Shanghai: Day Five
March 24, 2015
Today we woke up and got breakfast as usual and then headed out in our business attire. Our first and only meeting today was at KPMG where we met the COO and they told us about their China operation and the distinction between doing business in the states and doing business in China. In China things are a lot more complex and take longer to accomplish because of weird regulations that we don’t have.
After KPMG we headed to Tongchuan Wet Market. The wet market is a really expansive outdoor market where they have lots of tanks and shallow pools of filtered water that hold all different kinds of seafood. We saw enormous crabs, elephant mollusks, salmon, frogs, eels, turtles, and much, much more. This seafood is pretty much all imported from other places. We were particularly popular here as a group because they don’t see a lot of foreigners come through and a lot of people stopped me to take my picture.
We then went across the street for the day’s arranged lunch. We had a lot of different Chinese food – family style as usual. I even tried a little bit of pig feet… (AHH)
After lunch we went to tour a market called City Super. City Super was started in Hong Kong and now has three locations in Shanghai and in other parts of Asia. This store was really, really clean and gourmet. The food was sorted into different departments and it was reminiscent of a shopping mall. This store had a lot of imported products in addition to the Chinese products and acted as a really interesting contrast to the markets we have seen so far.
We then went to the Shanghai World Financial Center. This used to be the tallest building in China, but they just recently built a much taller one which is the second tallest in the world. What’s neat about this building is that there is a big opening at the top middle of the building and it resembles a bottle opener. At the top of the bottle opener is the world’s highest observation room. We took an elevator that takes 66 seconds to ascend 94 floors and then took another elevator to the 100th floor. The 100th floor has glass windows and floors so you can really see the view. It’s very cool. A lot of people in the class are afraid of heights though, so that was interesting.
We headed back to the hotel after our tour, changed really fast, and went to go see an acrobatic show called Era. The signage for this show says “You miss this, you miss Shanghai.” This show was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, it was absolutely unreal the things these acrobats could do!! At the end of the show eight motorcycles were driving on the walls of one of those metal cages too. All in all the show was spectacular and definitely worth going to even though only 20 of us went.
We went back to the hotel after and changed again and then went to a club called 7th Floor before calling it a night.
Keep following along with my trip here, I will post pictures later!
xoxo J