Hong Kong experiences part 1

I mentioned previously that when I worked as a Product Manager for Hallmark Cards I was given the opportunity to visit Hong Kong & China on 2 occasions. These 2experiences will stay with me for life, but for completely different reasons

Sometime around 2003 the manufacturing of all our cards moved from Bradford to China and whilst I am all for manufacturing staying in Britain and buying British it was amazing to see the level of quality and attention to detail in the products that were coming in from China compared to the constant faults and problems we experienced from Bradford

Towards the end of 2004 I was called into the Managing Directors office - presuming something was wrong or I was getting more work you can imagine how thrilled I was when he told me they wanted me to go to HK on the next trip

Feb 2005 I was en route to Manchester airport with 2 colleagues Louise who was also a Product Manager and Chris who worked as the liaison between our office and the HK office.

We got the shuttle down to Heathrow, there we had about 4 hours to kill until we got our flight to Hong Kong

I was excited and apprehensive at the same time about what the week ahead had in store for me.

I had never flown long haul before and the thought of an approx 13hr flight didn't thrill me, but it had to be done...

We survived the journey - it wasn't the most comfortable and we really didn't manage to sleep (well actually Chris slept most of the way!)

Once at the airport we were met by the hotel's car and given fresh wipes and bottled water - I remember thinking this is going to be amazing

We were staying at the 5* Langham Hotel



This was the view that greeted us as we entered



As you can imagine WOW was often in our vocabulary

Our rooms looked like this



with a bathroom like this



WOW WOW WOW :-)

The week consisted of us spending a couple of days in the Hong Kong Hallmark office, talking about production, costings, issues etc and then we also went on site tours of several of the manufacturers - these were all based in China

Every lunchtime consisted of a different manufacturer taking us to lunch and every evening meal was the same - a different manufacturer would take us for a meal.
It was the manufacturers opportunity to wine and dine us and clearly tout for more business

The lunch meals had pretty much the same format - taken to a private room in a restaurant where copious amounts of Chinese starters and main courses were brought out - all placed on a large "lazy susan" turn table in the centre of the table and everyone tucked in

The evening meals varied more...we went to an outdoor Fish restaurant where we had 9 courses of fish dishes!
You could even choose what you wanted to eat - although we didn't






I promise we didn't eat this one (just one that looked similar!!)


We also went to an Italian one evening but the most memorable eve was when we were taken to the private members club The China Club by a lovely gentleman called Mr Lau
He was so proud of his heritage and was passionate about tea and being lucky enough to sit next to him he told me all about this passion..

We had spent most of the week persevering with chop sticks and had just about got the hang of them, but here at the China Club you didn't get common wooden ones - these were solid silver - and much heavier than we were used to...
Louise and I managed to use them(just)...but Chris struggled, Mr Lau noticed, beckoned a waiter over and within a second Chris was presented with a knife and fork :-)
Our lovely meal was interrupted so that we could go into the main restaurant to watch the "entertainment", which consisted of the head chef doing a demo where he created noodles...It may not sound like much, but believe me - it was amazing! Especially when he skipped (still wearing his chefs hat) with the noodles







The days were long, but the nights were even longer...a typical day consisted of breakfast at 7.30, walk to the office, meetings all morning then lunch which was usually at least 2hrs...back to the office til 5pm ish..quickly back to the hotel for a quick change and then usually out for the evening meal between 6.30 and 7.00.

The meal would probably end around 10pm...and then 4 of us (Me, Chris, Louise and our MD David) would head for the nightlife of Hong Kong - which resulted in us generally getting back to the hotel and bed by 4am...and then the alarm would go off at 6.30 and it all started again
We worked it out - from leaving the UK to getting back to the UK we had no more the 20hours sleep across the whole week!

No surprise we slept well on the flight back!