Surveying customers is tough work! I felt pretty helpless since I could not speak Mandarin well enough to survey the customers myself. Instead, our translators did most of the talking. We found that a lot of times the housewives did not want to talk to us.
In the evening all of the students, faculty, and Min Sheng employees gathered at the hotel for the banquet. The purpose of the banquet was to build “guanxi” (relationships). We had been warned about how this usually works, but were not in any way prepared for what ensued. Toast after toast after toast was made, and if someone said 干杯! (ganbei) it meant you had to drain your glass. Needless to say it got ugly fast. Everyone was singing karaoke and having a great time. I was a bit shy about talking to people first, but by the end of the nite it seemed we were all friends.
Our biggest mistake was going out after the banquet. It should have ended there. But we were having such a great time, we didn’t want it to end. Several of us went to a nearby expat bar where I was able to practice my Mandarin. It was so awesome! We also went to a karaoke (KTV) bar where I learned how to buy a bottle of vodka in Mandarin and also encountered my first妓女(jinu – prostitute, or as Mike would say prostie). She was the one that waited on us, but when she got off her shift, she stopped back by our room and left her phone number with us. Maybe that’s why she’d been so helpful!
Found out I had some pretty cool teammates…
I know how to get those housewives to talk to you. Hand out your scones! They'll be back for more!
ReplyDeleteok, what Karaoke song did you sing? Hope you guys had a designated driver. ;-)