Final Days in China - Waikato MBA Study Tour
Colleen Rigby gives us an update about the Waikato MBA Study Tour.
“During the last few days in Chengdu we visited some high tech companies producing LED lights (including those for the Olympic Stadium) and Quartz blanks for signal transmission (you probably have one in your phone).
We also met up with SWUFE MBA students. They asked some interesting questions like “what else does NZ do besides dairying?” NZ Inc could definitely market our products much better. The very upmarket supermarket we visited in Chengdu had no NZ wine or dairy products in it at all! Other questions were related to DHB strategies for encouraging patients to go to their GP rather than the hospitals and how oil drilling occurred off our coast. Great to meet them all.
One of the issues we faced was the lack of Google, Gmail and Facebook, but wechat.com worked well for the tour party and has some excellent features. We are linking to the SWUFE students using this as the tool.
The food in Chengdu is Sichuan and pretty spicy as some discovered when they pitched a bowl of chilli into the hotpot (in table wok) in which they cooked their food - perspiration, curses and yoghurt were the order of the day! A great evening out though. Everywhere we went banquets of food continued to appear on turntables in the middle of the table! What a great way to share food.
The markets in Chengdu were interesting, but people were reluctant to refer us to markets where goods were cheap or had "brand" names, seeing this as shameful. So we tended to find ourselves in wholesale markets or high end shopping malls. Mesh found lots of shoes nevertheless! The panda breeding center was a beautiful outdoor reserve, but rain prevented us from fully exploring the area. Nevertheless we were able to see pandas from a young age through to the mature ones in the enclosures.
The flight check in was an interesting and very long winded experience. We thought we might be leaving a few team members behind in China due to the gate closing before everyone had checked in (despite us being at the check-in at 7pm for an 11.20 pm flight). All ended well, with a few breathless passengers having gone through the traditional "stand on a box and be patted down by security guards" ritual before squeaking onto the plane.