And That's the View

This day will be full-on.  This week will be full-on.  September man.  Everyone seems to want to visit China in September.  I’m looking forward to October.  A National Holiday, with everyone forced to do something other than work for a week is out there at the end of this month’s rainbow.  Today’s good, as I’ve managed to get lots of people to come to one hotel meeting room in succession.  It will be tiring, but stationary.

This hotel.  I wasn’t quite sure which one it was by name.  Got it. I remember it when was brand new around the time of the Beijing Olympics.  I came out here around the time I was launching my business to meet a CEO.  He was ever so skeptical that his business model would work in China.  We were unsuccessful at convincing him.  But we went on to successfully prove that very model many, many times over with another company.  And last I checked he’d been removed from his role for failure to scale his business in the U.S.  He should’ve come to China.

Fortunately, there is no pressure on me to translate today.  I like that.  I can listen and do a bit of translating for myself.  There’s that word, I’ve heard ninety-nine times.  I can look it up on line:  right, “anyway.” I knew that.  There is plenty I don’t know.  There are some rather brilliant engineers at the table.  They are discussing squares with twos and fours and shaded triangles.  I concentrate on trying to discern what that verb just meant.  This is more productive. 

One of these exceptionally talented young engineers gets up and goes to the window to pull back the shades as the slide presentation is over.  The entire apparatus falls to the ground and it appears that one of the bars has fallen on this young lady’s hand.  I’m worried for a moment but she says she’s fine.

At dinner, I try make sure that the vegetarian gentleman gets enough to eat as they fill the lazy-Susan.  A few people are in Beijing for the first time.  “What should you do?  You’ve got one afternoon?  Well.  I seem to hear myself repeating to one person and then another what I’ve told many, many people before: “After you emerge from the Forbidden City, you’ll spy a hill across the road.  Make sure you climb that.  It’s called Jing Shan: coal hill.  Climb it and turn around and that’s the view of the Forbidden City.”   The first and then the second person note all this politely. 

Monday, 09/18/17