Wuxi-Shanghai Bus Ride

One of the fun things I love about my job is that I often get to travel to places a bit "out of the way" and off the beaten tourist path, and sometimes via unconventional means.

As much as I was DYING for western food the other day, upon reflection it was fun to be in Wuxi - so different from the usual tourist spots like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo or (...insert big foreign city name here).

And it was capped off by my departure from Wuxi. This week is the "National Holiday" in China, and the whole country pretty much takes the entire week off, travels to visit family, and so on. As such, my travel agent absolutely could not get me a seat on a plane flying out of Wuxi on Sunday. Therefore, I took a bus from Wuxi to Shanghai, and flew to Tokyo from there.

Like they say, it's not always the destination, but often the path taken that makes things the most interesting. On that three hour bus ride, I was the only foreignor on the bus, and even before that, I was the only white guy in the bus station (see picture), that I saw at least. And after nearly getting on the wrong bus, I finally did make it to the right one, and the bus ride was fine. Being on streets in China, where traffic signals are merely suggestions and the lines on the road serve merely as decorations, is always fun! :-)

2008 Wuxi International Digital Arts Forum

The city of Wuxi, China (about 80 miles west of Shanghai) is a magnet for animation studios and a growing number of game studios. This weekend Wuxi sponsored their first annual International Digital Arts Forum, which was attended by about 300 professionals, government officials, and the press. Emergent was invited to present there, due to its growing popularity in China. I gave an overview of Emergent and Gamebryo, and it was received quite well. I made quite a few government and press contacts (both so important in China), and picked up some new sales leads, as well.

The Chinese certainly know how to hold an event. It was held indoors at a high tech park in Wuxi, and when they announced the Forum to be officially open, fireworks went off on the stage (see picture at right). Just bright white fountains, but still - it was cool. One of my sons suggested that we try indoor fireworks at our home on the next Fourth of July. We'll see if the Mrs. will approve that.....

The lighting stinks so I apologize, but this is me during my presentation. The audience had been sitting there for 2.5 hours of university professor lectures before I got up, so to wake them up, we did some audience participation stuff.

The Chinese love formal signing ceremonies. This one between a university in Beijing and one in Stockholm.

I want to be like this guy sitting down on the right. Wearing a suit and tie and get hot? Just roll up the legs in your suit pants!

Good Exercise, Bad Intentions in Wuxi

Friday afternoon this past week I flew from Chongqing to Wuxi in China, where I was a guest presenter at the 2008 Wuxi International Digital Arts Forum on Saturday. Before the opening reception dinner Friday night, I had about three hours of free time, so I took a nice, exercising walk. I hadn't intended to walk almost three hours, but I HAD HAD ENOUGH!!! I needed some western food!!! The hotel room service menu didn't even have anything western on the menu, so truth be told, I went walking with the bad intention of finding an unhealthy burger, pizza, or ANYTHING western!!!

My guess is that I walked probably five miles that afternoon, sort of in a large figure-eight pattern of the city. What did I get for my troubles? Pretty much muddy shoes and pants, and no western food. To one side of my hotel, I soon discovered that I had walked in to a construction city. That's right... not a "construction zone," but a construction city. Block after block after block of huge high-rises (they looked like apartments) under construction. Though it wasn't raining at the time, it had rained earlier in the day, and walking through a construction zone, my pants and shoes got pretty muddy! Enjoy the construction shot to the right, of two of probably 50 high-rises-under-construction that I passed on my walk.

But no western food!!! In three hours and five-miles-or-so of walking, I never found any western food. In fact, I never ran across another foreigner. All I seemed to earn were curious stares from nearly everybody I passed. I guess foreigners like me are pretty rare at least in the part of Wuxi my hotel was in. Which is kind of surprising; my guess is that Wuxi is only about 80 or so miles west of Shanghai, where there are foreigners and western food at every turn.

So I type this posting on my flight from Shanghai to Tokyo, where I CANNOT WAIT to fix myself some western food in my apartment!!! :-)

A cute little park on the grounds of my hotel.

From that park on the grounds of my hotel.

Check out the window cleaners on my hotel. You may have to click on this picture to enlarge it to see, but there's a dewd at on the roof of the hotel, a rope extending from him (I'm SURE he's not the only thing holding the rope), and a dewd at the end of that rope getting close to the ground. The dewd on the end of the rope is just sitting on a small board, like a 2 x 6, tied to that rope. Not a job I would want!!!

Check out these police motorcycles I encountered on my walk. Wouldn't Mike (Dillon) be proud to ride one of these hogs!

This is a middle school. Can you imagine going to a six-stories-tall middle school?

A view from my hotel window; check out the Ferris wheel.

That same view at night.

Chongqing University Visit

This past Thursday, I visited Chongqing University in the Chinese southern city of Chongqing. Most cities in China fall under the governorship of a province (the Chinese equivalent of a "state" in the U.S.), but Chongqing is run by the Chinese Central Government (I guess sort of like Washington, D.C. is). It's a tiny little city of about 31 million people (that's only slightly smaller than all of California!), and it is best known for it's spicy foods (so they tell me).

We went to dinner that evening with the university officials, and had a great meal. The meal included, of all things, duck tongue. But undoubtedly, the highlight of the evening was EVERYBODY in the restaurant stopping to look at big screens all over the restaurant, to watch the successful launch of China's third manned mission to space. The patriotic fervor in the room was awesome - it was cool.

John, apparently doing the Macarena during the meeting.

At dinner that evening.

Boring Speech in Singapore

Earlier this month Emergent made an appearance at Games Convention Asia. This was the second annual Asian version of Games Convention held in Leipzig, Germany each year. Being the business guy that I am, I stepped out of my comfort zone a bit, and gave a 50-minute presentation entitled "Simplifying Cross-Platform Development in a Multi-Core Environment." I spoke all about the varying multicore architectures of the PS3, the Xbox 360, today's multicore PCs, and even Larabee and Cuda, new architectures by Intel and Nvidia, respectively.

Does that sound like a really exciting presentation, or what?! I warned my audience that if they were taking notes, they had better put big ol' erasers on the ends of their pencils, so that when their heads came crashing down in their laps from falling asleep, they don't accidentally poke an eye out. Most everybody laughed, so apparently this group of attendees had a pretty good command of English.

Japanese Lesson for Brianna

Brianna started studying Japanese this year at school, and the last time I checked, she's doing pretty well in that class. I look forward to taking her to Japan some day in the near future, so she can practice what she has learned!

But here's a Japanese lesson for her (and anybody else studying Japanese). It's also a Japanese marketing lesson, showing something creative that companies do in Japan. To the right here is a picture of a sign in a train station, for a local dentist's office. The phone number they have is quite clever, and easy to remember for people who know Japanese. First of all, let's explain how to count in Japanese, 0 to 10. I'll list TWO ways to say the numbers, the first one being the most commonly used when counting, but the second form also used when using the number by itself. For example, "I'll have one (hitotsu), please..." (not counting). Here we go:

0 = zero = rei (ゼロ = れい)
1 = ichi = hitotsu (一 = 一つ)
2 = ni = futatsu (二 = 二つ)
3 = san = mitsu (三 = 三つ)
4 = shi, or yon = yotsu (四 = 四つ)
5 = go = itsutsu (五 = 五つ)
6 = roku = mutsu (六 = 六つ)
7 = shichi, or nana = nanatsu (七 = 七つ)
8 = hachi = yatsu (八 = 八つ)
9 = kyu = kokanatsu (九 = こかなつ)
10 = juu = to (十 = 十)

Additionally, a consonant in Japanese can be given a "soft" beginning by putting two little marks after the kana symbol. Therefore, "san" becomes "zan," "ha" becomes "ba," etc. Japanese can be kinda complex, ne?

So... in the photo on the right, the phone number is very clever. Look at the kana symbols they've put over the last four digits in the phone number:
6 = MU from "mutsu" or six.
4 = SHI from "shi" or four.
8 = BA from a soft form of "hachi" or eight.
0 = ZERO.

So... take those first three digits, and you have MUSHIBA, which in Japanese means "cavity" or "cavities" (there is no plural form of this noun). Therefore, this phone number essentially reads:
33-CAVITIES-NO.
A pretty clever phone number for a dentists office, eh?! :-)

Duck Tongue in Chongqing

You ate WHAT??? Yes, indeed... I ate duck tongue the other night. A lot of you might think that's funny; you might even quack up at the thought. But it wasn't that bad, really. Not a whole lot of flavor, and incredibly... how to describe it?... gnarly. Not crunchy, but like it was full of gnarls. My guess is that it was duck tongue cartilage that was giving it that effect. So enjoy the picture to the right, of me about to eat duck tongue.

Now... I just feel bad about all those Chinese ducks waddling around out there that can no longer talk! But then again, perhaps the rest of the ducks aren't walking around, anyway. Perhaps they're Peking duck on somebody else's plate!

But anyway, this was down in Chongqing, China. Most Chinese cities are in provinces (states), but from what I understand, Chongqing is one of three cities that is NOT in a province, but is it's own kinda-sorta-state, and falls under the control of the Chinese central government. Since most big cities in China in the eastern part of the country, the government is trying to build up other cities, and this southern city is one of them. And it's just a tiny little town of over 31 million people. Gees... that's not much smaller than all of California! It was raining the entire time I was there, and they tell me that it's pretty much always rainy or foggy there. The topography was really different than the other parts of China that I've seen; this was quite hilly.

Anyway... I had business meetings there, and after a business dinner Thursday night, Areil (our Chinese distributor) took me to this really cool old traditional-looking building that was full of shops, restaurants, etc. Most of them were closed because we got there late, but check out the photo below. I like the contrasting modern building in the background, and the lights on both. I've got a whole bunch more photos, too, but for some reason cannot upload them to my standard photo sites; please check back later.

Seoul Food

Ahhhh... my mother (God rest her soul) would be so proud, knowing her son is eating so well while he's traveling. I had a nice early flight from Seoul to Shanghai this morning, so didn't have time for a proper breakfast.

At the Asiana Airlines lounge, though, they had a limited spread of food. To the right here you see my lovely selection of scrambled eggs, cheese, pretzels/chips, and orange juice. That's all four of the food groups, right???

But below, at least you see that Asian service in hotels is certainly tops. Last night when I got back to my hotel room at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul, I found that the cleaning staff had actually fanned out the two stacks of business cards that I had left on my desk that morning. Is that over the top, or what?!

Tomorrow it's another early morning flight, from Shanghai to Chongqing. Oh joy!

Singapore = Habrichi

Prior to this trip, the furthest south I had ever been in southeast Asia was Hong Kong. So it was kind of fun to go somewhere new. Though my 3-day trip was pretty short, and nearly all of it was spent in my hotel room working or sleeping and/or at the Games Convention Asia conference, I liked Singapore.

My first impression in the taxi ride from the airport to the Intercontinental Hotel was that there were an incredible amount of palm trees everywhere. Man... it was like Hawai'i! Equally as hot and far more humid, but very much like Hawai'i.

My second impression was that they drove on the left. I probably would have noticed that sooner, but I had just come from Japan, where they also drive on the left. Combined with architecture like you see in Britain, and it was just like I was in the U.K.

Then, of course, I noticed that in addition to English-language signs everywhere, there were Chinese-language signs everywhere, too. Being just next door to Malaysia, that made sense, but it seemed just like China.

So... Singapore was like Hawai'i, Britain, and China all rolled in to one. HABRICHI. I like all three, so I thought Singapore was pretty cool.

At the conference, I had a number of meetings, and I gave a presentation in front of about 50 programmers from all over southeast Asia. "Simplifying Cross-Platform Development in a Multi-Core Environment." Talk about exciting!!!

I did go out to dinner with some associates at a shopping/eating/entertainment arcade called "Clarke Quay." Anyway, enjoy the photos.

On approach to the airport in Singapore.

On approach to the airport in Singapore. Looks like snorkeling would be pretty good here, too.

My hotel, the Intercontinental, is the tall building in the foreground. Right behind that is an interesting-looking building that is the National Public Library.

The Raffles Hotel at night. Love the architecture. My hotel was about a 10-minute walk to the convention center, and this hotel was en route.

The Raffles Hotel by day.

There are signs saying that this is the largest fountain in the world. Hmmm... maybe. I suppose it was about 40 feet tall.

The tallest fountain in the world. This is right at the edge of the Suntec City Mall, one of the most American-looking malls I've ever seen outside of Asia.

More of the tallest fountain in the world.

I thought the really tall dudes (dewdettes?) holding big white balls at the top of this building were interesting.

A bridge over the water at Clarke Quay.

Reflections in the water at Clarke Quay.

More Clarke Quay.

More Soccer Pics

I finally got around to going through all the photos I took from Andrew's first soccer match of the season, just before coming to Asia. I'm still sad that I had ref'ing duties during Steven's game, and couldn't take any pictures of that one. :-(

To the left here is Andrew dribbling the ball past a defender (by keeping it BEHIND him!); it was shortly after this that Andrew drove in for a goal.

I've got a total of 58 pictures that I've taken from that game. Parents/players from Andrew's team, I'm sorry I have a lot of shots of Andrew; I suppose I'm a bit biased behind the camera. But hopefully I got some good pics of most of the rest of the players, too.

To view all the photos in Flickr, please click here.
To view all the photos in Facebook, please click here.

Philippines from the Air

I'm not normally one of those geeky tourists that takes pictures from the window of an airplane, but as we flew over the Philippines today, I couldn't help myself. En route from Tokyo to Singapore, the Japan Air Lines 747 I was on flew right over the Philippines at 40,000 feet, about 50 miles southeast of Manila. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous, so I snapped a few photos.

The one (at right), in particular, looks like an island that is just barely submerged under water. I have heard that the snorkeling in the Philippines is some of the best in the world. I know an American who once went to the Philippines, and never went back (well, except to visit). He now runs one of largest outsourced call centers (I've probably spoken to some of his staff!) in the Philippines. I've actually worked with him in the past; they do some game development, as well, but they handle telephone support for many online games in Asia. Perhaps I'll have to pay him a visit some time, and after Hawai'i got me hooked on snorkeling, I'll have to be sure to get some gear. :-)

Greetings now from Singapore; I'll be here through Saturday, when I head back to Japan.

Disney's Interesting Fall Promotion

So I'm riding on the subway here in Tokyo today (the Ginza line), and I spot this ad from Disney, pitching a Fall promotion.

On weekdays from 9/12 to 11/28, if three or more "close friends" come together, and they're all 45 years old or older, their admission price to Tokyo Disney Sea drops from the regular 5,800 JPY to 4,500 JPY.

That's close to a 25% discount (though not quite), which is the only connection I can draw to the resort park's 25th anniversary here in Japan.

But I got to thinking, would such an age-focused promotion work in the U.S.? First of all, do 45-year-old housewives band together in California (or Florida) like I imagine they would in Japan? And secondly, wouldn't some 40-year-old nutjob instigate a class action lawsuit claiming age discrimination? Anyway... I thought it was an interesting promotion.

Regional Foods in Japan

In the subway here in Tokyo today, I saw the following advertisement for Kirin Beer. Now... since I'm not a beer drinker and know nothing about it, I cannot attest to the veracity of this promotion, but it talks about how Kirin beer is the perfect compliment to the special foods from all 47 of Japan's "prefectures" (counties).

But the ad got me thinking: do we have THAT level of regionalization of food back home? Japan's area is nearly 146,000 square miles and Japan has 47 prefectures. Close in size to that is California, with 164,000 square miles and 58 counties. The amazing difference is population density: 873 per square mile versus 234 per square mile. But I digress... in Japan, each of the 47 prefectures is known for a particular food. Could that be said of California's 58 counties? I would venture to say that that's not quite the case. Of course, when I think of California, now living in Idaho, I just think, In-N-Out Burgers.

Speaking of Idaho... my adopted home state occupies nearly 84,000 square miles, has 44 counties, and has a population density of just 15.6 people per square mile. I LOVE IT!!! But regionalization of food across the 44 counties? I'm not sure there are that many varieties of potatoes..... :-)

Back on the Pitch

It's that time of year again. Yup... soccer!!! Andrew and Steven are playing again this year, and we had two matches today. Unfortunately, during Steven's match I had to assume the role of A.R. so I couldn't shoot photos, but I got a bunch of pics of Andrew's match.

Andrew's team rolled to a 8-3 victory, and Andrew (#6 in red) scored two goals, one of which is pictured on the right. He threaded a shot between two defenders and right past the keeper for a goal.

Steven's team played really well today, too, and everybody had a great time!

Early John & Michelle

That last posting, and the mention of the silly faces my children like to make, reminded my mother-in-law that I've made silly faces for as long as she's known me. She was kind enough to send some photos she scanned of some early pictures of Michelle and I; some dating back to when we were dating! Check out my signature silly face in the lower right!

Man... were we an awesome looking couple, or what?! My children would be well-served by replying with, "You still are, Mom and Dad..." :-)

Birthday Dinner: Steven & John

As has been previously posted, it's tradition in our family to do a birthday dinner with each family member's birthday. Since Steven and I share a birthday, and since I'm traveling a good chunk of this week, we did our birthday dinner this past Thursday night. I'm sorry it took a few days to get this posted, as we had a bit of an unrelated medical emergency later that night that had us at the hospital emergency room until nearly 2am (oh joy!). There's a new restaurant in town, Famous Dave's. It's a BBQ place, and Steven and I decided to try that for our birthday dinner. Man oh MAN was it ever tasty!!! I had beef brisket and pulled pork, along with all the fixins'! A low-calorie, low-cholesterol meal to be sure, but it was very VERY yummy!!! :-)

We opened our birthday presents there, too, and both Steven and I were very excited with our gifts. Steven got "Rock Band" for the Wii, and I got a new 28-105 zoom lens for my digital SLR camera, replacing the decades-old one that I had that broke last year. But hey... Speaking of photos, enjoy the photos in this posting! :-)

Steven being silly in front of the Famous Dave's sign.

Silly faces seem to be all the rage with the Goodale children. Hmmm... I wonder which parent they get this trait from???.......