Sorry for the Delay in the Blog - Hello Nanjing

Hi everyone.  I realize that it has been almost a week since my last blog post.  I have now been in China for 10 days.  After my visit in Beijing with Fred and Lisa Begtine, I made my way to Nanjing.  It was a relatively short flight between Beijing and Nanjing.  I was greeted at the airport by Eduard who works for the Australian Business Volunteers (ABV), a non-for-profit agency that helps companies to promote business investment in the eastern hemisphere, primarily east Asia.  ABV is the agency that IBM is using to help connect the Executive Service Corps with governments in places like Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, and of course, China.  This is IBM's third engagement of the Service Corps in Asia.  There have been two others in Cheng Du and now Nanjing in Jiangsu Province which is about 80 miles from Shanghai which is on the Chinese eastern coast.

View from my 65th floor room

Zifeng Tower, Hotel Intercontinental

Eduard, a Chinese National, is here to help our team of non-Chinese speaking executives to get to where they need to be, the beautiful Hotel Intercontinental in Nanjing.  The hotel is the tallest building in Nanjing over 85 stories tall.  It is our home for the next several weeks.  No complaints about the digs here.  This is a luxury hotel in China.  No need for a steripen and most important this hotel is very western compliant with appropriate plumbing.  Other members of the ABV are here to facilitate our success.  Jean Sum, a charming Australian National who also speaks good Mandarin, has been with us since the early days of briefings.  It is a pleasure to be working with Jean.  She has been invaluable to the team keeping us moving from meeting to meeting and making sure that we have everything we need including finding us a church to attend if we need to and where we can have a great meal.  Jean understands the Chinese culture well, too.  She seems to really enjoy her job.  We appreciate all that she is doing for us.

Nanjing is a beautiful city with hills, a river, and a fairly sizable lake.  There is plenty of waterfront and our first couple of days were spent getting to know the city with a tour and a trip to the Confucius Temple.   We learned of the wisdom of Confucius in more depth than we know from our Chinese Fortune Cookies. It was a fascinating view of thousands of years of history preceding the birth of Christ.  Confucius died in 479 BC.  

Confuscious

You really get a sense of how much history this country has with over 5000 years of recordings.  It is sort of strange, however, that the country is not trying to preserve history.  Instead, it is modernizing most of their relics, including the outer walls of old Provincial Nanjing.

We have had some very nice dinners.  Chinese food can be so familiar to the sort of food we eat and so different when you eat the local specialties.

On our third evening here, we ate at a restaurant at the old part of Nanjing close to the original wall hundreds of centuries old.  It was an elegant restaurant with excellent food and excellent company as our team met with the local IBM team and discussed the client situation and our ESC engagement.  We got to try some unique dishes and of course drank the Watermelon Smoothie - basically puree'd watermelon that my daughter Elise, a watermelon junkie, would love.

My team is a wonderful set of executives, 3 from North America, and one from Australia.  They are all great to work with and I am having a lot of laughs with Dean, Judith, Doug, and Ron who are all bringing unique talents to this engagement.  We are working and gelling together quite well.  More to come on our team and our engagement.  Working with the City of Nanjing and the Chinese people has been quite a cultural experience for me.  I think you will all be quite interested in what is going on in Nanjing and where the Mayor of this fine and beautiful city wants to take the people of China.  I will try to be more regular on this blog, but our schedule has been so busy with interviews, dinners, and team meetings that finding even a spare 15 minutes to blog has been difficult.  And then there is sleep.... not nearly enough.  More tomorrow.