I got a quite nice hotel room :), 19th floor, Fuxuan hotel.
Very mixed messages.
The second day, Nov 2nd, was the beginning of the event with a grand opening and unveiling of some plaquette or sth. We, Thiemo and I, didn't really understand everything. There were 400 Chinese and 3 Swedes. Prof Kalle from KTH were there as well and held a talk about IoT they were involved in. Everything else was in Chinese but we had headphones with real time translation by two translators. One was awesome, she kind of tried to give the meaning of what was being said instead of what the guy did. He translated every single word and it just got out of hand.
There were a lot of politicians there, and photographers and we got seats at the front with badges that said "Delegate" on them. Fancy! :)
Today we also met Alexa the first time. Alexa is a Chinese girl that works at the FUDAN uni (co-organizers and the ones that invited us), and who we have been emailing with regarding all kinds organisational. Also, Prof Kalles equivalent, Alex, was there. Here we also met Prof Lu from FUDAN. We all (minus PrKalle) had lunch together at a table Alexa reserved for us, marked VIP.
Some eventcenter where the first day presentations were held.
Oh my….
Presentations.. First guy ran over his time by half an hour..
Oooh yes..
In the afternoon Prof Lu took us all to an old Chinese village outside Shanghai. It is more like a tourist thing nowadays, with mostly shops, vendors and small restaurants. The shops came in a few variants, eg quilt and blanket shops, handicraftshops, animal shops etc. We visited a small temple, with people trying to get money from us. They are easy to spot, wherever you are on the planet. It's universal. The village was very nice, really appreciated the visit!
Our hosts bought us dinner by the river; I counted to 12 different dishes, which we shared between us. Chinese style. Some were firsts for me, such as snail, crab (sorry Johan, the burnt excuse for a crab in Vietnam doesn't really count), lotus root w sticky rice embedded, dried small fishes (eat with head, fins and all) as well as a candidate for worst food ever: a tofu that smelled like poo. You eat it with spicy sauce. Eat da poo poo? I felt nauseus (spelling?) a while after that. Anyway, great dinner! Fun to try new things! Very appreciated!
Ye olde village
Crabs anyone?
Or pork?
Got back at around 19-20 and I got to work. I realized (and felt that) I had to redo large parts of my slides and make it better. We would be picked up by Alexa at 0730 so we would make it to 0900 (rush hour and far away). I got 1.5 hours of sleep that night, but I'm happy I did it because it got sooo much better.
Suspension bridge.
Maglev-train tracks
