This week I have been in Malaysia and Thailand for work, meeting potential customers for the two projects I'm working with together with colleagues from the offices in Norway, Singapore and Bangkok. The opportunity to meet colleagues from other offices after having spent quite some time mailing each other back and forth regarding the projects is of course a nice aspect of travelling! Now when working and living in a region with cultures others than my own I really get the chance to think about how background (not the least my own) influences ones behavior. And that "Asia" can not be viewed as "one culture", on the contrary Chinese colleagues and friends have argued that China in itself is as diverse as Europe with several languages, types of food, attitudes... The only common link I've found business-wise in the Asian (southeast/east) countries versus (west) Europe is that things are allowed to take more time since it is more important that the parts have trust for each other also on a personal level. I was told that sometimes in Southeast Asian countries people will take it as offensive if you push the importance of a written contract too hard, since they think that if you have had a relation for some while, trust should be built up and some flexibility is expected from both sides. Quite different from our very "efficient and rational" way of thinking about business here..!
Since I have meetings in Norway next week I flow directly from Kuala Lumpur with almost 35 degrees heat to Oslo where I was met some 15 hours later in the early morning by -15 degrees!
I will post some photos from this journey when back in Shanghai again since I forgot to bring the camera cable... But for this time I would like to share some photos I took during the Chinese New Year week, two weeks ago.
From left to right: Sisters sightseeing in Shanghai with the famous skyline in the background. We took a 3-hour harbour cruise and never got out of the harbour, even though much of the activity is moved to a deep-sea harbour at an artificial island some distance outside Shanghai!With my logistics background I of course had to take pictures of some of the vessels and was a bit disappointed that we never reached the new harbour.... Far away from modern Shanghai - one of the many water villages in the Yangtze delta. Those who have seen Mission Impossible 3 may recognize that a similar village was the setting for the end scenes - it's called Xitang and is located only a short distance from this one called Wuzhen. Time for weekend and sleeping off the jetlag in snowy Oslo. Perhaps it's time to call my Stabburet-boyfriend and ask him to take some Grandiosa with him for dining in tonight? ; )
