I'm sitting on the airplane at the Shenzen airport, on our way to Shanghai for the rest of the week. In a word, our trip to meet ZTE was successful. We still have our work cut out for us a bit to ensure that we win the design, but I'm sure that we can make it successful. I plan to spend a little time on this flight to work on some updates for Francis at Insieme and to close a few action items from the meetings with ZTE.
As a travelogue of the week so far, here's a brief summary of events:
- After the 6-7 hour delay of our flight in Chicago we finally arrived in Honk Kong at around 2am on Tuesday morning. It took another 1.5 hours to reach the hotel in Shenzhen so when I got to my room it was a little after 3:30am. I had a meeting with Cisco at 4:30am, so I just stayed up all night.
- The room was really nice - here a some photos of the nice Westin hotel here in Shenzen:
- I wasn't able to see the view until after our 5am treadmill workout, but I was very pleased with the great view out my window. The "Windows of our World" exhibit is very cool. Little depictions of all areas of the world. I was especially happy to see the replica of the Eiffel Tower!
The Breakfast buffet at the restaurant was incredible! It wasn't up to the standards of the Shangri-La, but it was pretty close! Here are a few photos of the breakfast at the Westin:
- After breakfast, we loaded up with the crew and we headed out to ZTE, which was a 20-minute ride through chinese traffic. They drive a bit like folks in India, but they do actually obey the # of lanes of traffic in the road - unlike the Indians.
- Honestly, I was expecting something a little nicer for the ZTE facilities, but I do recognize that we weren't at the headquarters. Instead, we were at one of the more industrial MFG centers that also housed R&D. Here are a few photos of the building:
- It was very interesting that they had actually been doing crack repair on the sides of the building. I'm not sure that I've ever seen that before - it was pretty ugly - I hope they plan to improve the asthetics of the buildings one day...
- All of the meetings went very well. We were in meetings all day long and we presented about 80 slides along with white board discussions with several different teams. The last meeting of the day was with Mr. Alex and it felt much more like an interview - it was very interesting... Unfortunately, I don't think it went that well for two reasons. #1 - Jack likes to talk a little too much and he would answer questions with VERY long and often off-topic responses. #2 - We had a really hard time trying to get Alex to understand why and how our methodologies would improve the overall experience for NG Bragi vs. the previous experience with xLSI. I plan to pull together a slide on this flight to capture my thoughts on this topic. At lunch time, we took a cab to a cute little restaurant where we got to enjoy sitting on a couch while we ate. The food was really good, as shown in the photos below. The fun part was the English translations for all of the food. I've included a few photos on that as well.
I actually ate this "whitebait" fish whole - with a little wasabi sauce to mask the fishy flavor. It was actually pretty good, though.
- Back at work, I must say that one of the greatest parts of the visit was the morning and afternoon "music" with exercise. Everyone gets up and stretches, does some exercise to music for about 5 minutes. Then, from 12pm - 2pm, they actually turn out the lights, have lunch, then take naps. It was awesome!
- After the successful meetings, we went out to eat with just the Avago crew. It was pretty good food and luckily, I wasn't too dead from not sleeping in a VERY long time. It was a nice ending to a pretty good day. The restaurant was located in the shopping mall attached to the hotel. It was definitely a high-end mall and was 5 stories tall. We don't have many of those in the US!!
- Afer dinner, I went back to the room and I zonked out - I was exhausted!! I slept until 4am, then I just woke up and was awake. I sent a text to Jack and he was awake as well, so we put on our work-out clothes and went out for a run. We ended up getting a little lost, but we had great conversation, even about the church for a while and we really enjoyed ourselves. We ran 4.2 miles in under 40min, so it was a fun run. Here's the "map-my-run" results of our run:
- On the way to breakfast, I did stop by and take a few photos of the hotel pool. Very nice pool, but I was surprised that it was outside - it's not really warm enough in Shenzen to warrant a year-round outdoor pool, but maybe it was heated!
- At the end of the post, I definitely need to show a few photos of the Shenzen airport. It was a REALLY nice airport! I was very impressed with the architecture, the openess and the functionality of the airport. I've never flown "China Southern" airlines before, but I've been very pleased with my experience so far!
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