What a Cultural Experience!
I am now in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after two very successful MEDC events! As I mentioned before, the MEDC conference in Taipei was a huge success, and the one in Beijing was also quite popular! Very classy, and very BLUE - true to Microsoft tradition!
I only presented one topic in Beijing - Introduction to XP Embedded - but I think it went quite well. This time around, the session was only 50 minutes long, and my content lasted about 43 minutes, so it worked out fine in the end. I had several people come up and ask me for my slide deck afterward, and one developer started asking me questions about the El Torito process. (Seems we may have a slight problem with some of our documentation...)
Before I go on, I'd like to point out and recognize Derek Snyder from the Windows Mobile team. He's a technical product manager and has been speaking and helping to run the MEDC events, and he is also a master blogger! Infinitely more entertaining than my blog posts, and he has photos up! Check out his blog at http://derek.pocketnow.com/blog .
After the MEDC event was over, we had a couple of days in Beijing to be tourists. We met a tour guide named Yearick, and the very first thing he did was to present each of us with a very nice traditional gift - a clay bowl meant for dipping a large paintbrush into for painting Chinese scrolls. We were bowled over! (ha ha, get it?)
Yearick then proceeded to take us on a tour of the Forbidden City. What a cultural experience! This place was built during the Ming Dynasty specifically for the Emperor's family and his staff. I guess the reason it was Forbidden was because you could only go inside if you were part of his family or staff, or if you were a guest specifically invited by the imperial family. In any event, I'd read and watched documentaries on this place before, so it was awesome to get to see it up close!
Afterwards, we went to Ya Show Market, a typical Chinese marketplace where all manner of goods are sold... by some of the pushiest salespeople in the world. I thought used-car salesmen in the States were pushy! I had a woman grab my arm and nearly force me to try on a jacket, and then try to sell it to me for the equivalent of $600 USD! And she just wouldn't let me go. The same sort of thing happened to everyone else in our group, too. (I did eventually buy something nice for my wife.)
We were then treated to the best Peking Roast Duck in all of Beijing. In typical Asian tradition, plate after plate of delicious appetizers were served to our private table, and we had a standing waiter there dedicated to serving only us. I could get used to being treated like royalty! :) And after all the appetizers (which filled me up rather well), Chef Dong himself came to serve up the roast duck, serving up only the choicest of meat and skin and giving us quite the show in the process. It was delicious, and it's easy to see why this restaurant (Da Dong Peking Roast Duck, in case you're ever in the area) was rated #1 in Beijing!
As if that wasn't enough, the next day, Yearick and his bus driver took us to see the Great Wall of China - one of the Seven Wonders of the World. We took a cable car (think ski-lift gondola) to an entry point of part of the Wall, then walked and climbed some very steep spans totalling a bit over a kilometer. I snapped a whole bunch of photos of the place, and I learned quite a bit about it while we were there - such as that it was built over a period of 1500 years starting in 211 BC. It's amazing to think that this wall has outlasted entire civilizations! It kinda puts our achievements as a modern society in perspective.
When we reached our exit point, we took a toboggan-sled ride down the face of the mountain. That was incredibly fun - they had a metal slide set up to weave its way back down to the parking lots, and each of us just sat on a plastic cart with wheels and a single hand-brake to control the speed. When I reached the bottom, I wanted to do it again!
We finished off our stay in Beijing with a dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe (it felt really good to eat some old-fashioned American hamburgers for a change, after all the extravagant Asian cuisine we'd been treated to) and some rather spectacular thunderstorms. I'm a thunderstorm nut - love watching lightning, and this was some of the most active lightning I'd ever seen down here. They didn't last that long, but it was still rather fulfilling. :)
Our flight from Beijing to Hong Kong was really nothing to write home about - it was with Air China, whose business class felt a lot like coach in other airlines. But the connecting flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur made up for it - Cathay Pacific Airlines, which so far has had the best service in my opinion. We arrived in Kuala Lumpur at about 4:30pm, and our very own Loke Uei Tan, a citizen of Malaysia, beat us all through customs. Kuala Lumpur is so far the prettiest of the three cities we've visited, with tropical vegetation everywhere. We're staying at an excellent hotel with an awesome view of the city and the surrounding hills, and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the concept of people driving on the left side of the road.
Later today, we're going to go through a practice run for tomorrow's final MEDC event. I'll be giving two presentations - Intro to XPe and a topic on automating build processes with CMI Explorer, so wish me luck! :) See you all again in a few days!
- Matt
