A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Well this has certainly been an odd day. I woke up early this morning to go to the police station to complete our residency permits. The police station was pretty nice, I'm not sure if there is another place for police work and this one was just for filling out forums, but that's all anyone seemed to be doing, it wasn't exactly NYPD Blue in there. It took a little while as they looked thorough all out forums and kept stamping and signing every page. You really get a sense of China as a bureaucracy with things like this it was just one thing after another getting stamped and moved around it almost seemed sort of like a giant Monty Python version of what a bureaucracy should look like, row after row of people punching and moving papers. After that we went back to the hotel which is where I lost track of Brian, Ken, and Dave, but soon after Clark called me and said that some Chinese guys wanted to take us somewhere and that there would be food involved. If that sounds vague well that's how it sounded to me, we were going some place with some people to see something. I know China is sort of a go with the flow place but this was pretty vague even for that. I came downstairs to see July and Veronica, two of the German girls and Clark and his friend Cindy already out there sort of talking with a few Chinese guys. I say sort of talking since they didn't speak much English and we didn't speak much Mandarin. After a minute a van drove up and we all got in, most of the Chinese guy were in another car. As we were driving down the street I asked anyone if they knew exactly where we were going or why which was met with general shrugs.

We came to a hotel on the other side of town where a line of buses had formed and a lot of people in suits or semi-formal cloths were standing. I eventually learned that we were going to some kind of expo and we were all given passes and ushered onto the bus. It's a pretty wired feeling to be going to some place for reasons passing understanding with people who seemed to have serious business there. I eventually figured out that I think the organizers of the expo just wanted some more foreign people there, there were a number already, so some one came and essentially recruited us. Being in China seems to make me automatically some sort of foreign dignitary. We eventually arrived at the expo which featured a ton of over the top style performances. We were ushered around, with about a thousand other people between the booths getting a look at what companies are set up in Changzhou. On the way I started talkign to another western person on the bus who was from France but lived in Nanjing. It turns out he was only here since a client his company did a lot of business with had invited him. As we talked I learned that he also was part of the management for a French restaurant in Nanjing which I got the card for and intend on visiting.

After we had seen most of the exhibition hall we came to a huge auditorium where their was some sort of presentation about to take place. A number of speeches were given then some sort of contract was signed by a number of the participants. A few of the speeches were in English though I doubt more then a quarter of the people there could have understood them. The Frenchmen told me that a number of the business there represented more then a hundred million dollars investment in Changzhou. He also noted that every time he visited Changzhou he would get lost since the city was constantly reinventing itself. After all the speeches were over we were taken by bus to a hotel where we had what was essentially another banquet, along with the customary drinking too much. It's pretty amazing to just find yourself shoved into a huge expo with no real understanding of why you are there except that you are a foreigner. I think I came at a pretty amazing time in China's history where westerners are still rare enough that this sort of thing can go on. I took a ton of pictures which are on Flickr and if I think of more I'll post it tomorrow though as for today I'm pretty buzzed from that damn Baijou