China is even more bustling with energy than usual these days because next week the Chinese will celebrate the year's most important holiday - the Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival or Lunar New Year. All offices are closed for the whole week and people go home to their families and celebrate with lots of traditional food, visiting relatives and sending up enormous amounts of fireworks into the sky on the Eve, which falls on this coming Sunday. In skyscrape-filled Shanghai my sister (who's coming to visit me) and I must find a high place from where we can see the light show!
This means however that this week and last week have been even more intense than usual in the Elkem Shanghai office. Last week all salesmen were out visiting customers, wishing them happy new year and toasting to their continued success. This week everyone is working hard to finish their tasks on time. I'm working mainly on two different projects, both are related to mapping potential customers for new products/applications. Until now it has been a lot of desktop job, and also some collaboration with our other offices in Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangkok...) , but I'm looking forward to actually visiting the first customers which I'm doing together with two of our technical sales guys (or actually, one of them is a woman) in a few weeks time, when we are going to Malaysia.
Before Christmas I visited our research lab in Beijing, and also got the chance to have a meeting with one of the professors in the China Building Materials Academy. The photo of me in front on the academy building was taken by our very nice lab manager Lin.
Even though Christmas is not celebrated except by the department stores and the Christian minority in China, we still had a company Christmas party. The photos show the happy Elkem crew in Shanghai and the excellent Norwegian and (mainly) Chinese food we enjoyed in that evening= )
Today after work I'm going for dinner with one of the girls in the office, Cindy. We had a dinner some weeks ago and found out that we have to continue a very interesting discussion on differences and similarities between Chinese and European culture... it's not a topic that you can finish easily!
Even though Christmas is not celebrated except by the department stores and the Christian minority in China, we still had a company Christmas party. The photos show the happy Elkem crew in Shanghai and the excellent Norwegian and (mainly) Chinese food we enjoyed in that evening= ) 
