So we finally arrived in Shanghai on Sunday night after a lay over in Hong Kong. I brought Emmanuel (Five Four Design Director) with me on the trip. We were picked up at the Shanghai Pudong Airport by Ryan (Five Four Product Development Director, based out of Hong Kong). He’s been killin’ it at our Chinese factories for the last 3 months, poor guy lost like 15 lbs. dieting on Chinese food and tea!
I’ve been to Shanghai before but when I usually come all I do is work. First time I was here for 2 weeks and the second time I came I was here for about 12 hours, came to our vendor’s office and then hopped on a plane to Hong Kong at night. Anyways, so we got to our hotel pretty late and needed to get some room service immediately. We were stuck eating nasty plane food for a whole day. Got some burgers and grubbed. Also ordered some great Chinese beer called Tsing Tao.
The next morning we came to our vendor’s office to work all morning. They then took us to lunch and surprisingly I saw two American restaurant chains I didn’t expect to see here, Hooters and Coffee Bean. You normally see McDonald’s, Starbucks and KFC everywhere. In fact, I’ve never seen so many damn KFC restaurants in my life, there is one here every 3 blocks!
Came back to the office to work all the way until late, went to another great Chinese style dinner. Check out the bowl of chili peppers that welcomes you when you walk in to the restaurant.
For those of you that have been to Shanghai, you know the city is incredible. We decided to head out to The Bund at night for a drink. There is this club called 18 on The Bund (I think that’s the name) there that has a great view of the Bund and the river as well, its pretty nuts.
The next morning we went to a city outside of Shanghai called Ningbo to check out a factory. I slept the whole 3 hour drive. The city is pretty nice, peep below.
Everywhere I’ve been China people drive like nuts. Here is one instance how we were sandwiched between 2 other cars on one street, you almost seem to think like you are always going to get hit by another car but luckily you never really do…
After hitting up the factory, we went to another Chinese style dinner. This time we ate at the yacht club. Our private room overlooked the river.
We headed back to the hotel and decided to grab a drink. The first bar we saw next to the hotel was called O’Reilly’s, a brand new Irish pub that opened today. Since it was opening day, it was free drinks all night. Ningbo isn’t really the most popping town, so I think this might have been the coolest thing going down all night. In L.A. it’s usually a hot private party or club that’s going off w/a good crowd and bottles poppin’, here it might be foosball and pool tables at O’Reilly’s as the hot night in the town. Pretty young look…
On a side note, I’ve been noticing translations from Chinese to English on many signs and packaging, here are some that were pretty funny.
