My Passage to India.

The three sweetest words in the Traveller’s Language:

• All
• Luggage
• Arrived

Life is good as I sit here beside the pool enjoying breakfast. This is no ordinary weekend – it's the weekend before Divali, the Festival of Lights (equivalent to Christmas in the US). Visiting families have changed the once-quiet pool into a puddle of giggles and squeals. I had an epiphany sitting here eating breakfast – drinking my watermelon juice (they don’t have that at Fresh Market!) and my South Indian coffee… I like the food here so much because (with a touch more spice variety), it’s very much like southern food in America: fried and heavy on the potatoes. Of course I love it! Just took me a return trip to figure it out.

So backing up a couple of days… everything in China went great (after my remodeling meltdown). The Grand Opening ceremony was beautifully delivered by our Marketing teams and the Support Center looked fantastic for its official debut. I couldn’t adore the team more – what a cute bunch they are! All of them are very different – and each of them are just lovely, sweet people. They’re going to be fantastic!

We had a wonderful celebration dinner at “the most famous” restaurant in Dalian. Now don’t dismiss that… Dalian is a large cosmopolitan city with 3 million residents in the city limits and another 3 million in the outlying areas. Everywhere I turned I was greeted with shop storefronts I see in San Francisco, LA, and other world-class cities. So – back to the dining… :-) WanBao Seafood. 5 stories tall and looks like Vegas – inside and out! We had a table for 28, and I didn’t know whatttt to expect. So turns out this is a huge (“gi-normous”) round table – maybe 7 meters (21’) in diameter – with a huge mound of flowers in the middle of the table with a big chandelier, and then… reachable from the diners’ seats… an inside ring that rotated so that dishes placed on the ring were in constant rotation around the guests’ seating. Pretty nifty. I’m thinking about converting at home!

Tracy (my godsend for the week – what a trooper! there’s nothing she couldn’t coordinate!) and I, accompanied by a couple of ‘curious georges’ from our group, toured through the “market” on the first floor to choose the meal. Here was another learning experience in China… I entertain. I cook Southern (nice, fancy Southern – but still, typically, for Southern appetites and behaviors). I know that everybody wants to try everything and have learned over the years that if you prepare 20 dishes, people will want to try all 20. You wind up cooking a WHOLE LOT MORE – and a whole lot more goes to waste. I’ve learned it’s more effective to prepare larger quantities of really neat dishes than to spread it thin and dilute things with a bunch of normal to boring dishes. So that was my mindset – pick 7-8 dishes and get 4-5 “batches” of each. Tracy knew better. She and I kept having this tug-of-war, because I’d point at something and order four, and she’d want to adjust it to two… Competing philosophies… Well, when we got upstairs (I hadn’t seen our room and the gi-normous rotating tabletop yet), then I understood why. Tapas (‘small bites’) have become very popular in America recently. Although these dishes were prepared family style, everyone got just a bite or two onto their plates as a dish circled by. We could’ve had 4 dishes or 40 – and everyone still would have tried a bite or two of each and been done. As it was, it was perfect (thanks to Tracy). Variety IS the spice of life… And I have another cultural lesson under my proverbial belt for the next time I (try to) entertain in China.

So – on a personal note (if you’re reading this, you must be F&F – friends & family – so you get the whole deal…): I now have a new trend – but it’s a story to share, so here goes. On my last trip to China I had my first flare up of gout. OMG. My Mom has had gout over the years, so has my brother… so why was I surprised when it hit me? :-) In July, I hobbled all over the place on my visit to China and wore Crocs sandals the entire time. This time, it hit the last day (of course, the biggggg day….). So for those of you who don’t know what gout is – they call it a “rich man’s disease”… caused by rich foods, rich wine, etc. (ME?!?! ha.) It’s a chemical thing and something crystallizes in your joints – usually it settles in on a particular joint/joints, mine happens to be my left inside ankle. So these crystallized “things” in your joints cause sharp jabbing pains – horrible pain, intense swelling, etc. Cures are varied (as are intensity levels of “flare-ups”), but the worst is cured by medicine that breaks up the crystals and enables them to disperse through and be absorbed by the body (until the next flare-up).

So – Friday mid-day I realize what’s happening when my left ankle is double the size of my right ankle. Friday night I take the first round of meds (thank you, Mama). Saturday I fly. I had a longgggg layover in Hong Kong on my way to Bangalore and spent my time shopping in the airport, etc. On the way to my gate, there was a “Chinese Herbal Healing” massage shop. What the heck, I’ll try anything at this point. OMG*4. Having had pedicures for years and years, my feet aren’t terribly sensitive (comparatively, my Mom is a relative newcomer to the pedicure scene and it’s hysterical to watch her jump around when someone’s trying to work on her feet… sorry, Mama :-) ). So this woman @ the Hong Kong airport had me in tears. I yelped, I “ouched,” I gritted my teeth and squirmed. She was actually rubbing those crystals (harrrrrrd!) out of my ankle. She worked it and worked it – I swear, I thought she was gonna break them through the skin! It was amazing…. I could feel them (painfully) being pushed out of my ankle tissue and then she was running them up my leg (where there’s plenty of room for them to get lost – ha!). Just amazing. This morning, the swelling is significantly reduced and I think the pain is pretty much gone. I’m sure the meds got it started – but wow, was I impressed by that painful Chinese Foot Massage and a woman who spoke almost no English but saw my swollen ankle, knew what was wrong, and went straight to work.

Flights went fine, again. Lucky fortunate me. I arrived at the hotel around 3:30am and now am sitting by the pool enjoying breakfast, a breeze, and a lovely waiter who – true to my past stories – warms up when he realizes I’m interested in the food of his culture. By the time breakfast ended, two Indian hosts had adopted me and I have two other breakfast dishes I have to try (both typed into my Blackberry since my adopted hosts are on “Christmas vacation” tomorrow). Life is good.

I'm here...

Yes, I really am.

My nickname of “Martha (Stewart) with a toolbelt” has never been more true. But I’m jumping ahead… It has, after all, been four days since I lost contact with “my world” and a status update is in order. Flights were fine (if you call 20+hrs strapped in a steel cylinder at 30,000ft… “fine”). My planes landed where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to, and - for those who know the story - ALL my luggage arrived with me. (Say it with me, folks: Hallelujah!)

Coming to Dalian is like visiting my old college town or somewhere I used to live for a short time. After all, I’ve been here 3x more than my beloved San Jose this year (no comments from the Dining Divas, please!). There’s great comfort in being able to point your way to the office in a town where none – not one – of the taxi drivers speaks your language.

Work has been – well… absolutely frantic. Doing business in this environment is so much different than I have ever experienced. You can’t OVER-anticipate enough, and yet there are still things you just never imagined to consider. It has been a tough two days – one of my buddies who is here from our Bangalore office wrote another colleague in the States and said “Tonya’s not happy…” Made me laugh when I heard it, because the majority of you know that popular phrase: “When mama ain’t happy – ain't nobody happy!” Well, just call me MAMA! :-)

So my worldwide outreach on Martha (Stewart)’s behalf continues. I nearly ripped the drill out a Chinese tradesman’s hands, doled out instructions on toggle bolts through a translator, licked my finger and smoothed uneven caulk edges – all just part of my global goodwill campaign to teach the finer details of home craftsmanship to the masses. [wink!] I haven’t done thisssss much micro-managing in 15 years. Well, truth be told, it’s hard to micro-manage when the folks doing the work are so much smarter than you – so I guess the last 15yrs don’t count because I’ve been surrounded by mental giants who tolerate me romping through their technical forests.

So – meltdowns have been contained, the Dragon Lady is retreating to her campfire (“Long” = “Dragon” in China – but I swear they only call me the Dragon Lady out of affection!) I’ve washed the drywall dust out of my hair and tomorrow is the big day. From February to now, this has been on my “to do” list. I’m a little sad to see it get checked off the list, but am definitely thankful to have worked on this project. I’ll have far more uninterrupted nights (i.e., fewer 3am conference calls) – but sad that since my work here will be completed I won’t have as many opportunities to visit in-person and work face-to-face with the people I’ve grown to adore over here. Well, I suppose that’s what IM is for.

Enough rambling. Here’s your special-interest headline of the day: “Smiles are a universally accepted language.” Cheesy? You bet! But so so true in the majority of cases. I’m still amused at how a few (appropriate) hand gestures and a smile will get you through the ordering process in a restaurant where no one speaks your language, or for a taxi driver to wait (just a minute) while you grab money out of an ATM. I’m not insane – we all know there are GRUMPS out there. (And I’m talking real grumps – not you, WB.) But the majority of humans respond to a smile (sometimes accompanied by a small dose of patience). I now know this to be true because in China there’s no “Southern Factor” attached to me. They hear my accent as just some eager chick from the States, so no one decides I’m slow/harmless/”sweet” because I sound like a George Peach (with razor blades buried under the skin – tee-hee). So try it – bite your tongue or you cheek or whatever it takes to exercise an extra dose of “happy” this week and see if it makes a difference. Heck, we could make this a global experiment and who knows how much more livable the world might be… one smile at a time. (Cheese-filter now removed and tucked away. Back to work - the US should be waking up now!)

Off to ChIndia!

“ChIndia,” you say? Well, yes. I’m headed to China and then India for the next three weeks.

My trek to China begins early Monday morning, flying through Chicago and on to Shanghai before reaching my destination in Dalian. There’ll be no dilly-dallying in Dalian – I’m only on the ground for three PACKED days of work. This will be my third visit in the People’s Republic this year – and likely my last visit for a bit. My work here will be done with this trip, as we will have successfully opened a new branch of our company’s business with 14 vibrant happy “launch team” staff to take care of our growing customer base in the region. From China I’ll head over to India (lovely 16hr flight it is) to spend time with my work friends in Bangalore for the following two weeks.

This blog is likely to be a little different. I don’t know – we’ll have to see… I don’t write about the specifics of work (and for goodness sake, who would want to read about that?!), but usually I am able to make time to go see some pretty interesting things either before, after, or during weekends in the middle. This time, it just wasn’t possible to work in extra days – and I’ll be travelling one of the two weekends. So who knows what I’ll find to write about? I guess that’s part of the adventure! Perhaps you can live without seeing pix of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the bullet trains of Tokyo, and Hindu temples with more gold than Fort Knox? We shall see. I take this as a challenge – a test – of my creativity and writing skills. (But I’m a geek like that – all of you know it!)

So from here I’ll likely “pick up the pen” middle of next week. For the reasons I listed above, it’s likely I won’t write as often. But, as always, I invite you to join me on the journey and hear the stories that help my family sleep well at night knowing I’m alive, well, and happy to be experiencing new things.

T.