Shanghai Wind...

View of Pudong from the Bund...

Okay, not so much wind, but certainly a ridiculous bit of rain! My flight left KUL at 1000 after being delayed by 30 mins, and was striding my way towards immigration at PVG by 1530. Got into a taxi at a little past 1600.

As luck would have it I got the blurrest taxi driver in all of Shanghai! (or so it seemed after stopping twice to consult his map...) and at one point even asking me if I knew where the Radisson Xing Guo was!!! And when we got to Xing Guo road, he insisted that there is no such hotel. A minute later he sheepishly remarked that there is such a hotel after all, as we drove past the entrance!

The hotel is nice, located in the midst of a park. Of course I didn't know about this till much later as I arrived at past 1700, and darkness had fallen. To cut a long story short it was raining when I arrived, and didn't let up until Monday night, and even then still continued sporadically.

Had dinner on Monday night at a restaurant on the Bund called Finestre. Food was good, wine was good, and the view magnificent. When we got there it was still drizzling. The top "pearl" of the Oriental Pearl tower was shrouded in fog until halfway through dinner, when it lifted to reveal an icon of New China in all its glory. Nice...

Took the really awful noise-riddled picture above from the Finestre balcony, with a Nokia 6300 which is a pretty bad camera even by phone standards! Considering the device and the conditions, I'm surprised it came out at all!

On the whole the conference was very informative, and gave us different perspectives of the business. We all got a lot of networking done too, which was great. Wished we had more time though as some discussions were truncated due to time constraints. Oh yes, the Ronnefeldt tea they served for breaks was a nice touch... hehe...