Oh boy, this is a work trip alright. Since last Monday, we conducted 27 interviews at companies large and small all over the place. We have seen most districts of the town, from fance new Pudong to the outskirts and the auto town, which is basically a one hour drive by car, but I think still considered being “in” Shanghai.
The city is still amazing me. You cannot imagine how chaotic things are here. Foreigners are not even allowed to rent cars here – I assume they’d be crashing within the first hour of renting a car, so I consider this a good thing. In the pecking order from bus to cab, car (expensive to cheap), motorcycle, scooter, bike, down to the pedestrians, it is amazing that there are no piles of dead bodies at every junction. It is THAT chaotic, but somehow totally self-regulating. I wake up every morning at 7:30 to 8 by the increasing noise of honking cars outside the hotel (and I am on the 7th floor) – here, honking is a necessity and expression of the automotive lifestyle, I think. You honk to warn, to impress, to signalize, to vent… everything is possible here.
Inbetween the interviews Julia and I tried to squeeze in some sightseeing as well, rather successfully, but there is still a lot to see and only little time. I took a lot of pictures as well, but in the evenings I am currently so stressed out that I did not stay awake long enough to go through them and upload some. You might have to wait for imagery a bit longer, sorry for that.
Today we are taking the train for the first time and go to Suzhou, which is about a one hour ride out of town. Suzhou itself is a city of over 5 million people, so it might just feel really smallish compared to Shanghai… oh, new information coming in – we are going to Taicang, a harbour development area, between Suzhou and Shanghai. Gosh… now we only have to figure out how to get there 
Gotta run!