Wednesday, June 1 2011

Today, in the morning, we took a bullet train from Shanghai to Hangzhou, a tier two city about two hundred kilometers north of Shanghai.  The ride was very comfortable and the train ran at three hundred and fifty kilometers a hour.  There was a visible difference between the tier one and tier two cities.  In Hongzhou, we first visited Longjing Tea Village, located about half an hour away from the train station.  The drive to the tea village was beautiful and we saw fields of tea plants on our way to the tourist information center.   There we learned about the medicinal properties of this tea from Dr. Tea.  He explained about the different types of tea in the world and how this tea was special and unique, as it does not get exported out of China and was grown for emperors only.  

 

Our next stop, after a traditional Chinese lunch at the local restaurant in the Tea Village was to Geely Motors, a Chinese car manufacturer who has recently acquired the Volvo operations in China.  The cars manufactured by Geely Motors were impressive and I was surprised to see the quality of the Chinese cars.  To me the quality of the cars was no less than what we see here in the States.  During our presentation, I discovered that the company was struggling on how  to market their product.  They were trying to penetrate the Chinese market but in my opinion they should be trying to market their product in the Western markets, as the Chinese do not want to own a Chinese car due to the deep western influence in their lives.        

Cars At Geely Motors

Our last stop at Asian American Amity Association was brief as we were running out of time to catch a train back to Shanghai.