I finally got back on the Internet today. But I still haven’t been able to get my laptop online so no pictures (yet).

Halloween came and went and no one seemed to care here.
Two days ago we flew from Guangzhou to Shanghai. Very big ultra modern airport. One of our agents is Tiger and his office is in Shanghai and he was a wonderful host. The first night we had a great dinner. After a few Chinese beers Jennifer started a charades game, so we had to give clues to our teammates who didn’t speak each others’ language — it was a blast. Then we played rock paper scissors, which apparently is a truly universal game. (Shirley, our Atlanta partner who is from near Shanghai won, which was suprising because I am very hard to beat at that game.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to go to the downtown area and see everything. Yesterday, we spent all day at one of the factories that makes some of our candles. Very interesting. We spent the whole day planning and giving instructions for new products. In a few months our product line of wholesale wedding favors will go from about 15 products to over 60.

It is amazing how inexpensive you can get things here. For example, all the offices we’ve been in have desks that would cost several thousand dollars n the U.S. that they got from one of the factories for a few hundred bucks. Jennifer and I are planning to load up on furniture when we have some extra space in one of the containers.

Today is our last day here and we are in Zhejiang (about an hour from Shanghai) touring more factories and meeting with the place that does our printing. Tonight we fly back and tomorrow I can start getting caught up on 2,000 emails. If you tried emailing me, sorry, I haven’t been able to get my email all week. It’s been weird not being on email for that long…

It’s easy to keep track of the time in China; you don’t even have to change your watch. It’s exactly 12 hours ahead of Atlanta time. Now, it’s 2:00 p.m. Wednesday but it’s only Tuesday in Atlanta. We left on Monday, so I missed Tuesday altogether. (One time time my sister flew to the other side of the world and missed here birthday completely. If you want to stay young maybe that’s a good trick.)

After 3 flights, including a 16 hour plane ride from Chicago to Hong Kong on a 747-400, we arrived in Guangzhou for the trade show last night. The trade show is huge. We spent the morning in a big show until we figured out it was the wrong one. Currently, I’m in the right one but lost. I got separated from the group so I wandered into an Internet booth and got online. Next, I’ll see if the phone card I bought works and try and call them.

Everyone over here has a cell phone but of course mine doesn’t work. Of course, it barely works in Atlanta, so it’s not a surprise that it doesn’t work here.

So far, the food has been great, but the McDonald’s across the street is starting to look pretty good.

My flight to Reagan Nation in D.C. was cancelled so I’m going to the Marketing Sherpa Lead Gen conference in the morning. I’ll be blogging live from the conference so stay tuned. I expect there to be a lot of content worth mentioning.

If you search on Yahoo for “Paymentech” I’m now on the first page at #9. Heh. On Google, my Paymentech listing is #11. Still not on page 1, but we’re knocking on the door. But we are #1 on Google for Paymentech Merchant Account.” Not bad.

Get your copy of the updated “At Work Internet Audience Media Conception Study” here. (This is the updated srvey from the one they did in 2001.) Very interesting stats about internet and media usage.

James Maguire wrote a nice column about My Wedding Favors for ecommerce-guide.com, part of the Internet.com network. Don’t let Jennifer see it though — she’s the one that does all the work. I’m just the Search guy.

If you left Paymentech, or you decided not to go with Paymentech because of the way they mistreat their customers, post your comment here to let Paymentech know.

Need proof? Try these Google searches: paymentech merchant account

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