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July 5, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 3

Wednesday, June 25:

• The hotel has, perhaps, the best breakfast buffet I've ever experienced. It's got a huge range of food choices - Chinese, Indian, western, you name it (likely necessary due to their expat clientele). You can get anything from pork-filled buns to curry to Cheerios to omelettes. The food's of good quality, too, and very tasty.
• (On the downside, the hotel insists on playing soft Western music (e.g., Wham!, the "Titanic" soundtrack) during breakfast, which, while initially earning points for kitch, gets old very, very quickly as the week continues.)
• The Microsoft office is about 1km from the hotel, so we walk.
• Beijing is enveloped in a white, cloudlike, foggy substance - visibility peters out about 1,000 feet away in any given direction. At first, I'm not sure if this is pollution or fog or what, but it doesn't have any appreciable smell, and doesn't irritate my eyes or lungs. It also never goes away for the duration of the trip. Huh.
• At 7:30 AM, the streets are full of people - people on foot, people on bikes, people on mopeds, people in cars, people in buses (the buses are packed), people streaming in and out of subway stations, people, people, people. Everyone has a bustle and a focus, and nobody seems to pay anyone else very much attention. It's got a fascinating rhythm to it; I feel like I could sit and watch the flow for hours.
• The Beijing Microsoft office is exactly like every other Microsoft office I've ever been to, except I can't read half the signs.
• Brooke and I, badly jet-lagging, grab coffee from a Nescafe machine in the shared kitchen. It turns out to be very, very, very yummy.
• Our first order of business is an 8 AM video conference call with some folks back home in Redmond, where it's still Tuesday, 5 PM. After yawning and blinking and drinking oceans of coffee to keep my focus, I now have a much greater degree of empathy for my Chinese colleagues.
• After the call, Brooke and I hole up in an empty office and focus on getting things done.
• Working remotely is actually pretty nice because you can focus. During my usual workday, I regularly shut off my e-mail and IM for periods of time to give myself unbroken stretches where I can concentrate and get in to flow. It's a deliberate effort, and one that can be controversial (people sometimes expect you to reply to email right. this. very. second.). When you're 15 hours ahead, your work day starts as the home office is closing down for the night (8 AM = 5 PM), so the majority of the e-mail that was going to be sent that day has already been sent. As such, when I arrive I slurp down all the mail that was sent during the day, process it, and ... that's it. Not much new comes in during my day, and the quiet is wonderful. I'm able to really crank on some of my projects.
• Around 2:38 PM, we get punchy enugh to start Rick Rolling one another. The Dramatic Prarie Dog also makes an apearance. More Nescafe does not seem to be helping.
• For dinner, our Microsoft colleagues take us out to a very nice, very modern Chinese restaurant. At one point, I went to set my napkin on my lap, and one of my fellows gently explains that this is considered rude - I was "taking the job" of the server at the restaurant who was supposed to do that. Hmm.
• The food is amazing.
• By the end of the day, I'm exhausted - deep-bone exhausted, everything-is-funny exhausted, walking-like-a-slightly-drunk-person exhausted. I return to my hotel room, brush my teeth, and call it a day.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 5, 2008 11:14 AM. Posted to MSFT | Travel.

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