointing and dumb to say the least. We've been to the train station before, when we went to Hangzhou last month, so we knew the routine: take the 8 minute taxi ride to the station, go through security, sit in the waiting area of our designated train until it's time to board. So we left an hour before our train was scheduled to depart, but it just wasn't enough. What we did not anticipate was the traffic on the highway. How often do you get traffic at 9 at night? Out of the many taxi rides that we've taken throughout this city, we have never hit traffic on the highway that lasted more that 10 minutes. Today was different. It took us 55 minutes to get to the station. A trip that should have taken under ten. Halfway through, I showed the taxi driver our ticket and asked him if he thought we would make it on time, he smiled and assured me that we would get there no problem. He was wrong. The train was scheduled to depart at 10pm sharp. We arrived at 10:05pm. It had already left.

Sooooo, we shook our heads, talked about our stupidity for not leaving earlier, as well as our unluckiness, and laughed it off. What else can you do? We sold back our tickets for 80% of the original price, and we weighed our options. Taxi drivers were soliciting us to drive us to Beijing today, which they said would cost us about $450 per guy to get there, so that was out of the question. Then we considered scalped tickets for tomorrow, about $75 per guy. Then we decided that we should just buy tickets from the Train Station for $25, the same seats on the same train that we had the misfortune of missing. We bought new tickets for next Thursday. Probably the best choice out of our possible options. Again, we depart at 10pm from Shanghai. This time, we'll be taking the subway to get to the station, as it is a sure thing - no traffic possibilities. And, we'll be leaving 2 hours before our scheduled departure time. No harm in waiting.

Moral of the story? Plan ahead and prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. We're thinking that this change in plans will actually work to our benefit: #1, we're leaving on Thursday now, instead of Friday, so we'll have an extra day in Beijing; #2, hopefully we can arrange for a different train ride home as opposed to taking the 24 hour ride with no air conditioning and horrible comfort situations, #3, more time to plan and research for the trip. Ohh, and #4, now I get to play soccer this weekend :-) ...Big game Sunday evening!

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PMM

Chinese Cuisines

My apologies for not posting in the last couple days. I've been quite busy prepping for Beijing, working, and writing. I have to write up quite a bit for my mid-term evaluation for school so that I can get credit for this adventure to China, and I think it's due today :-)

Wednesday was an excellent opportunity for me to learn all about many new foods that I had never known much about before. As we went through the market, taking pictures and writing down names of foods, Linda explained all kinds of things to me: how Chinese people commonly cook the foods we were examining, how they relate to Chinese culture, little stories about the history of the food in the country, etc. It was great. Maybe we should consider hiring Linda as a tour guide for 3 Dumplings!? I think she'd be great. I'm sure she makes some good money as a Mandarin tutor, but maybe she could be a part-time guide for us. Hhmmm, interesting...

Here are some foods (I currently have a catalog of 47 different foods) that you may not know much about, or maybe you do already, either way, they were new to me!

[[ I may be wrong about what some of these are, as I'm still trying to straighten out all of the specifics on many of them, so if you are more knowledgeable than me on this stuff, please share your wisdom! ]]...

^^This is called 'Si Gua' in chinese, which translates to 'Silk Melon' but I believe it is commonly known as a Luffa or Sponge Gourd. It's a vegetable. From what Linda tells me, once the si gua is mature, you can remove the skin, seeds, and pulp to leave a sponge-like bundle remaining which is then used to create kitchen and body sponges, such as the Luffa (loofah?) shower sponge.

^^Bai He: Lily Bulb. Apparently it is often called 'Bai he' in English as well. I guess it peels apart and you use shreds of it in cooking or just to eat.

^^Sheng Jiang: Ginger. I have personally never seen ginger before. Maybe that's just because I'm not much of a cook, but here it is.

^^I know that this is called 'Shan Yao', but I do not know the English translation or what the heck this thing is. It appears to be a very organic vegetable.

^^Dong Gua: Winter Melon. I'm not exactly sure if this is a fruit or vegetable. It seems to be a mix between a cucumber and a melon. I think it is a fruit. It's HUGE though, and you purchase it in pieces.

^^This is 'Zong Zi', Chinese rice dumplings. They are small bamboo leaf-wrapped dumplings filled with rice, meats, beans, egg, and other exciting treats. They are commonly eaten in celebration of the Chinese Holiday 'Dragon Boat Festival Day' or 'Duanwu Jie'. Linda tells me that this holiday is celebrated to honor a man named Qu Yuan, a famous Chinese scholar and government officer during the Zhou Dynasty who committed suicide after being accused of treason for opposing an alliance that the Emperor had built with some other state. Qu Yuan killed himself by drowning himself in a river. The local people paddled boats into the river and threw zong zi into the water to distract the fish so that they would not eat Qu Yuan's body. And so now, people around here eat zong zi and have dragon boat races to celebrate the holiday! Quite an interesting piece of Chinese culture. The holiday actually just happened a month ago. Unfortunately I did not get to see any dragon boat races, but I did eat some zong zi...it's pretty delicious.

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I'm heading off to Beijing in an hour!! Paul, Ibbi, and I are taking a 12 hour night-time train ride up there...should give me some good time to finish up my mid-term evaluation for school. I'm very excited to go see the capital of China and the Great Wall and everything else that the city has to offer! Organizing a way back to Shanghai was tough, but we got it done. All of the good train options were all sold out, so we're taking the crap train...apparently it has no air conditioning, hard plastic seats, a TON of people (standing, sitting, laying on the ground, etc), and it's going to be a 24 hour ride (it must go about 30 mph max, I don't know why it takes so long). Around here, they often sell tickets to people even after all of the seats have been filled. So people stand or sit on the ground for some rides. I really hope we have a seat!! Ibbi got the tickets, so we'll see on Tuesday I guess :-) The three of us all get along really well, so it should be a lot of fun either way. Nonetheless, it will certainly be an adventure...

I believe our hostel has internet (i'm going to take my computer), but it is $4.50 per night to stay there, so you never know what you're gonna get with a price like that! People always say 'you get what you pay for'...we'll see! I'll try to make some posts to my blog from Beijing if I get some time, but don't be too puzzled if you don't see a post again until Wednesday.

Chairman Mao, I will soon become a man! :-)

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PMM

Guanxi?

"Do you have guanxi with __________?" <-- This is a commonly asked question in the business world here in China. The term 'Guanxi' (pronounced gw-on-she) literally translates to mean 'relationship.' And when used around here, often refers to a network of people that you have established a strong connection with, which can be used to help you accomplish various tasks. It's all about relationships if you want to get things done and find a lot of success, especially in this country. It's absolutely necessary to build a network and utilize it to minimize risk and frustration. A 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' kind of mentality goes a very long way here.

Unfortunately, the guanxi of my boss and all of her contacts was not strong enough to keep Closed Door standing, sometimes it helps to know people in the government, and that guanxi just didn't exist for her quite yet, maybe in the future. But her readily available connections do seem to be helping her to build out the other six ventures that she is involved in here in Shanghai :-) Things are looking very good for the future of 3 Dumplings, Iiiit! Cafe, Cantina Agave, Boxing Cat Brewery, Boxing Cat Bakery, and the Alchemist. It's a bummer that I haven't been able to work more with the Alchemist molecular martini bar, as it's business concept very much intrigues me, but I'm quite happy with the other projects I've been working on.

My own personal guanxi has been growing wider and wider everyday here in Shanghai, and I am beginning to use it more consciously in my daily life. For example, my boss wants me to go into Shanghai food markets and catalog anything and everything that western tourists might find 'out of the ordinary' ...which is a lot, from my perspective! So, I have decided to utilize my Mandarin tutor, Linda, to help me accomplish this task. In the food markets around here, no one speaks English, and if I want to actually get things done and find success in cataloging the many diverse foods that look unfamiliar to me, then I will need some assistance. And my tutor provides me with the perfect opportunity to do this. Here's the game plan: upon finding a food that seems very culturally specific to this region, we take a picture of it and Linda tells me what it's called in Chinese or asks what it is if she doesn't know, and we also figure out how to write it. (It helps to have Linda for this because she knows how to write the 'pin yin' romanization of Mandarin words, which then allows me to understand how to pronounce them correctly) Then, we have to figure out how to translate/explain what it is in English such that I can easily create a tour guide training booklet teaching our 3 Dumplings guides what they should be saying to tourists.

I suggested the idea to her this afternoon during my lesson, and she loved it. #1, it's an opportunity for us to take our 'classroom' outside of the apartment and use it in the real world, and #2, Linda loves teaching me all about the culture of Shanghai and China so the thought of showing me new foods that I have never seen really excites her. We're meeting at a local market tomorrow at 11am...wish me luck.

I'm going to try to take a picture of Linda and I at the market, so that you guys can put a name to a face and see who I keep referring to!

It'd be nice if I were a bit more aware of foods and produce just in general. I feel as though there are many foods which are popular in the U.S. that I am quite clueless about. I have a feeling that I may end up cataloging things that are pretty common for westerners, but are just things that I don't know a squat about. :-)

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PMM

Finishing Up at A.C.

As some of you may know, I am finishing up my undergraduate studies at Albion College one semester early, and I'll be completed with all of my necessary classes for my major and two minors in December of this year (only 5 months from now...that's crazy to think about).

With the International Studies major at Albion College, all students are required to go abroad for a semester, and immediately following their return to the U.S., they are required to take a class called "Building On International and Intercultural Experiences" which allows students to integrate their experiences of studying, working, and/or living abroad with a deepened analytical understanding of international and intercultural issues. I'll be taking this class in August, when I get back to school. In this class, I will be required to write a ~20 page research paper focusing on an academic topic that is inspired by my experience abroad. It must incorporate at least two different disciplinary approaches, to demonstrate that we students are capable of approaching an issue from multiple perspectives. I'm thinking of maybe attacking it through historical and business approaches, but I cannot focus my mind to think about what I'd really like to select as a topic for this paper. I feel as though there are many options for things that I can write about, but I need something that will both intrigue and challenge me.

If anyone out there has any suggestions or ideas for topics, please leave me a comment!! Any idea is a good one at this point. Help me brainstorm :-)

The CLOSED Closed Door

Closed Door is now closed. Ironically... The government licensing problems were too much to overcome, and the whole 'private social club restaurant' thing just wasn't going over well with most customers. The food was incredible, the atmosphere was great, and the whole idea of the restaurant was pretty unique and exciting, so it's pretty sad to see it go down.

But, we're opening up a new bakery at the brewery: the "Boxing Cat Bakery" :-) Picture (preliminary construction) below. It's pretty crazy how Kelley always has something in mind. If something ends, something new begins immediately, without even a second thought. I love it, and I hope to someday become an entrepreneur with a very similar mentality!

The space pictured here shows what will become the bakery, and really not all that much is changing. Upstairs has always been a bakery. I guess when this brewery location was built, Kelley put a bakery upstairs to supply all of her restaurants baked goods. Bread, pies, cakes, etc, it all comes from the 2nd floor of this building, and it's only a room of about 150 square feet. It always smells incredible when I go in there. The 1st floor of this area has always been used as a storage and fermenting room for beer, kegs, unused furniture, and other supplies. Now, it will become the retail and customer service area of the bakery...very exciting stuff.

[[ I feel very fortunate to have been placed with Kelley to do this internship in China. Many of my friends often complain about how they go to work in a huge office building and sit at a desk all day just google-ing things out of boredom. My time with Kelley has been full of great experiences, and I love everything that I've had the chance to be involved in. ]]

I don't know much about the plans for the bakery quite yet, but when I do, I'll be sure to post something about it!

Enjoying the Markets

Lately, my new projects with 3 Dumplings have taken me all around the city of Shanghai. To new places that I yet to see in my 2 months time here. In the past couple days, I've made my way to the Muslim Food Market in Jing'An, the Nanjing Clothing and Accessories Market near People's Square, the Xinyang Fashion and Gift Market near the Science/Technology Museum, and the Xu Hui Wet Produce Market. These four places have been a lot of fun.

I'm trying to get a good feel for what we will need to show our customers when we take them around the city to various markets for shopping excursions. There are definitely some very wild foods available at the wet markets around here that I bet westerners will ask questions about. Live eels, snakes, all kinds of fish, frogs, turtles, and more.

The clothing and gifts markets are a lot of fun. They've got a ton of fake stuff: dvds, purses, jerseys, shoes, clothing, artwork, computer software, electronics...pretty much anything you could ask for. It's a great spot for tourists, and you bargain your way through every purchase, so I think people will really enjoy visiting it.

Creating a full training booklet for tour guides will not be an easy task. There's a lot to think about, ya know. I have to put myself in the tourist's shoes and try to figure out everything that they'd want to know about, and I don't know much about the city myself, so it's a lot to take in, but it's a good project.

I recently met with a marketing director at the Pudong Shangrila, a very upscale hotel in the downtown area (probably the nicest hotel I've ever been in, they treated me like a king, it was great), and she provided me with a lot of good information regarding hotels and how we can go about presenting our tours to hotel clients. I'm thinking that we're going to want to hook up with the following organizations to distribute our tour offerings: both large and boutique hotels, hostels, national consulates, relocation companies, international schools, multinational organizations, expat websites, Shanghai city info sites, and maybe some other more well established tour companies. I think that an audience we should really consider targeting is new families coming to Shanghai because either the husband or wife is being relocated to the city for work on a longterm basis. Our cooking classes and market excursions could be a great way for them to learn about the city for the first time, our tours would be an excellent introduction to Shanghai life.

I've got to focus on this tour guide booklet here this upcoming week. There's lots to do!

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In soccer this morning, we beat the German team 5 - 1, and the weather was incredible. We couldn't have asked for a better day to play. AJ and I are heading to start our 'season' with the other team that I joined tomorrow for a 5pm game. Should be fun!

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PMM

Beijing, Game On

Our train ticket to Beijing has been booked. Paul, Ibbi, and I are heading out next Friday night. We're doing an overnight ride so that we can sleep and then wake up in Beijing ready to go on Saturday.

Unfortunately, we do not have a ticket BACK to Shanghai quite yet ;-) Because of the Expo, train tickets are crazy these days and you can't book a ticket any earlier than 10 days before you want to go. We'll hopefully book tickets back tomorrow. We want to come back on Tuesday of the following week. So we'll be there for a full 3 days. As I mentioned earlier, we're looking to keep this trip as inexpensive as possible, and so far, so good. I booked us a hostel for $4.50 per person per night. I read some good reviews on it, and I'm hoping they weren't all lies! We'll be staying in a room with 8 beds in it. Worst comes to worst, we just leave and go somewhere nicer, but I'm thinking we'll stick it out as I'm sure it will make for a great story or two. Hopefully we'll get to see as much as we can. It should be an awesome time!

I think we have a decent idea of what we want to see, but again, anyone with any recommendations for what to see/do in Beijing, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below!

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PMM

Street Meat

Recently, I've been eating a lot of street food. And it has been excellent...

Everywhere you go in this city, you can find some delicious and incredibly inexpensive food on the side of the street. You'll often find dumplings, skewered meats/vegetables, and noodle dishes readily available. Today, I filled up my stomach for both lunch and dinner on a budget of only $2 USD. That is ridiculous, and it is unbelievable how delicious most of the food is. It's often spicy, but the spices are growing on me.

I am very much appreciating the services of the wonderful Chinese people who cook up these meals on the side of the street. They have become my saviors. I almost feel bad paying nearly nothing for these meals, but obviously being a cheap college student, I don't feel bad at all ;-)

I'm beginning to get more and more adventurous with what I will try out, but there are many things that scare me off quite easily. Anything with large prickers coming out of it is not going anywhere near my mouth :-) I tend to stay away from the seafood as well, it's just better and probably safer in the restaurants, ya know. Chicken, pork, sausage, cucumbers, dumplings, noodles, potatoes...all seem to be safe and fantastic.

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PMM

And the Ads Are Rolling

Last night, I launched my five Google Adwords ads for 3 Dumplings. I'm trying to maintain a $4 per day budget, $2 per day for my text ads (the ads that you always see when you search something in google), and $2 per day for my image ad (which shows up on google's display network...other sites that make money by showing google ads on their pages)...but I'm maxing out the budget everyday, and they seem to be very relevant and optimal clicks that we're receiving, so I may consider increasing my budget, or trying to get rid of keywords that are wasting our money. I'm definitely no expert with online advertising, so I'm still tweaking things as the days roll on.

Here are the stats from day one of my ads:

• Image Ad | 4 total clicks, 3,678 impressions, and an average cost of $0.43 per click. Total cost is $1.74. Average ad position is 1.1 (which means my ad is showing before other competitors'...that's good)
• Nightlife Tours Text Ad | 3 total clicks, 376 impressions, and an average cost of $0.55 per click. Total cost is $1.64. Average ad position is 1.4
• Market Excursions Text Ad | 1 total click, 275 impressions, and an average cost of $0.18 per click. Total cost is $0.18. Average ad position is 1.9
• Cuisine Tours Text Ad | 0 total clicks, 46 impressions, and no cost. Average ad position is 1.7
• Cooking Classes Text Ad | 0 total clicks, 17 impressions, and no cost. Average ad position is 2.1

Out of 8 total clicks, 7 of those are coming from Google's Display Network, so they're being triggered by content on websites that display Google Ads, and they're not actually being sought out by people on Google.com.

Clearly, our image ad is driving the most traffic, because it is an impression campaign, and we pay for ever 1,000 impressions. With about 4,000 impressions, that means that people are seeing our name and our brand is getting some recognition, which is nice because it's brand spanking new. I need more people to click on it and then actually buy our tours ;-) Nightlife seems to be the most popular available offering that we have, which was expected, but that's not really what 3 Dumplings is about...we're trying to attract a more 'foodie' type of audience, people who want to know about Shanghainese and Chinese foods. I guess you never really think to go to google and type in, "Cuisine Tours" so I've got to figure out how I can attract people who would be interested in taking a tour of the city to learn about the various food offerings of Shanghai. I've got some evaluating to do, that's for sure. If you stumble upon a 3 Dumplings text ad on google or another website, please DO NOT click on the ad! (That costs me money when you do) If you come across the image ad, that's totally cool to click on, because it doesn't cost me $ when you do ;-)

Lots to think about...people make livings setting up Google Ads for businesses. There's a lot that goes into it, hopefully I'm doing alright so far.

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PMM

"Chairman Mao says...

...you're not a man unless you've been to the Great Wall." I met a Chinese man at a restaurant a few weeks ago who told me that :-) My plan is to live out Chairman Mao's expectations and I hope to fulfill my 'manhood' very soon.

I'm planning a trip to Beijing with some friends. We're thinking a long weekend trip would be perfect, Friday to Monday, and we're trying to do it as inexpensive as possible. Because of the World Expo, and increased demand for flying to/from Shanghai, it seems that prices for flights within China have sky-rocketed, so we're taking the cheap route - train. We're going to take the train from Shanghai on Thursday night (next Thursday, I believe) and we'll arrive on Friday morning in Beijing. There are some really great things to do and see in China's capital...obviously the Great Wall is pretty close, and it's a must see, then there's Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Beijing Zoo (where I would assume you can find an extensive amount of pandas!), and probably much more.

I am also planning a trip to South Korea, with the same friends. I don't know much about South Korea, but I have a couple of fraternity brothers (Kyle Wulf and Dave Knox) living in Incheon working as English language teachers, and a good friend of mine who I met here is actually moving back to his hometown - Seoul, South Korea - on July 30th. So we're planning on going from July 30th to Aug 2nd to spend time with all of them. Another Friday to Monday trip. Tickets to fly roundtrip to Incheon from Shanghai are only $170 USD, so I figure while I'm out here I might as well see another country, you never know when you'll get another chance like this, ya know. Seoul and Incheon are only about 30 miles apart, I believe, so it should be easy to maneuver from one to the other. Seoul is supposed to be a really cool city to see, with some great historical sites, nice palaces to tour, and just a lot going on both during the day and at night. Incheon is apparently pretty great as well. I've read that there is an awesome 'Chinatown' in Incheon, which is interesting...I've been to American Chinatowns, and I've been to real China towns in China, but I've never been to a Chinatown outside of China in Asia. It should be fun to see! :-)

If anyone who reads this has ever been to Beijing, Incheon, and/or Seoul and knows of anything that we should see/go to/do etc, please leave a comment and share your wisdom and experiences with me!!! Any insight you have is much appreciated.

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PMM

Three New Posts

See Below: Marketing Projects, No More Pie, Please, and Intern of the Month!!.

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PMM

Marketing Projects

Okay, I know everyone wants to know all about what I'm doing with my internship these days, and I haven't been good about posting about it, so here goes...

I'm planning to launch my online advertising campaigns for 3 Dumplings Tours soon. Most likely tomorrow actually, so hopefully they bring some good traffic to the site. We're not exactly fully prepared to give tours yet, but we need to practice and get a feel for what people are going to want out of the tours, so we have to start sometime, what better time than now.

I'm going to start focusing essentially all of my work on 3 Dumplings. Kelley wants me to basically be the one who builds out the business to start it up, which is a lot of responsibility, but it's a pretty awesome opportunity. Within the next couple weeks, I'm going to be meeting with Hotels in downtown Shanghai (the Pudong area) to figure out what we need to be doing to have our tour offerings presented to Shanghai tourists staying at these hotels. First, I'm going to meet with some directors at a couple big hotels (two people who Kelley know) in order to learn about what it takes to get our product into hotel concierge desks to be offered to their customers. I'm not doing sales pitches or anything quite yet, just learning from them and collecting information. I'm hoping to learn the best way to build out our marketing materials in a way that will hit home with Shanghai tourists who will hopefully want to take our tours, and also, how to go about connecting with hotels so that they offer our tours to their clients. From there, I'll create pamphlets, packets, presentations, and whatever else it takes to get us behind some hotel concierge desks, and then I'll try to go out and put 3 Dumplings into the hands of as many hotels in Shanghai as possible. While doing this, I'm also going to be building our tours. I have to go to all of the markets that we plan on taking people to, and I have to figure out what people might ask questions about. This is good because I'm pretty much the exact audience that we are directing our business towards: the foreign tourist who has never been to Shanghai before. So I'm heading to food markets, shopping markets, etc and taking notes on what weird foods are or anything that tourists might needs answers for. This is going to require quite a bit of Mandarin, as many local food markets do not have English-speaking people behind the counters. Also, I'll be researching good places to eat and good nightlife options for our other tours. Then, I will create a training guide for tour guides that we will hire in the near future. This guide will provide them with all of the information that they will need to give a great tour to our customers. Hopefully I do all of these things well! I'd love to see this thing take off in the right direction.

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PMM

Intern of the Month!!

Next Step Connections (the program that brought me to Shanghai) has chosen me as intern of the month :-) Out of a possible 60 other interns that they have, it's a pretty nice honor.

Check out my interview at:

http://www.nextstepconnections.com/news/intern-portrait-june-2010/

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PMM

No More Pie, Please

Our 4th of July celebrations around here ended up being a lot of fun.

We had our 4th of July Party at the brewery and about 200 people ended up showing for it, which was disappointing because we had planned for about double that, but the weather wasn't exactly in our favor and we had a pretty high ticket price for the event. It happens. We still made the most of it and everyone had a really good time. The pie eating contest went really well although there were some technical difficulties with the pies...they were TOO BIG :-) At the last minute, before the competition, we had 7 contestants and needed 8 because we had 8 pies, so I decided to be the 8th. Everyone thought that we were going to be eating 6 inch pies, and we thought they were going to be blueberry, but we were all mistaken. It ended up being 12 inch pies and they were chocolate banana cream pies!! (clearly, there was a miscommunication somewhere down the line) Talk about filling your stomach...no one could even finish, and that was the whole point of the competition, the first person to finish wins. The rules of the competition prevented anyone from using their hands, so we tied everyone's hands behind their back and you had to attack the pie with only your face...there were some serious messes on our faces! I probably had half of the pie up my nose. The size of the pie was just too much to handle, but we all tried our best. One girl got very close, but after 25 minutes no one could any more =) we agreed to give the victory to her and we weighed the rest of the pies to determine 2nd place. I took 4th, and got about 2/3 of my pie done, which wasn't too bad, but my stomach hurt like hell afterwards (the burger and hot dog that I ate beforehand did not work to my advantage!). I hope to never see another pie for a long long time though!

...pictures will come soon, once I get them from the event photographer.

After the brewery party, I headed over to O'Malley's for a BBQ and some cornhole. The boards they had seemed to be well constructed, but they had your standard hand-painted simple design on them, in red, white, and blue.

I tried figuring out who owned the boards to tell them to check out my website, but no one knew who's they were! AJ and I ended up getting a few games in before the thunderstorms came. I told the guy running the event that they should move the bags to a safe place so that they didn't get ruined by the water, but he didn't listen and guess what happened? They got ruined by the water :-) So the rain ended the cornhole fun, because they bags blew up to 2 times their normal size and became rock solid. It was too bad, I was really hoping to take home the 1st place prize! The rest of the day was still a lot of fun, we found other things to do. There were nothing but Americans there, I didn't even feel like I was in China, it was a pretty nice was to celebrate the holiday.

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I think that I'm having some bug issues. I wake up every morning with what seem to be new small bug bites either on my arms, stomach, or legs. They itch like crazy and I now have about 18 of them in total...I don't know if something is attacking me at night or what, but my sheets get cleaned and changed every week so I doubt there's something in my bed. I'm hoping whatever it is leaves my bedroom soon!

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PMM

Shanghai Summer

It has arrived, the incredibly HOT Shanghai weather. People talked about it, but I never really understood until recently. I'm not usually one to complain, but woah. This past week was probably the hottest week I have ever experienced. It's been right around 40 degrees Celsius for the last 6 days, and all of the forecasts said every day would be thunderstorms, so each day pretty much went like this: sunny and a tolerable high heat in the morning, then lots of rain for about an hour, and then super humid and very sunny for the rest of the day. It's been feeling like 110 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. Riding my bike around the city has been eventful. I carry a new shirt and a towel in my bag, along with 3 bottles of water. It's all absolutely necessary if I want to refrain from looking like a fool upon arrival. Every once in a while I'll ride past a store that has its air conditioning cranked up with the door wide open (not sure why), and it is a very magical 2 seconds when that happens. I'm now beginning to understand why sooooo many locals carry umbrellas when it doesn't rain, they're just trying to decrease the temperature any way they can. And the night time isn't any better. It's still high 80's at night, ridiculous. The thing to do around here is to tuck and roll your shirt up above your belly. I always see lots of chubby Chinese guys walking around like this, it's hilarious:

I haven't yet decided if I'll soon be joining them in this new fashion trend, I'm not sure if my belly is big enough to hold up the shirt :-) It's the most creative way to battle the heat though.

Playing soccer is not easy in this weather. We try to sub often, and we bring tons of water. But we're still doing well. We won our game this morning, 3-1, against the Greek team. Their names on the back of all their jerseys were all Greek Gods, and they called each other by those names too, it was pretty funny. I was recently recruited to play in another league as well - the ASAS league. They play on Sunday evenings. So it should be a nice addition to the end of my weekend. It doesn't seem to be quite as competitive as the SIFL league, but it should be a lot of fun. My first game for the new team is next Sunday at 4pm.

Tomorrow is one of my favorite holidays - the 4th of July. It's fun because there's always a good bbq and good people to hang out with all day, plus fireworks. What could be better? And I'll be spending it here in China...BUT, we'll be celebrating here as well! We're doing a big Dukes of Hazzard-themed party at the brewery, and then I'm heading over to an Irish pub (O'Malley's) to play in a cornhole tournament with some friends. Yep, Cornhole...in China! :-) Who would've thought!? I'm very interested to see what kind of set up they're going to have. AJ is my teammate. He's from the Midwest, so I'm expecting a lot out of him. I'm hoping we'll take 1st place, we should have a good shot at it. Hopefully they've got some nice boards and bags. If not, I'll be recommending my services =)

After soccer today, I went to the grocery store for the basic necessities...pineapples, peanut butter, strawberry jelly, and bread. These have become my go to meals. I'm trying to conserve a bit of money, spending less on a daily basis, so I can do more things around here. For example; golf, indoor skiing, water parks, trips to nearby cities (and far cities), souvenirs for people back home, this extra soccer league, another day at the Expo...the list goes on!

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PMM

City Weekend Awards

Yesterday was a lot of fun. I ate dinner at the brewery, and then headed off to the City Weekend Restaurant and Bar Awards Ceremony at G+Plus (a club downtown) with Michelle (roommate) and her boyfriend, Rafael, a good friend of mine who owns a Mexican Restaurant around here - Adobo Latin Flavor. His place is the go-to spot where my friends and I all hang out to grab cheap drinks and good food. They were going to the awards ceremony as well, so I rode with them. Here's Michelle and I at the front entrance:

The whole thing was pretty cool. You gave your invitation to get in, and there were programs for the awards with lists of who got what for which category. Some of the biggest categories were Restaurant of the Year, Best Global Cuisine, Chef of the Year, Bartender of the Year, Bar of the Year, Band of the Year, Club of the Year, etc. They had a band playing during the whole thing, free food and cocktails, and they went through the categories much like you would see at an Academy Awards Ceremony, and they gave awards out to First Runner-Up (2nd place) as well as the Official BEST (1st place). Kelley wasn't feeling well all day, and so she only came for about ten minutes, so I went up to accept the awards for all of her restaurants :-) I felt kind of like a celebrity. I was definitely the 'mvp' of the night, as I went up on stage to get a total of 5 different awards! Unfortunately Boxing Cat didn't take 1st place in anything, but we did get First Runner-Up for both BEST AMERICAN RESTAURANT and BEST BEER SELECTION (and also 2nd runner up for bar of the year, but you don't get an award for that). Cantina Agave, Kelley's Mexican restaurant, took 1st place for BEST MEXICAN/TEX-MEX RESTAURANT (I felt bad, because Adobo took 5th in that category). Closed Door, Kelley's Italian place, took BEST BRUNCH and First Runner-Up for BEST ITALIAN RESTAURANT. I guess I'm working with the best in Shanghai!! Rafa's restaurant got BEST HAPPY HOUR, so that was really cool to see Adobo win.

I met some very cool people at this thing, and it was pretty awesome because people would walk by me and say congratulations, shake my hand, hang out and chat about things for a while. I left the party with business cards for a guy who is opening up a new hotel chain in Shanghai and hopefully a brewery in the near future, a design engineer who does interior design on a lot of new restaurants/clubs/bars/hotels/etc, an owner of a new club, and some others. Connections are key in a big city like this! It's too bad I didn't get any cards made up for myself before I left for China, I often find myself receiving cards (I have a nice stack of about 20 in my apartment) and people asking if I have a card to give them, only to inform them that I unfortunately do not. I've been playing it off as if I just ran out, so that seems to work pretty well =)

Overall, a very cool experience. I'm glad I had the chance to go.

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PMM

Mission Accomplished

I made my way to the barber shop today :-) I opted out of the $.85 USD place, I just wasn't feeling confident with that kind of a hair cut. So I went to a barber shop that I found actually just down the street from my apartment.

It was much more of a solon than anything, but I paid a total of $8 USD, and it got me all I could ever imagine...The workers were incredibly kind to me, greeting me as I came in, storing my backpack for me, etc. First, they washed and massaged my head. It was magical, and it lasted for a while, about 20 minutes. I was getting concerned after ten minutes, and I wasn't sure if I needed to tell the lady to stop or if there was an allotted time that she planned on massaging my head for, but I played along and eventually she finished. Then they gave me some delicious hot tea, and dried my hair. Next was the cut. This was where I needed to be prepared. Luckily, I had a mandarin lesson immediately before I left for the barber shop, and Linda and I practiced what I needed to say. My phrases of choice were "the same hair style that I have now, but shorter" and "a little bit shorter right here, please." Those two got the job done just fine =) There were times when my barber was saying some things that I didn't understand, so I just shrugged my shoulders and laughed, he laughed also. He could have been saying anything to me, and I didn't catch one word. That happens quite often, so I'm pretty used to it! He was very strategic and quick with his cutting. Strictly a comb and his small scissors were all he needed to do it. I was very impressed with his technique. After the cut, he shaved my neck with no shaving cream, just a razor, it was interesting, feels fine though. Then they washed my head again, dried it again, and I walked away with no small hairs pricking me from under my shirt, it was pretty awesome.

I had to get it cut today, as I'm heading to a big awards ceremony tonight. It's the 2010 City Weekend Reader's Choice Shanghai Restaurant and Bars Awards.

It's a fancy cocktail thing, and I'm supposed to get dressed up, so I'll be borrowing some dress shoes from a friend since mine got lost in my luggage :-) It should be fun, I'll keep you all posted as to what awards my boss' restaurants receive! Last year the brewery got Best Beer Selection and Best American Restaurant, so we'll see.

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PMM

Blog Formatting Issues

Sorry to anyone who reads some of these posts and wonders why there seem to be a lot of extra unnecessary lines in between some paragraphs or pictures. The reason for this is that different browsers do not read the content the same. So when I write my post using my Google Chrome Browser, I often have to hit 'enter' many times to get things to turn out the way I want them to look. But I recently viewed some of my posts using Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and some of them look quite ugly. From now on, I'm going to just enter everything in normally, which may look odd for people using Google Chrome, so my apologies!

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PMM

Shanghai Cuisine Tours

This new venture that my boss has got me working on has been a good experience so far. I've been working with web-designers and programmers to try to improve the web presence of 3 Dumplings (and to improve the actual content on the site itself, it still needs some help), but it's too soon to tell if anything that I've done has made a difference. Hopefully site traffic will pick up here in the next couple weeks as search engines crawl it and include it in people's searches for things related to the services we offer. I really enjoy working with web-based companies. My internship with Athletes' Performance last summer in Boston was what originally sparked my interest in getting involved online. My boss, Ace Bhattacharjya was a great mentor and taught me a lot about online initiatives. CorePerformance.com was a fun project to work on for a few months. After my experience there, I created PMMCornholes.com and RodtrimInteriors.com for my father and I (the latter needs a lot of work, still). This past spring, at school, I had a chance to help a close friend improve his web presence for his landscaping company - WasmerBros.com, and that was my first real time spent with Google Adwords. So now, I'm taking everything that I've learned from these 4 experiences and combining it to hopefully provide beneficial results for 3Dumplings.com. So far, I think I've been pretty successful.

As of now, I have created 5 Adwords campaigns for 3 Dumplings; one for Shanghai Cuisine Tours, one for Shanghai Market (Shopping) Excursions, one for Chinese Cooking Classes, one for Shanghai Nightlife Tours, and the last one is an image ad campaign which will be advertised on websites outside of Google, what is called the 'Google Display Network,' (sites such as about.com, food.com. nytimes.com, businessweek.com, youtube.com, gmail, fandango.com, cheapflights.com, entrepreneur.com, and many more) and will come up on these sites when things like 'Travel, Nightlife, Shopping, or Cooking Classes' are part of the content on the site. Here's the image ad I created, we may use this, or go with something else that a more experienced graphic designer can come up with :-) I wish I knew a thing or two about Photoshop...

None of the campaigns have been launched yet, but they're ready to go. We're waiting to see what kind of traffic comes to the site on a regular basis without the help of advertising, so that we have some base-data to compare our future advertising efforts to. Essentially, the main goal is to drive traffic to the site and, in doing so, hopefully getting customers to purchase some of our tour offerings. One tool that we're using to gauge our traffic and our visitors is Google Analytics. It's a marvelous tool that Google offers (one of many) and it's entirely free. If you have a website or blog or something and you're not running Google Analytics, you really ought to consider it. It's easy to install and it allows you to see how many people are visiting your site, what they're looking at on your site, where they're coming from, and more. You can set goals that you want to achieve, and for someone running adwords campaigns, like myself, you can see what keywords people are typing in to find you. This allows us to narrow our keyword selections for future campaigns. Google Analytics has graphs, charts, all kinds of cool gadgets, I'm on it every day.

On a different topic...

I have yet to get my hair cut. The plan is to go tomorrow around dinner time. Today, my Mandarin tutor taught me some words and phrases that should allow me to successfully communicate what I want done to my hair, so I guess we'll see how that pans out for me!

I want to send out a special thanks to the new viewers of my blog :-) Hopefully you've had a chance to catch up and you've learned all about what I have been up to over here in Shanghai! It's been quite the adventure (many adventures), and I'm having a blast. Stay tuned for more posts soon!

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PMM

Ohh Boy, This Food...

The food here is like nothing I have ever had. Growing up in the Midwest part of the US, I never really became the type of kid who would adventure into trying new foods, especially ethnically diverse foods, but that has all changed since my recent travels. Yesterday I ate ox's tongue, moving/half-alive shaved clam, turtle tail, seaweed, fried banana, and monkfish liver. Some of you may read this list and say, 'ohh I've had these foods, it's no big deal,' and some may not, but for me they were all firsts. Most of that stuff was pretty delicious, while some of it I hope to never eat again :-) I believe that the majority of these dishes were Japanese, not Chinese, but it was nonetheless a personal adventure. The not-quite-dead shaved clam was probably my least favorite thing out of the many foods that I tried yesterday, it was tough, chewy, and bland...not the best.

The cuisine of Shanghai is quite interesting to me. It is not the standard 'Chinese Food' that you'll find at your local Panda Express, that's for sure, and I have been told that Shanghainese food is quite different than the food of different parts of the country.

Fried noodles, dumplings, hot tea, soup, cold chicken, tofu, crawfish, frog, duck, and pork are the most popular foods that I have come across at local restaurants...fried rice dishes don't seem to be quite as popular as I had hoped, but you can commonly find a side of rice at most places. Vinegar, ginger, and red chilies are often used in the preparation of many dishes, and almost always come on the side of every main entree.

I recently got sick, which I do not attribute to the food that I've been eating as most people around here tend to do. It was not fun. Being sick back home, where you can easily find medicine and have no difficulties communicating your problems to the people who can help you makes being sick a simple task to handle, usually. But here, it's not easy. I picked up some sort of cold, likely from a roommate, and I also contracted 'fever blisters' on my lips. I made an attempt at trying to go to a nearby pharmacy, after researching some of the ingredients in the medicine that I needed, but I found very little success. Imagine me standing there acting out my symptoms with my hands and some noises, while the pharmacist hands me boxes of medicines that I can't read. So I decided it was never going to work out and I had better take a translator with me at a future date. I did that, and it worked out much better. I got the right medicine, and my lip problem vanished after 3 days of meds. As for the cold, I'm still battling it, but I think it's going away. It often amazes me how difficult seemingly simple tasks can become when you add a language barrier into the equation. It always makes for a good story, though. =)

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PMM

McDonald's - Restaurant or Home?

I recently came across this article in the China Daily which touches on a situation that occurred on my street, at the local McDonald's restaurant, just a couple weeks ago: China Daily | My Kind of Place

It seems that many of Shanghai's 24-hour fast food joints have turned into sanctuaries for homeless Chinese citizens, and the management at these establishments are having a lot of trouble keeping people from using them as their own personal bedrooms late at night. It's an interesting story, and it's something that I've personally noticed while passing by these restaurants late at night. Both the 24-hour KFC and the McDonald's down the road from my apartment have at least 20 people sleeping on the tables and booths between the hours of 11pm and 7am. It often hinders you from getting that late night ice cream sundae which you've been hoping for after a long day.

The stabbing that the story describes is not something that happens often, so please don't be worried about my safety. The area that I live in and everywhere that I've visited in Shanghai all seem to be quite safe in comparison to some places that I've been back in the U.S.

While I'm on the topic of the 'Sleeping Chinese' that I had mentioned in an earlier post (Sleeping Chinese and Poor Translations), I might as well share some images that I have collected during my adventures throughout the city of Shanghai which show how common it is to find a person napping in really any societal setting:

Here is a young boy sleeping on the front porch of a Xujiahui restaurant after watching the USA-Ghana World Cup game through the window.

This bus driver is catching some Z's while he awaits the tour group that he just dropped of in Pudong.

Here's a lady who need a nap in the local KFC after a long day's work.

This guy looks like he was forced into going to Starbucks at his girlfriend's command, and the caffeine in his frappuccino just wasn't enough to keep him from passing out on the comfy green couches in the dining area.

(Side note: Unfortunately, team USA got knocked out of the World Cup tournament by Ghana yesterday, for the second WC in a row.

Which means that I won't be able to rock my big red/white/blue Uncle Sam hat and American Flag on the streets of China anymore...aside from our 4th of July party at the brewery. But it does mean that I won't feel obligated to stay up until 5am watching World Cup matches anymore.)

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PMM

Internship Update

As pointed out by a few loyal followers of my blog, I have not been providing much information about my internship, and that's really the reason I'm here is to gain an experience in a foreign work environment. So here it is...

Lately, I've been working mostly with the brewery, Closed Door, and 3 Dumplings. I'll start with 3 Dumplings, because I haven't even told anyone about it yet, it's new, so let me explain. Kelley and her two friends (Cathy and Pauline) recently began a website that offers tours of the city of Shanghai. It's mostly directed towards food-related tours, so they provide customers with an opportunity to see Shanghai through its incredible cuisine varieties. You can do market (shopping) tours, restaurant tours, nightlife tours, and also take cooking classes. Check it out at 3Dumplings.com...

Currently, I'm working on some SEO (search engine optimization) and online advertising, so that people will be able to easily find 3Dumplings.com and will hopefully use it to tour Shanghai! It's a good thing I took that Google AdWords class at Albion this past semester, or I'd be wondering aimlessly around the web trying to figure this stuff out. It's great to enter a real-life situation with knowledge that you've obtained from school, being able to utilize things that you learn in class is really a great feeling. It's nice when your boss says 'research how to do this' and you don't have to because you already know. With this project, I've been educating Kelley just as much as she's been educating me...it's been interesting. It'll be fun to see where the website goes from here.

As for the brewery, I'm continuing to plan for our 4th of July party coming up. I've been assigned to the task of organizing a Boat Race 'Chug for Charity' Beer Drinking Competition (teams of 5 compete in a bracket-style knock out tournament of drinking mayhem), as well as a Pie Eating Contest (blueberry pies, no hands...it'll be incredibly messy and funny). Here are the registration forms that I came up with for these two events:

I'm also helping to make the transition from the original BCB location (which closed down when the current location went up a year ago, but is now used as a 'warehouse' to brew the beer), to the new location which will open on September 1st of this year. We've been taking a lot of inventory and sitting with design teams to build the layout of the new place. It's been very interesting to see what all goes into opening a new restaurant. It's a lot of work, that's for sure. I imagine I'll be helping move things and set things up once the new location is ready to be furnished! Oh boy :-)

As for Closed Door, it's being shut down. The whole 'private social club/restaurant membership' deal was not working for people, and it's impossible to change the license of the building over so that it can be used as a working restaurant, so it just has to be shut down. I guess some things have to end so that new things can begin. All of the staff from Closed Door will be moved to the brewery and be used there, so it's not a total loss for everyone involved.

I haven't gotten involved in much regarding the Molecular Martini Bar lately, which is kind of a bummer, but I'm hoping to dip into that some more very soon. Kelley and her business partner (Eduardo Vargas) recently had a meeting with some investors for the big project, so I'm hoping things will start progressing here in the near future and hopefully I can get involved with a lot.

More to come soon. I lost my cell phone, it just disappeared on me last night. So I have to go out and buy a new one! I'm also going to hopefully get a haircut today, we'll see.

USA plays Ghana on Saturday at 2:30pm EST (2:30am on Sunday, my time)...it should be a fun game to watch!! Wednesday's game was craaaaazy, everyone was going nuts around here, it was a great moment for American Sports history =) I've got my own soccer happening tomorrow as well, another 7 v 7 game with the Shanghai Puxi Lions. Should be fun!

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PMM

Can We Do It??

This post doesn't really have much to do with China, I just want to share some things with everyone...

The US team has had the opportunity to appear in the World Cup 8 times. In each of our past appearances, we've lost EVERY game 3 that we've played. Today is our chance to make history. We take on Algeria in game 3, and we need to win.

Out of a total 27 games played in the World Cup, the US team has won only 6 of those games, tied 5 of them, and lost 16. It's about time we add some to the WINS column! What better time to do it than when we really need a victory. By beating Algeria in t-minus 7 hours and 30 minutes, we will be accomplishing three things: 1) We'll have broken the curse of game 3, 2) we'll show the world that we're better than those crappy British, and 3) we'll move on to the round of 16 where we'll play in a single elimination, bracket-style tournament until we're knocked out (which hopefully isn't for a while!).

The best outcome that we've ever gotten in a World Cup was the first ever tournament in Uruguay in 1930, and we made it to the semi-finals. Lately, the best we've done is make it to the quarter-finals in the Japan-Korea 2002 World Cup. So this year is a huge opportunity for us. I wish more people in the US would be more open to supporting the sport of soccer in our country. Many Americans are missing out on something that brings great joy to billions of people around the world. There are countries out there whose team did not qualify for the World Cup this year, such as China, and the Chinese are fraught with disappointment because of it.

So please turn on your television to ESPN in 7.5 hours (or check out the gamecast on ESPN.com if you're at work) to watch the US tear apart Algeria in their 3rd game of the 2010 South Africa World Cup Tournament. It is sure to be a great game.

An update on my internship will come soon!

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PMM