(October 1, 2006)

Wow it has been a busy couple of weeks. I hope I can remember what has been going on . . . I’ll start from the big event . . .

Weekend of September 23rd

The weekend of the 23rd was the big weekend of the F-1 (Formula One Racecar) run in Beijing as well as my first project, the Urban Safari. Saturday I was up at 5:30 am to catch a bus to the site (about 1 hour north of Beijing) at 7:00 am. I spent that day supervising the construction of the tent, learning about the site, and coordinating the project via cell phone (there were 3 people who still had things to finish up in Beijing the day prior to the event). Besides a little confusion about where our 4:00 rehearsal would take place (one girl thought it would be at the office, but it was on-site) and one other thing, things went smoothly on Saturday.

The other thing that didn’t go smoothly was the hanging of the pictures in the gallery. It wasn’t supposed to be hard . . . but it was for some reason. We had 5 hired assistants with nothing to do, so we gave them this job. We had printed off photos of how we wanted the pictures arranged on the wall. The instructions were simple: make sure that the tops are flat and that the pictures that are at the same level in the example picture are at the same level on the wall. Well, it turns out that hanging pictures level is very, very hard to do. Now there were 5 guys there, so they could have had 2 hanging and 3 checking to see if the pictures were level, but for some reason that didn’t happen, even after I saw the “first draft” of the wall, screamed, and suggested it. The second time I came back after leaving them to do it, the pictures looked like they were floating along a wave in an ocean. They started (on the right half of the room) reasonably flat, but then they started tilting to the right and rising until they reached the crest at the far left end of the room where the top of the left-most picture was a full 3+ inches higher than the top of the right-most picture. The change was gradual, so one wouldn’t have noticed it if they were walking 4 inches from the wall, but if you were on the other half of the room, it literally hurt your eyes. Yikes. So I just did it myself.

After that fiasco was straightened out, we had the walk-through by a couple of VIPs, and they were very excited. Hurray! After that, we did a little run-through, packed up, and went home to get a little sleep before the big day.

Sunday morning, I awoke at 4:30 am to catch a 6:00 am bus to finish setting up. The main day went extremely smoothly with the exception of a little scare when our wine connoisseur showed up 15 minutes late. Luckily, only one VIP had arrived to tour the tent at that point, and he was still around when the wine-man arrived.

Later in the day, the tent was a huge hit! We invited about 50 people, 30 or so came, and several came 2 or 3 times to take advantage of the air-conditioning, the massages, and the wine. Meanwhile, I got to discuss Urban Safari as a concept, hand out my business card so that people could schedule their own Safaris, and so forth. It was excellent. It felt very good to finally reach the end of the whole project and to see all of the ideas come together as a reality.

Despite the fun time that I was having in the tent, the high-point of the day came when I got to see the F-1 car run. Because our company planned the event, the people on our team got “very special access” badges which allowed us to go right up next to the F-1 racer as it took off and whipped around and skidded to stops, etc. It was crazy! It’s actually pretty scary when a car that can go 0 to 60 in 3 seconds is whipping around about 8 feet in front of you and burning so much rubber that you can’t see it after a second when it starts driving away. And all of this occurred when we were in what I liked to call the “death zone” (as in, if the driver screws up, he plows through the barricades and you are dead, zone). He did actually go through the barricade at one point, but not near me. It was a pretty minor accident too, with only $500,000 damage done to the car (eek).

So that was that. I got lots of “congrats” from the other members of HighTeam for completing my first event, and many (including Alex) said that the tent was better than expected. So I’m happy for a first success.

This past week was quite eventful to, but not as unique as the F-1 Event. Monday I thought I was done with work, but since I’m a numbers guy I had to run the analysis from all of the survey data that we took. It wasn’t too bad, though. Tuesday I took a trip to IKEA and continued the slow process of making my little bitty apartment into a home. Wednesday was a thank you dinner for the better than expected F-1 Event from the mystery company whose name I can’t divulge. Thursday, I was invited to a wine tasting by the wine connoisseur who helps us with Urban Safari; I’m finally starting to get a feel for the wine lingo that he throws around. After the wine tasting, it was on to karaoke, which was a blast. It was so much fun, in fact, that I went back for more karaoke on Friday. Saturday I caught up on sleep and today is Sunday, the first day of our week-long Mid-Autumn Festival (which means that I have no work next week!).

So today Erica and I went shopping around Beijing and I got the man-bag that I’ve been wanting for such a long time (my backpack is too big). In case you’re not familiar with the term man-bag, it’s something like a purse, but for a guy. However, you can sling it over your shoulder, so it’s masculine. Then we did some grocery shopping, I watched some T.V. and I treated myself to a nice little Bose stereo system that hooks up to my iPod. Soon my apartment will be a home ☺.

That’s about it for now. I’ll keep updating as I have time (which I hopefully will this week)!