I figured that most of you are still digesting the announcements from PDC last week, so today I will write about a little off-topic. As one of the last activities for my MBA at NYU Stern I went to China and Vietnam to meet with executives of local companies, as well as international companies doing business in South-East Asia and, last but not least, to have some fun exploring the local bar and club scene ;-). While I have been to some Asian countries before, I have not been to China and Vietnam before. It turned out, that not all stereotypes apply and experiencing the countries first hand definitely beats watching the Olympics and/or Discovery Channel :-).

In general, the people were very open and friendly. We even were considered as potential husbands for a beautiful Chinese lady (not the one in the picture above though) offered by the ladies Mum at a local matchmaking event (for parents and grandparents of young people) in Shanghai’s people’s park, which we politely declined.

The cities we visited in China (Beijing and Shanghai) were very clean and modern. Visiting these cities encouraged me even more to look for opportunities to work and live there for a year or two (so if you know of a nice job in Beijing or Shanghai for me please send me e-mail ;-)). I certainly have to continue to improve my Mandarin which turned out to be, unfortunately, not enough to have a real conversation but it was a start. Ah, yes we met companies such as Bank of Communications, Li & Fung, IBM, Balloon Plastic Products, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, IBM and Google. Funny enough, during the (very short) office tour through the Google office in Shanghai I met my friend from old MVP days and the Software Architecture Workshop Gregor Hohpe by pure chance. It is a small world, after all.

In Vietnam we visited Ho Chi Minh City which was very different. It was not as modern as Beijing or Shanghai but we could feel the energy of this emerging country. The population is very young and entrepreneurial. There were millions of scooters on the roads and crossing the streets posed a serious challenge ;-).

We also had time to explore some bars and clubs to mingle and talk with the locals, which I always enjoy. I believe, only by talking to the people living in a place you can get insight in the country. I have to say the people we met were all very nice and helpful (in contrast to our experience in Russia last year, but that is a different story).

Alright, I will get back to technical topics next week. Windows Azure, .NET 4.0, Visual Studio Team System 2010, and BizSpark are on my mind, so I will post about one or multiple of those topics……. TTYL……