A Shanghai day

Today I had what my manager called a typical Shanghai type day.  Stressful, confusing, urgent.

My manager is Taiwanese born, grew up in California, but speaks Mandarin.  We worked together for about a year in Indianapolis before she and her husband accepted assignments at the affiliate office in China about 1.5 years ago.  She is wonderful to work with and since she is Western its making the adjustment to China much easier on me.

Our biggest and most urgent task at this time is the opening of the permanent bank accounts so we can get our major capital investment into China from corporate.  The opening of the bank account is essential to continue the process of registration with various government entities as well as being able to start carrying out activities of the Research Center - like paying bills we have been delaying! Opening a corporate bank account is a very complicated task here. There are over 20 required documents, about half are issued from various government entities which we have been gathering over the last 2 months.  The other half are original application forms issued by Citibank that must be authorized by our Vice President.  Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working through the account opening checklist from Citibank and thought I had everything I needed to get the account open.  Through a conversation on Wednesday, I found out there was a whole other section that required the VP's authorization - and she was leaving for the US for  2 weeks today at 12:30!! We could not afford to wait another 2 weeks to get this process going.. After a day and a half of trying to get ahold of Citibank to issue us the original forms, we finally got to them at about 11:15am.  

This triggered a crazy couple hours for me... I immediately packed up my stuff and raced to Citibank to get the documents.  Luckily, Cherry - the Treasury Specialist, agreed to accompany me because she deals Citibank very often, and as she said, they may not be able to speak English to you very well. She was a life saver! So, we rush to the bank, then jump back into the taxi to head to the Research Office in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park which was about 30 minutes away.  We got out to the office just in time for Bei to sign the 10 or so documents.  I did not have time to fill out all the many details in the forms, but we had to talk through it all for her to be comfortable with signing the mostly blank forms.  I don't think I've done justice to explain the hectic-ness and stress that I felt over the 2 hours this trip took!

The paperwork running around was stressful... but the best part for me was the time in the taxi with Cherry.  She graduated from a university in Shanghai in 2009 with a degree in Accounting.  She also joined Lilly directly after school, but she had to apply with the company on her own and even take an accounting test before being hired.  She said that at her school, Lilly only comes on campus to recruit sale reps, and that the school's main focus is architecture - but this is a field more suitable for men.  We had a chance to exchange many details about ourselves and our lives.... a few things I learned - like most Chinese her age she has moved back in with her parents, mostly men do the cooking and cleaning (lucky!), she has never been outside China, she began learning English at age 10, she takes a bus about 1 hr to work everyday each way.  Cherry made this day and taking care of business possible for me! She said she would let me take her out to lunch sometime soon - Chinese food!

Also, I finally made it to the grocery store tonight... I picked up pasta, sauce, bread, milk, tortilla chips, salsa, brie, and crackers for about RMB360 - about $55 - yikes! Nothing like dinner of chips and salsa :)

Now to get to sleep with honking horns below... even noisy on the 31st floor!