Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Nagoya - in two weeks!

So Alicia and I had a wonderful trip to China. We spent a couple of days traveling around Beijing to see the Great Wall of China, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, not to mention the Bird’s Nest and Swimming Center for the Olympic Games. We don’t know if Beijing will be finished with all of the work that they need to accomplish as they seem to have construction projects in every section of the city with some amazing projects yet to even be started! We'll see in August if they are able to finish.

A great time was had though and Alicia and I had a spectacular last day in town during which we went exploring on our own and witnessed some interesting aspects to the city that we had missed previously such as the early evening in the hutongs.

From Beijing, Alicia returned home while I continued on to meet up with the International Plant Trek in Shanghai via a quick stop in Hong Kong, my new favorite city. Very tropical and an interesting mix of eastern and western cultures, Hong Kong was able to surprise me at every turn. Shanghai on the complete other end of the spectrum was non-western friendly in that every road sign was in Chinese and it was very hard to get a good map of the city so my skills at getting around were very taxed. By the end of our 4 nights in town, I had a handle on the area of the city that we were staying in at least. We had a good time in Shanghai meeting the CLFM students and seeing a couple of factories. The highlight of these factory tours was seeing an Apple supplier who produces some of the parts for the MacBook Air. We also had a great event titled the Global Operations Leadership Dinner (still looking for an article to send to post about this) in which we had many media, industry representatives, LFM alumni and both LFM and CLFM classes take part in discussions about the current manufacturing environment in China – very enlightening.

From China, we headed to Tokyo, Japan where we spent a few nights as we headed on a day trip to Nagoya to see a Toyota facility. Not quite the manufacturer’s holy grail that some of my classmates were hoping for, but at the same time, the trip helped prove that the Toyota Production System is amazing due to its simplicity of execution. An interesting lesson to be learned. I definitely feel like I want to get back over to Japan for another visit as I didn’t get a chance to see much of the cultural side of life, though we were blessed with the Cherry Blossoms coming into full bloom while we were in town.

Here are some photos from the trip to Asia.

Hope you enjoy!
More later...