Celebrating My Birthday, Qingdao Style

After going out and seeing the band until pretty late last night, it felt really good to sleep in a bit. I hadn’t talked to my folks at all, so I gave them a call when I got up and before breakfast. Dad told me my favorite birthday story, which I truly look forward to every year.

I needed to get down there before they closed, and was completely surprised to see everyone there sitting at the table for an impromptu surprise birthday party. They had balloons, a crown, a cake, and even got me massage. It was super sweet for them to do that, and completely unexpected. I even was serenaded in the middle of the restaurant. We all celebrated with some cake, which was actually really good.

Rafael and I then got together to cover the final details for the afternoon community service event. After that, I wanted to get out and get a bit of exercise so I went for a run on my normal beach route. Given that it was midday and the construction equipment was in full force trying to clean up all the seaweed it made for a hot and stinky run. Qingdao has a lot of tourism, so getting the beaches back to normal is obviously a big priority. Still, one thing I won’t miss are all the smells.

By the time I got back, cooled down, and showered it was time to go to the community service event. We all piled in a small van and rode over to Link (the incubator) for our afternoon session. When we got to Link, Zoey and Katherine came running up with a present for me as well. They knew that I was drinking a lot of water at work, so they got me a nicer portable mug to drink from it. Super sweet of them! Karen also got me a very nice notebook as well. I’ve been so fortunate to have all these people who obviously care about me to celebrate my birthday with when I need to be so far from home.

Today was also another IBM Snapchat day, so I was looking for interesting things to share throughout the day. At the event, we had a great turnout — I’m guessing close to 60 people. Jose was going in full force and gave some wild introductions for Matthias, Rafael, and I.

Matthias kicked things off with the Marshmallow Challenge. All the participants were really into it! It turned into utter chaos (in a good way) very quickly. And just as he has said often happens, the winning team had several children on it. Test your assumptions, iterate, don’t be afraid of simple solutions, and keep the end goal in mind.

After that, Jose came back to the stage to introduce Rafael and I… Including getting the whole room to sing to me. Nothing like a little embarrassment to get some life in you right before you present to a big audience. My design thinking pitch itself went very well, but it’s also been the 4th time I covered most of the material between the session at Han Te and going over everything with Katherine and Zoey beforehand in the last week alone.

The design thinking exercises we did seemed to go over well with them, and we definitely got some interesting ideas on how to help IBMers volunteer more. As always some were better than others. We had the full mix of things from saying that they should go on strike, to docking their pay, to buying them a new house so that they spent less time in traffic, to getting their daughter to guilt them into it. Ultimately, it seemed to get the wheels turning about focusing on the user (for most people) which is what we were going for. Afterwards, I got a few really nice complements from the other IBMers about how you could tell that I’ve presented this before — which is always a good feeling.

By the time we got back to the hotel, there wasn’t much down time before we had to walk to the restaurant Karen had recommended. Everyone except Bharat came to dinner which was fun. It was a nicer Szechuan restaurant in Darling Harbor — very close to the hot pot place. We didn’t venture into anything crazy, but the food was really good! My favorite was a Kung Pao Chicken — which still was very different than what we’d get at home. There were also some really nice shrimp that were split down the middle. I also got a chance to briefly video chat (and get birthday wishes) from Korey, Crosby, and Carlyn before they went to go play the silly game.

After that, the eleven of us met Bharat and walked over to the bar… So we had the whole gang hanging out. Apparently this group’s thing is tequila shots, and after all it was my birthday, so who was I to say no. It only took one of those before Matthias was ready to dance, so he went out to the dance floor. A few songs in, I couldn’t let him stay out there alone, so I started dancing too. By about halfway through the first set we had most of the group out there. It really was a blast! Tonight was also apparently beer pong night, so while the band was taking a break, the bar manager pulled out a table and groups of the 12 of us started playing. I was in a pretty good groove, and went 2 for 2 on the night.

It was great to have the whole gang out there dancing and hanging out together. I think I’ve been really lucky to have such a fun group of people to essentially become temporary family for a month.

One of the last highlights of the evening was getting pulled up to the stage to sing along with the band — essentially live karaoke for “Shut Up and Dance.” It was so loud that I had no idea if I was actually singing or if the mic they gave me was even on, but it was fun regardless. Susa actually recorded most of it, so I later found out that it was indeed on – maybe not American Idol worthy, but not terrible either. If I had to be away for birthday, this was certainly a good way to celebrate.