Shipped off to Shanghai 2010: My First Business Trip

Two weekends ago I went on my first business trip! Thursday afternoon I left the office with the rest of the HR department (in total, only 5 of us). We went to the airport to meet our HR counterparts from all of the other China offices, and then were taken by bus to Suzhou. We stayed at a fancy 4-star hotel (which are VERY deluxe in China).
Friday we all went to an all-day conference in the hotel. The conference was a string of presentations made in Mandarin, so I was left sitting there in boredom. I could only pick out a fraction of the words (most were business words beyond my comprehension), and not nearly enough to have much of an idea what they were talking about. Lunch was a very fancy affair, and a nice respite from the conference. The afternoon was filled with more of the same. One thing did pique my interest, however. Since the slides were in English, I could sort of follow the topic of discussion. During the “best practices sharing,” though, I couldn’t figure out what “POO communication” stood for. (Instead it just left me laughing and thinking of Bubba.)
Saturday we had ‘team-building’ excursions to Zhouzhuang and Suzhou. Zhouzhuang is famous for its classic bridges and waterways. It was so beautiful! But it was also incredibly hot and humid (probably the worst I’d yet experienced here), to the point where it was hard to enjoy sightseeing… especially given the throngs of people. Luckily, in the afternoon it cooled down, so visiting Suzhou was much nicer. We visited one of the four famous gardens, the Lion Grove Garden, which holds special appeal for me because it used to be my Grammy’s family’s summer home. It was such a nice estate (and HUGE!). The lakes and rocks (the classic ones with the holes all over them) were really beautiful.
After a boat tour in the evening we returned to the hotel just in time to watch the World Cup semi-finals. I was ecstatic to discover that our hotel suite allowed me to raise the bathroom’s window blinds and watch the came from the comfort of a warm bath! In a country like China, that feels somewhat perpetually dirty, a weekend getaway to a fancy and pristine hotel can be heavenly!