Business Trip'n

4.18 Business Trip

Just got back from Macau and Hong Kong!  This weekend I had a little business trip with Mr. Li.  If you ask me what my job title is… perhaps a personal assistant for Hengwei Investments Ltd.?  Mr. Li is a venture capitalist who would like to invest in language school in Hong Kong.  I accompanied him there to help with English and to listen to the presentation of the Romanian couple who would like to open the school and are asking him for the startup capital.

This is a great opportunity!  I didn’t use any English this weekend, and all expenses were covered. From the presentation I could tell that the Romanian couple had almost perfect English, and that they were very experienced in teaching.  However, it seems their understanding of business is a bit shallow.  The estimates they had for the first year to begin “return on investment” was somewhat unrealistic.  Other details of the presentation were simply written on pen and paper… not exactly what my Laoban 老板 (boss) was looking for.  So I will be busy this week trying to mold their presentation into a proper business proposal format to properly estimate the risk and rate of return.  I am so excited to do this in Chinese!  Hopefully he finds my work useful.

Now what about the fun aspects of trip?  I arrived in Macao Friday night and stayed at this beautiful hotel called 老铺京. It is the “Sin City / Las Vegas “of Asia. They even have a 威尼斯 Venice like Caesar’s Palace.  You will laugh at me because I am not at all someone who has interest in gambling.  Why let hard earned money leave your wallet like water slipping through your fingers?  I can’t think of any other better comparison.  It makes me sick to think of, however, Mr. Lee gave me a small stipend particularly for gambling… “just try it!” He said, you need to learn this part about Chinese culture... Everybody loves gambling.  Um, okay?  Educational experience? I thought… I’ll try out my luck... four hours later I ended up with enough money to buy a Gucci bag.  One of the funniest things that has ever happened to me!  Why a Gucci Bag?  Particularly in Macau, there a many Russian woman who are 妓女… (prostitutes) the way they distinguish themselves are by small sparkly purses.  Not knowing this I left my hotel at the beginning of the night with a small bag…  this along with the fact that most Asians guess by my profile (my big nose) that I am 俄罗斯人 Russian or Eastern European  -allowed too much room for suspicious eyes to follow me.  At the end of the night with this “silly” cash, I opted to distinguish myself from these ladies with a much larger, less sparkly, classy “prize” bag. 

I already discussed the dinner in Hong Kong.  Quite productive!  This trip has inspired a “business idea”,  I will continue to turn this over in my mind a while before I write about it =)  But anyways…  the trip was successful, and I have safely returned to Nanjing. 

Love,

Caity