Hong Kong Day Trip

It feels like we have been here a month, and yet, it has only been a week.  Our days are busy with the basics, meetings, getting acclimated (cell phones, data plans, apartment hunting, etc), and of course cocktail meetings, which one may argue are more productive than the afternoon-kind.  The expat scene here is unreal.  Alex came in to China on Friday and on his flight from Beijing he sat next to an expat businessman, and they got to talking.  Nice little meeting, no big deal.  Later that evening a friend of ours, Mark, comes down to our apartment and says to Alex, "So you're the guy that sat next to Jason on the flight from Beijing."  The community here of non-natives is apparently very tight-knit, something we have found to be a welcome change from the business scene and friendship circles back home.  Everyone shares information whether it be where to get the best dry-cleaning rates, or which secretarial firms to use for your particular business.  The best thing about them though is the ability to tap into their networks and Chinese connections here.  That networking is infinitely more useful than any Blackberry breakfast back home. 

We are making quite a bit of progress, and True Wind should be set up officially within the month (our initial incorporation was Anemoi Partners LLC and is the parent company for our education service).  

Back to Hong Kong though...  One, it's an unbelievable city; two, the night life is pretty swank.  We were in town Monday to meet with a few web developers and get a banking account set up for the business.  Olivier's girlfriend Elena happened to be in town with her Fordham Law school arbitration team.  Apparently there is a big competition in Hong Kong where law schools send teams to compete in various lawyery matters.  The nice thing about this is lawyer happy hours.  We were given special entry into one of their cocktail hours, and I must say it is pretty cool to tell people you live over in Shenzhen, are involved in a small education start-up, and were in town for business that afternoon.

This brings me to an expat institution in Shenzhen (parents and worried parties, this may a good time to head back to msnbc.com)  the inebriated border crossing.   There is one border spot that stays open 24 hours a day, and is home to one of the oddest travel situations I've seen so far.  Seeing as it is essentially a right of passage here, we committed to it after deciding that Monday night was not an important enough evening to merit a late-night hotel crash in an overpriced foreign city.  I will not venture into details, but the trip is indeed something everyone should do once.  It is quite an adventure.