Kyle's trip to China!

Hey everyone, it's Kyle. A couple of weeks ago I went to China for our annual product line review with Home Depot. It was an eye opening and humbling experience because it made it abundantly clear how insignificant each of us are in the grand scheme of things. To think about going to a country with 1.5 billion people was hard to wrap my head around. The trip over was relatively uneventful except for a 2 minute ordeal when I forgot my suitcase at security in Los Angeles. This could be due to the fact that I had the bright idea to stay up the night before in order to sleep on the plane and be on the correct time schedule once we got to China. Oh and I did see Carlton from Fresh Prince in the airport too.

To give you a rough time line of how long it took to get there we left Atlanta on Monday morning, flew to LA, then from LA to Tokyo and from Tokyo to Hong Kong. Because we flew across the international date line we actually lost an entire day and finally arrived at our hotel at 11:00 pm Tuesday night Hong Kong time (11:00 am Tuesday ATL time). We stayed in Hong Kong the first night, which for those of you that don't now Hong Kong is an amazing city that was a British colony until only a few years ago, therefore it is very clean, sophisticated and modern.

When I finally got to my room it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to turn the lights on (you have to put your room key in a little slot in the wall). I was hoping to lie down on a nice comfortable bed, but I soon realized the beds in Asia are more like sleeping on the floor. The next morning I woke up at 4am which was more sleep than I thought I would get and my boss, Tim, and I had an early breakfast before getting on the ferry to Zhong Shan.

Our hotel was right on top of the ferry terminal so we went downstairs, bought our tickets, and took the 45 minute ferry ride across the Hong Kong harbor to mainland China. We were picked up by one of the employees from our office, named Ming Bo, in Zhong Shan who spoke absolutely no English. Once we got to the office we joined our product manager, director of marketing, industrial designer, and project engineer who had been over there for a week already, preparing for the meeting. We spent the next couple of days getting all of the models, pricing, and presentation ready for our first meeting with Home Depot.

During our time in Zhong Shan we had the opportunity to try some interesting traditional Chinese cuisine (ie shrimp heads, baby octopus, dragon fruit, etc).
On my 3rd day in, I was able to take a tour of one of the factories that we work with. This factory manufacturers over 3.5 million ceiling fans a year and employs over 5,000 people. The buildings total over 300,000 square meters. It was very cool to see everything from glass blowing to precision motor manufacturing to each part of the fan being hand painted. In total there are over 600 steps to build a ceiling fan from start to finish.
After our initial meeting with Home Depot they chose some models to be sent to their corporate office in Shen Zhen. We had Ming Bo drive us the 2 hours to a hotel right next to their office and I really enjoyed the car ride as I got to see a less Americanized part of China.

The night before we left to go to Shen Zen we were in the hotel lobby eating dinner and the Hotel Staff asked us to participate in their Earth Hour celebration. If you are not familiar with Earth Hour it is a world wide commitment to energy conservation. In major cities around the world all the of the largest buildings will turn off all power for 1 hour. The hotel that we were staying at was one of the largest in Zhong Shan and therefore had a great deal of media present for the event. They asked us to hold candles and stand behind their earth hour banner and count down until earth hour began. Once all the lights were turned off photographers came in from everywhere and snapped pictures and we were informed that we were going to be in the newspaper the next day. Sure enough they were right:
Our hotel in Shen Zhen was pretty amazing and cost about what a Fairfield Inn would charge in the US. I was upgraded to a suite with an office, living room, bedroom, 2 bathrooms and an amazing view of downtown. The next couple of days were a lot of "hurry up and wait" because we were at Home Depot's beck and call and were called into meetings as early as 7:30 am and as late as 9:00 at night.
On one of the first day sin Shen Zhen I was getting pretty homesick and missing talking to Leah (it was $2.00 a minute to talk on the phone so our conversations were SHORT), so I went out to the local mall and found a webcam for $20 US. So not only got to talk to her but see her face and talk via Google Chat as much as wanted to for the rest of the trip. Tyson even made a couple appearances on there which was nice.
Once all of the final decisions were made we still had an extra day in China so we decided to head to Macau. We booked rooms at the Venetian hotel, which has the largest casino gaming floor in the world. Because of everyones hard work, we were instructed to have a nice dinner and enjoy ourselves on the last day in China. We had a wonderful dinner, spent some time at the Black Jack and Craps tables (and actually won money!), and even got to play miniature golf on the roof of our hotel with 50-70 yard holes, sand-traps and water hazards.
After our night in Macau we headed to Hong Kong where we were flying out early the next morning. We happened to be there on a Saturday so we got to enjoy the light show on the Hong Kong harbor.

This is a laser light show that they put on every Saturday night set to music and all the sky scrapers in Hong Kong shoot lasers across the harbor. After enjoying some of the Hong Kong nightlife we headed back to our hotel for an early and long flight back to the US.
Overall, I really enjoyed my trip to China and it was interesting to see their quickly developing economy and industrious nature. I could go on for hours about all of the interesting things we saw and experienced so if you are interested to know more let us know.