Actually the morning started with discovering my hotel shower was like having my own rain cloud. Very fancy! Then I went up to the 40th floor club lounge for a very civilized breakfast. Frenchmen in the elevator, Germans by the buffet, South African asking for his coat... it's a multicultural place, the club lounge is.
And after getting myself ready, I looked outside and saw the thing that is almost a stereotype... a group of similarly dressed Chinese people doing calisthenics together in a big court. So strange. I even took video for full effect, but I'll be uploading video when I get back home.
Then I met up with Qiong and Xiaoyu and we walked over to the office. It's a pretty quick walk.
It was strange walking into a building jam-packed with people (the second half of the building is being renovated so there's too many people in the one half right now). One of the designers took us around to meet people, so I met the other designers that are here. Then I met up with David, the dev manager, who introduced me to most of the dev team I've been working with for close to two years. It was so wonderful to put faces to the names!
I spent most of the day doing emails, bugs, and other normal work. But it was nice to go discuss bugs with the developers. And I also had the dev manager plan a time for me to give a presentation about user research. It's the same one I gave to the Manchester team, but with far more people ready to attend. I don't think they'll all fit into the room!
For lunch, the designers from the architecture and engineering products went out, plus the development manager. That was fun. We went to a place that has Taiwanese type food. I had chicken, which was great. And Sam, next to me, had beef, which was also great. They also had a green tea jello-type dessert which was quite tasty!
After more work through the afternoon, my development guys took me out to dinner. The food was in the style of Gallen's home town (he's the lead developer), which is 500 km north of Shanghai. Some of it was medium spicy, but all of it was good. There was only one dish out of a dozen that I didn't really like, and I tried everything on the table. My favorite was tofu (shocking) and some of the mushrooms. Yum. The team seemed entertained that I could use chopsticks (check me out and my ability to pick up a peanut!), that I wanted to try everything and know what it was, and that I liked everything I tried. They were also fascinated that I have dogs. Not quite sure why, but they seemed quite interested by it. Anyway, I did not take nearly enough pictures of the food or the people, but here's the one I have.
After dinner we went back to the office and killed time before our 8pm meeting. Normally I'm on the other side of this, but it was fun to be in the room with the guys. Particularly because this was when we declared our feature complete and that we have no more regular meetings. Woot! No early morning tuesdays for me for a while, and no late nights for them! Also, I showed them a picture of the pugs. They thought they were great. I forget what David said the name for pug is here...
Finally, I walked back to my hotel with Sam, who was headed to his bus stop. He's from Hong Kong and is incredibly animated. If you ever saw the UBS guy on the old MadTV, he reminds me of him. :)
When I got back to the hotel, I found my laundry that I had them do today. It was in a basket in linen with an orchid on it. How posh is that?!
And now I must go to bed. When I volunteered to do the presentation, I wasn't quite figuring it to be tomorrow morning first thing, so even though I could easily do most of it off the top of my head, the large number of attendees means I need to at least run through what I'm going to say once or twice in the morning.
Also, in health news, I woke up with the stuffed nose, but after getting out of bed, it seemed to clear up and has been only a bit runny today. Hooray! Maybe I won't have a painful sinus infection when I fly home!
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