Katherine to the Rescue!

Typically, I’ve been writing these posts in chronological order, but some things can’t wait to be written about. It’s currently Friday evening and I’m currently sitting in the Qingdao train station waiting for our train to Beijing. There’s no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be sitting here if not for Katherine — who certainly earned her Rock Star designation today. With that, I’ll go back to the normal flow of things… But before I do, I must give my most sincere thanks to Katherine for taking care of me today.

After over 21000 steps yesterday and a long weekend ahead of us, I decided that getting the extra 45 minutes of sleep would be well worth skipping exercising this morning. I was feeling crazy this morning, so I actually tried something new… Plain yogurt with honey and cereal.

Since we were going to the train station and Han Te’s main office is so far away from downtown, we decided to go to the marketing office which is much closer. This also gave us a chance to meet with Xiolong and discuss some of the issues they had around marketing and sales. He’s currently the only one dedicated to it, but he was going over his expansion plans for a dedicated sales and marketing organization. In the end, I’m really glad that we had a chance to talk with him as I think there are some recommendations that we can give to help them. Carosa even joined again via WeChat.

This was definitely a hip office. They also had a big 3D printer and some really neat things that had been printed around the office. Probably the coolest was a little speaker that fit an large smartphone and them amplified and directed the sound out the end of what looked like a megaphone.

The marketing office was in a really neat part of town that had all sort of restaurants and shops around it.

We took a break mid morning and walked around the area for a bit. We also got a chance to try some Chinese frozen yogurt. For that, they take a packet of warm yogurt, add a bunch of nuts and fruits to it and press it around in a cold stainless bowl to freeze it in place. Then they scoop it up and toss it in a cup to eat. It was definitely different than anything I have had before, but it was good.

We went back and did another hour or so of discussion then we packed up for lunch.

I hadn’t had a chance to tried some KFC — in this case, Korean Fried Chicken. It’s apparently pretty famous, so when I saw that there was one right across from the office, I suggested we try it. We tried two different types, one plain and another with some sweet Thai chili sauce which I would definitely do again. It was a bit heavy — as it was fried chicken, but at least it was good!

After lunch, we went back to the hotel to pack and get ready to go to the train station. I was furiously charging everything I could to minimize what I would need to bring — toothbrush, razor, Fitbit, camera, phone, iPad, and my China phone. We still needed to pick up our train tickets so we left for the station with plenty of time… And good thing we did. And here we are again back to the train station…

When you order train tickets online, you put in your passport number. Apparently when I put in mine, there was a slight typo. Also apparently in China, having that number right is important. And when I was buying my ticket a week ago, I transposed one of the numbers wrong.

So when I went to the ticket counter to pick up my two tickets (there and back), they only gave me one, and asked if I bought another one for another person. Katherine stepped in and tried talking to the agent, but to no avail. She said that I needed to cancel and buy a new ticket. The only problems were that the train was completely sold out, and there’s no way to change the number after it’s purchased.

So now the sweating begins. Katherine and I go down to the place where you can buy new tickets, to see what we can do. Could we cancel and buy the ticket back simultaneously? Could a supervisor override the number? Certainly not one of my better moves. To cut the long story short, Katherine somehow managed to convince the ticket agent to just type in the passport number incorrectly, and to issue the ticket. They called ahead to security to let them know I would be coming as well. And it’s only at after that point, I begin to hear how lucky I was. She said that if I was not a foreigner, there’s no way they would have done that. So here’s a big thank you to the ticket agent and supervisor who were willing to help me out… And of course another big thank you to Katherine for being the huge help that she was. Once we had the ticket there weren’t any more issues, so we could finally relax.

We had a bit of time to kill in the train station, so we grabbed some snacks and then eventually got on the train. Miraculously enough, despite the seats being randomly assigned, we all were sitting in the same two rows which was nice. The train itself was very comfortable. There was a bit more leg room than you’d typically get in an exit row on an airplane and the seats actually reclined quite a bit.

Despite it being a 5 hour ride, the time went by pretty quickly… Most likely because all of us were hanging out and having fun. I also took some time to write some of the final report for the assignment.

Getting to the hotel after the train ride was far from a simple task. I still think we didn’t go out the right exit as we ended up at the bus station. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take the subway since we were getting in too late. There were a bunch of shady illegal taxi cars so we tried to get Ubers. However, since we were in a bit of an odd area, it took forever for them to finally find us. They did, and we set off for the hotel.

Upon checking in, Matthias and I went up to our room only to find a bunch of mold on the ceiling and water on the floor. After much deliberation (and again intervention from our super hero Katherine), they finally agreed to move us to another room at no charge.

The only downside was that it just had a queen bed, so we ended up swapping with Maria so that we each would have our own.The new room wasn’t a whole lot better, but at least it was clean! At that point, I was exhausted and had no trouble falling asleep when Matthias and I stopped chatting and my head hit the pillow.