We started off the morning by visiting the American Chamber of Commerce: Shanghai (AmCham). It was fairly interesting for a little bit. We got to learn about the history of Chinese trade and economics. As an engineer this got a little boring. AmCham helps American business do business in China. Specifically, it is made up of a lot of companies that work together for resources to operate in this forging economy. I did take a pretty sweet nap during the talk and woke up to them talking about the same thing. It was a pretty good presentation that they planned to get off topic of. It was two hours of questions leading to other topics. I specifically found it interesting that the Chinese populace pushed the government on renewable energy. The people that live in the Chinese “rust belt” began to leave as the country abandoned coal. This ties in heavily with switches to things like bullet trains. Bullet trains and the like are an absolute necessity in a modern world. They are so much more energy and time efficient than planes. It will be interesting to see how America moves forward from this especially with how tech giants have been pushing for them.
After lunch we were supposed to visit caterpillar (which I don’t know how that at all relates to smart phones but whatever) but caterpillar had to cancel on us. Instead we ended up visiting Horiba, a company that makes precision instruments. The initial lecture was all right but the tour was very interesting compared to the business visits. We got to tour their facility and see various rooms where they were making and using their instruments. In some of them we weren’t even allowed to take pictures because they were testing other company’s products pre-market. One of these such rooms was an engine test room where they were able to test torque, speed, and gear boxes.
After this Dave and I went downtown to explore some more. We took the subway which was just as easy as Beijing and just as cheap. We came out downtown and explored till we found a little local place mostly full of families to eat. Dave was nervous at first because we didn’t see any menus but I walked in and made the opening a book hand motion and the Lady aggressively slammed the picture and English menu in front of us. We ordered two full meals and two things of dumplings and wonton soup. The price came out to like five dollars for each of us and we couldn’t even finish it all.
After dinner we walked down to the Bunt again. We were going to try and go up the Shanghai tower but it was too cloudy. We had a great time people watching especially watching little kids run around excitedly. One thing that stuck out to me the entire trip was the popularity of the brand Boy London. Boy London just so happens to use the same eagle on their logo that the Nazis did. At one point a little kid excitedly ran past only for us to notice that he was wearing a Boy London which broke me down laughing.