Traveling around

Like always, Donald's travel schedule keeps me on my toes. I just received an email saying that he is coming a day early b/c of a typhoon that's approaching Vietnam. Yay, I can't wait for him to get here!

I've been traveling since yesterday morning for work, by car, plane and train. First stop was a factory about an hour outside Jinan, which is the city that I flew into. We drove about an hour out of the city to get to our destination. My manager, Diana, and I saw another nice factory. For those interested, here is what a clothing factory looks like.

 Workers on the line, sewing and what not.

The machine closest to us is a welding machine, glues material together,
and the machine with the operator in the background is a seam sealing machine.

Rarely, do I see a factory with so much unused space, we are walking over to the cutting area

Here's a laser cutting machine.

Fabric that has been spread and is now ready to cut

Screen prints drying!

Embroidery machine. They don't mess around,
 looks like this machine has 18 embroidery heads.

Then we caught a fast train to Beijing. This is me with our representative from the factory. His name is Wayne and is a very nice guy.

Once getting to Beijing and checked into the hotel, i found out I got upgraded to an executive suite...this doesn't happen often to me so I thought that I would document it. I've never had a hotel room with a separate living area and 2 bathrooms.

Then Diana and I explored a little bit of Beijing to find a bite to eat.

We came upon Lady's Street. You would think that you would either find something really dirty or some amazing shopping. In this case it was neither, a bunch of cheap trinkets so we didn't last long here.

We found Lucky Street for some Korean food, and had some pretty terrible service.

Today we had another visit with the same company but different factory.

Left: An automatic fabric cutting machine. Right: facilities of the factory

Lunch was a lot of fun. I got to try traditional Beijing style Hot Pot.

Iris, do you remember hot pot still or are you fully enchanted with American Cuisine!?!? 

This meal was centered around a pot of boiling broth, we were given thin sliced lamb and beef to cook in the liquid. Then mushrooms, cabbage, greens, tofu and potato starch noodles all showed up to be put in to cook also. We had a bowl of sauce (front right of picture) to dip everything in. I think the sauce must have had a tahini base to it. Totally fun! I'm already trying to figure out how to do this when I get home.

Here's the pot with some beef cooking in it.

I caught a flight back to Shanghai and now home relaxing, making sure that everything is ready for when Donald arrives tomorrow.