The Qingdao Media Extravaganza Continues

Despite being a bit tired, I set off for my normal morning run. I was running (no pun intended) a bit late, so I only got in a little over 3 miles. It’s been incredibly humid out so by the time I got back, I was drenched. I went and grabbed breakfast first so that I could cool down a bit before grabbing a quick shower.

At Han Te, Carosa and Jat were traveling today, so we worked with Nancy to run their morning stand up and to give our management update. Carosa joined with video chat which was pretty funny to see, but worked surprisingly well.

We also got some fun news from some of the activities we’d done over the last week. The CSC team was in the news again twice. And guess who got top photo billing again? Yes, my local celebrity status continued. They caught a photo of me popping out of the smoke tent where I was goofily celebrating my escape. And of course, it didn’t take long for the rest of the crew to start with their Mr. Handsome comments. All joking and teasing aside, I was really glad to see the event made the newspaper since the core project for Angel Emergency Center was to improve their visibility and set up a marketing plan. I’m sure both the team and the client we’re excited to get some positive press.

We also found out there was a write up from the newspaper about our community service event. Given that I was one of the presenters, I did get mentioned by reporter. It’s definitely been fun to get the press — even if this time they switched mine and Rafael’s title. We were told that the media would be very interested in us and our activities, but I didn’t imagine it would be as prevalent as it was. Qingdao has 9 million people, so the fact that we’ve been in the newspaper three times in three weeks is pretty amazing.

Despite the media blitz, today was a productive at the office. Matthias did a bunch of work with the developers in the morning, while I was working on creating a “Delivering Effective Presentations” deck. Maria has been working on the final report a bit, so things are starting to come together — which is a really good thing since we’re going to Beijing this weekend and we’re very quickly running out of time.

We tried out a new place for lunch, which I thought was pretty amazing. It was an individual hot pot restaurant and all the food itself went around a little conveyor belt. You just picked the food that you wanted and tossed it in your pot. At the end they just counted the type and number of sticks you pulled off the conveyor, and based on that, told you what the bill would be. For a ton of food, including a fair amount of meat and a beer, the bill was just over $2 each. Completely unbelievable!

If there was a downside to the restaurant it was that it might not have been the cleanest in the world. Matthias and I loved it, but Maria thought she was going to catch something just sitting there. I personally didn’t see any more issues here than a lot of other places we had been and considering everything was cooked in a pot of boiling water, I wasn’t the least bit worried.

After a quick (yet hot) walk around the block, we got back to work. In the afternoon, Matthias did a great session on writing user stories while I finished my presentation and started to review the final presentation.

When we got back to the hotel, Matthias and I made another typical run to the bakery and Carrefour. Every time we walk into the store, we’re met by this amazing smell coming from the bakery. The pastries with cream cheese inside have been delicious, so we each got some for dinner tonight. In Carrefour, we picked up some more of our go to snacks of apples and yogurt drink. As we were picking up the yogurt, a worker convinced us to buy the special priced pack… Which turned out to be an even bigger deal because despite us trying to tell her otherwise, the cashier only scanned one. As Matthias said, “We scammed them! First the bus driver, then the girls, then Maria… Now the man!”