Punch the keys

Giving a demo to an audience always requires some preparation. Even if it is only one member in the audience, it matters a lot because the impression the person would have depends on how you are doing. As it is, it is difficult to give a presentation or market an idea to another person. Add to that the language barrier and the mix gets interesting. Well, I had my first experience with such a mix a couple of days back when I gave a presentation of the proof of concept that we were working on. My colleague from China acting as the translator for the presentation. He had already instructed me to go slow since it would otherwise be difficult for him to keep up and translate. Having no experience in this and  no chance for a rehearsal, we dived in. The important thing for me was to keep track of what I was saying. Speaking slow and having to pause in between, I needed to keep my attention on where I was more than usual. My colleague would say the gist of what I had said and then te...

Some of my friends who had traveled east, told me how difficult it was to have food in these parts. Either it was the lack of vegetarian food or the different crawling or other creatures on the menu that were the point of contention, the gist was that food was going to be very very difficult here. So I was mentally preparing myself for a big diet which would have been good for me, I believe. But fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, it was not to be. I find the food here at Shanghai quite to my liking. To be fair to my friends, they had not come to Shanghai. They had visited the southern parts where, my Chinese colleague tells me, the menu has a lot of crawling creatures. Of course I am sticking to vegetarian and sea-food only. But still liking it. I don't think I have had so many vegetables in a single meal. Hmm, come to think of it, possibly only with the exception of an Onam Sadhya! There is a choice of spicy and non spicy food and the cooking style is ...

One of the must visits, that my friend here told me about was the world expo that has been going on at Shanghai from 01 May till the 31st of October 2010. You can see the theme of the expo "Better City, Better Life", the logo and the mascot, Haibao, all along the streets, on the public transport and billboards. According to the Wikipedia page for the expo , this is the most expensive expo in the history of world fairs. Around 90 odd countries have pavilions in the expo. During conversations about the expo, we never had any inclination of the mammoth setup of the expo. I imagined that it would be a grand fair, one we could spend about 6-7 hours and finish off. When another of my colleagues suggested that three days may not be sufficient to see it completely, I attributed it to an exaggeration. On Tuesday 15th Jun 2010, I understood that it was not so. We spent about 5 hours there at the expo and could cover only one pavilion completely and about 10 percent of the Ch...

The first weekend in Shanghai was a working weekend. The following week had a couple of holidays for the Dragon Boat festival and so the client was working to compensate for that. At the end of the day on Sunday, my colleague took us to see The Bund . It was an amazing view of the Shanghai Skyline from the Bund. You can see the panaromic view on the wiki page. The lighted up buildings are really an amazing sight. There were a lot of people visiting the Bund. It seemed as if there were Chinese tour groups too visiting. Most of the people had cameras and flashes were going off all around. Many had superb SLR camera with tripod too. It was totally understandable. This side of the Bund has all the older architectures. The Peace Hotel, which is supposed to host the foreign dignitaries and important personalities on state visit, is also on this side of The Bund. The Bund is along the Huangpu River, on the other side of which we could see the Shanghai  Pudong ...

The Shanghai Experience till now has been a great one. I really liked the place. It is very clean and planned. Thats the short of what my time here till now have been. Now getting into the details. :) The First day We landed at the Pudong International Airport on time. The local time being around 4:15 pm. The first act being to find the baggage. That was easy. All basic stuff which have now kind of become standard at international airports. After collecting the baggage, we went through the queue for the immigration check. The police officer on duty went through the documents and had only one question. "Where is the hotel address?" Locked safe in my baggage I told him. And he was kind of fine with that. Apparently, the hotel would have to register my passport number with the local police within 48hrs of my checkin. Hmm possibly the reason why he was asking for the hotel address. The next was to get a cell phone. I had heard that it was possible to get a pre-paid card at the ...