Thursday, May 10, 2007

Day Fourteen: May 8 - Bosch China Plant Tour

Today Elmar took us for a tour of Bosch/UAES, a German company that makes a variety of things, including automotive parts, home appliances and high-end power tools. Elmer is the Executive Vice President of the Asia division. It was nice for Melanie, Ryan and Megan to meet Elmar since they had stayed at his house for the 1st 3 days of the trip, but he had been out of town during that time. We started out with a tour of the manufacturing facility and had the chance to see the Chinese people putting together little pieces that go into our cars. It was amazing to see them just do repetitive work for the minutes that we saw them and know that they do this 8 hours a day, 7 days a week and make such little money. We then had a brief presentation at Elmar's office about the company financials.

Patricia and Kecia went to go pick up their dresses and coats, while Elmar took the rest of us to lunch at a Japanese restaurant.

After lunch, we had few minutes to walk to the Pudong side of the river and catch the views, which were awesome. Amy also got to admire the Pearl Tower up close and personal.

In the afternoon, we had a meeting with Sinomedia, a company that publishes magazines and guidebooks in both Chinese and English, and their focus audience is ex-patriots and business travelers. Some of their magazines are SpaChina, Stardom, China Economic Review, and EuroBiz. We were all given a subscription to SpaChina, which Ryan was very excited about. We found it quite facinating that when writing a story on the same subject, they would oftentimes write the articles with a completely different slant, depending on the culture and what that particular audience would be interested in. Another interesting aspect is the censorship of the articles. If the government doesn't like an article that is published, then all of the magazines will be pulled.

We finally attended the Shanghai Rotary meeting in the evening. It was nice to see the Rotarians that we had spent time with in the past two weeks, and to meet many others. The GSE team that visited Denver did a brief presentation on their experience in Denver, and in the middle of dinner, a very large group from Bangladesh came in the join the meeting. There were about 20 of them, and most of them wanted to chance to speak and say who they were. Then, it was our turn to speak to the Rotarians. We went up on stage, and immediately started singing the ROTARY song in Chinese. It was a great effort, and brought many smiles from the audience, although we're not sure that anybody actually understood what we were saying! Then each of us got to spend a few minutes talking about ourselves, and what this experience means to us. It was nice to look out into the audience and see so many familiar faces! It was a fun evening!

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