Tales from the Road

Some small stories while waiting for my flights in Hong Kong airport:

The meaning of “one by one”?  When you are having dinner with Chinese customers and partners, and you are the most senior executive in the room, and the host, you are expected to go around with the most senior executive customer host – and have a drink (gambai) with each and every person.  I’ve been coming to China for a long time, and maybe I just got lucky before.  But this time, going around to every person and having to literally finish a half-glass of local wine was a difficult task.

It could have been worse though.

They then started filling small glasses with a clear liquid that was 56% alcohol.  I had one drink out of courtesy and then got the hostess to fill mine with water.  Except that it was HOT water.  So when I had to do the next toast, my glass was steaming and it was too hot to down!  The waitresses were kind of smiling and laughing in the background, but it was the right thing to do.

(Moral of the story – having gone easy the night before, I was able to deliver the keynote without a headache and with a great deal of passion and enthusiasm – which reminds me of my next story ….)

Have you ever given a speech and had it translated into a foreign language?  What I love is having to stop after a few sentences and then the translator goes on for about five minutes and you have no idea of what he really said.   It’s kind of a bizarre experience to have him replay what you just said and listen for english words that might give you some indication that it was on track with what you wanted to say ….

As opposed to my keynote in Delhi this week with no translator.  But since it was a pretty intense subject, I had set up a separate notes monitor to see as well as the slides in front of me.  Which worked great until the person I had worked with to click through the notes pages got lost and got ahead and behind and I was left standing there in front of a good sized crowd and trying to regain my place.  Funny now, not funny then.  What I remember was this one bead of sweat coming down by back with the hot lights on me and getting my place again.  It all worked out well and the moral is to not use notes and to know what you want to say and not rely on someone to keep up ….

While … just outside the auditorium we were in, were the restrooms.  Now, I am absolutely sure you have never seen a small video screen on the outside of the door that changed images that depicted either men or women?  Well they did here.   It was totally strange because you had to look hard to make sure the sign had not changed since the last time I had been there.  It reminded me of foreign bathrooms or even ones in the US where you have to translate a word or look at the depiction carefully to see if you are entering the dames or the madams correctly.  I am sure you have had that experience before!

My final tale for fellow travellers … remembering your room number!  After a few different hotels and doing some memory tricks, I completely forgot the room number today in ShenZhen.  Yes, I could have carried around the teeny-tiny envelope the hotel gives you with the number on it, but that would have been way too easy.  I did have to ask eventually and now that I’m checked out, I can completely forget it!

OK – time to go – I just have to remember my gate number and seat number!