Today was our first company visit where we had to take a bus to see the different parts of the facility. Yangshan port is humongous, and we had to take one of the longest bridges I have ever been on to get there. Between endpoints, the bridge was a thirty minute drive and for a while we could see nothing but the sea and the wind turbines that pepper the coast. Another Pitt alum who had been living and working in Shanghai for seven years came on the tour with us and spoke about her experience living in China. I was interested to learn that businesses don’t usually use email to communicate, instead they use WeChat, the ever-present messaging app that also processes the majority of QR code payments in China. According to the alum, this is sometimes problematic because most people message socially on WeChat, so when their business communications are on the same platform as their conversations with friends it can be hard to find an appropriate work-life balance. The first place we stopped at wasn’t actually the port headquarters, we were at a scenic viewing area that oversaw the port in action. The port stretched far in each direction with thousands of shipping containers stacked on top of each other and the iconic red cranes standing ready to load or unload the next ship. After snapping a few pictures we got back on the bus and then rode back over the bridge to reach the Yangshan Port shipping headquarters. The sky was clear when we left the shipping area, but once we got to the headquarters the weather was suddenly gloomy. Once inside we took seats around a conference table in front of pre-placed water bottles and an informational booklet, a port representative entered and began a short presentation explaining the port’s functionality and its history. We learned that we had actually only seen a small part of Yangshan Port, there was actually an entire complex that we would not have time to see. The presentation was interesting but it left the group with a lot of questions that we were eager to ask. Unfortunately, the representative had a hard time understanding our questions without help, and when she did she often could not remember the answer to our question. Regardless, I still found the meeting interesting and afterwords the representatives took us back out on a bus ride down a dock. At the end of the dock we saw a ship unloading a full load of cars, each one with protective white stickers covering them. According to the representative it takes about two full days to fully unload a ship on the dock. Then we drove back to the headquarter building for one of the most diverse lunches I have had so far in China. There was plates of corn, shrimp with the shells still on, pork broth soup, and rice. There was also a mystery dish which took us a while to guess, turns out it was turtle meat! The port trip was very interesting and I would definitely go back there to see the rest.