You may have guessed from my recent posts; I am on the road.
I was in India last week, visiting Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Delhi. It was my first time in India, in spite of living in Asia for years.
Today it is snowing in Shanghai, a rare event, they tell me. I am taking a break from visiting the city to warm up.
I arrived in Shanghai yesterday. I was last here in 1989, so the city has changed! I find it almost indistinguishable from Tokyo. Sure, I speak and read Japanese so I can figure it out at the first storefront, but the qualitative differences are subtle and someone less familiar may take a few minutes to figure out which country it is were he to suddenly appear in the middle of the city.
I must say I didn't expect such a large development gap between today's India and China. They are so often grouped together as the emerging powerhouses. I only visited the large cities of India, but they have decades of development to catch up to Shanghai. But every Indian with whom I met is working hard to get his country there.
I think my hotel here is now one of my favorite in the world. Beautifully designed room. I have been telling my Italian friends, who are very proud of their country's slick design sense, that they should watch out for designers from China, and this hotel confirms that.
An interesting tidbit: my hotel in Mumbai cost almost 3 times the nicer hotel in Shanghai. A friend in Mumbai who works in a leading hotel put that in perspective. He tells me there are 110,000 hotel rooms in New York City and only 90,000 in all of India. That explains the prices.
I am finding intermittent connectivity problems from shanghai to our site and I want to assure you that we are working on that.
Later this week I will be in Beijing and then next week I visit Tokyo. An interesting and fun trip! but I also miss my kids.
I am writing from my Blackberry, so forgive any typos. I also can't post this in Japanese for the same reason. Other posts I have made while I was walking around are shorter simply because my hands are cold.
See you soon back on yappr,
Patrick
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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