Thursday 6/26 update from Singapore

We got to Singapore on Tuesday evening after visiting a few customers in Malaysia on Monday and Tuesday. The hotel we stayed at in Kuala Lumpur, the Hilton, was very nice but on the expensive side. Jerry got a good rate on the room by prepaying, but the other costs (restaurant, Internet, laundry) were on the outrageous side. We ate in the Japanese restaurant to have some S&S (sushi and sake) and the prices were so high we cut back on our ordering so the bill wouldn't be too outrageous. The Internet access in the room was over $20/day! Anyway, it was nice but I'm not sure if we'd stay there again.
The trip to Singapore was uneventful, and we're staying at the Park Hotel Orchard in downtown Singapore. Here the rooms are nowhere as nice as the Hilton in KL, but the room rate is higher. Both Jerry and I got rooms with some smoke smell, and I complained about it yesterday and got a room air sterilizer and the maid sprayed some air freshener when she installed it, so the smell is not evident anymore, so far.
Wednesday morning we got a late start because the morning appointment rescheduled, so we were picked up by our distributor's agent, Marcus of Chemart, and we went for lunch in a food court which had about 15 different types of food, Malaysian, Indian, etc. We had a very good meal that Marcus picked out for us. It included deep fried small fish, fried chicken (~KFC), a local fish specialty, served in a palm leaf, and rice and a couple of other things, served with a sweet/hot sauce to dip the food into. Very good!

In between afternoon customers, we stopped at another food court-type place to have a drink and kill some time before our second appointment. We all tried the sugar cane juice drink that was very tasty. They squeeze the juice out of the cane by passing it through a corrogated mill, not too unlike a rubber mill. See pic below. The market also sold chicken or duck spine; there were hanging fowl, hanging by their heads, with just the backbone attached to the heads, kinda like a turkey drumstick. M-m-m good!














Marcus took us to Mount Faber which is the second highest hill/mountain in Singapore. The views of downtown Singapore and the harbor were fantastic! Here a shot of me with Jerry and Hiyama-san, of Nomura Jimusho.



Gotta get ready for today's adventures.
Ciao,
tom

Saturday Night update

We just got to Malaysia this evening and just got back from dinner. BTW, all the time we were in China I was unable to access the blog to update or even view it, presumably because of big chinese brother not allowing access to blogs in general. As soon as I got on the Internet in Malaysia, it was no problem.

Anyhow, tonight Jerry and I got into Kuala Lumpur about 7p and got to the hotel, the KL Hilton, a little after 8p. We went to the fitness center to exercise for a bit before having dinner with Mr. Hiyama. We just had snacks in the lounge bar, but beer and pizza tasted great after a week of Chinese food.

Last night, in Guangzhou, we first went to dinner with Kevern and Perry of Sou Le, then we went out with our distributor and a few customers for drinks. The restaurant had an interesting selection of menu items, as seen in the pix below. We didn't select the frog or crocodile, but did have some chicken that was served with the head.





















Later we went out with a customer for some refreshments and entertainment. We ended up at a karaoke bar, playing a few fun dice games, one I think was called bullsh!%, where each player rolls 5 dice and calls out a hand, like like liar's poker. What made it a little more interesting was that the one pip on the die was a wild card. The loser of each round had to drink a little, but that wasn't strictly enforced. I don't know what the other game was called, but everybody playing first bet an amount of a whiskey/green tea mixture (about 1:3) to drink. That player threw seven dice into a bowl and had to try to get at least 350 points, by combinations of 1s (100 pts) and 5s (50 pts). If they didn't get either a 1 or a 5 on the first throw, they had to drink twice their bet. They kept throwing dice until they got at least 350 pts, when the next player started, or they didn't get a 1 or a 5, when then had to drink their bet and start over. It was fun with the group of about 10 people that played. After leaving that bar at about 11:30 we went to a restaurant where we went to a private room and had a soup pot on the table that we added fish, vegetables and !cow spinal cord! to cook in the soup and eat. Different, to say the least.

Customer visits in Guangzhou were good, with some good possibilities for business at a dog toy manufacturer. He'd like to use our clear Millathane 97 for dog toys, although achieving the desired properties at the low hardness the customer wants may be a challenge.

Tomorrow's an off day, so it'll be a good day to relax before a fairly busy week in Malaysia and Singapore.

tom

Tuesday June 17: to Taipei

Tuesday was a busy day, riding by car from Taichung to Taipei (a 2 hour drive) and then visiting two customers. Both customer visits were good, with the first being an existing customer that we offered info the help solve some minor compound problems, and the second introducing Millathane millable urethanes for his possible future use. At the second company, we only met with the president of the company and he seemed pretty technically competent and interested in our products. I was able to make good use of TSE's TIPS* bulletins to answer many of the questions he had, and, at the same time, help me get closer to being able to close my computer case!

We stopped by the office of our distributor Sou Le and Jerry and I were surprised to see our name on the "Welcome to Sou Le" (poster) at the entrance to their offices. We took a pic that we might submit to our company publication, the Mullet Wrapper.

We were welcomed by the president of Sou Le and given several gifts, one a neat pen/penlight/laser pointer, and the other a small dragon statue that's supposed to bring good luck and prosperity. We had another great dinner with the Sou Le folks, with several Taiwan beers to wash it down.

Wednesday morning (in a couple of hours) we depart Taipei to go to Guangzhou, China for training at Sou Le's Guangzhou office and then visiting several customers on Friday.

It's been busy, but fun so far. I though I was pretty well adjusted to the time zone (12 hour difference) but woke up about 1:30 am and couldn't fall back asleep, so I've been on the computer since about 2 am. Plenty of time to sleep when you're dead, so they say.

tom 3:30 am Wednesday

*Technical Information for Performance Solutions

Monday in Taichung

The day was spent at the offices of our distributor, Sou Le, exchanging information and providing training to their sales personnel on the types and uses of TSE's Millable Urethane Rubber (Millathane). We did a mixing demonstration of a Millathane CM compound in a tilt mixer and it mixed pretty well for a first shot with this formula.

Dinner was at a Japanese/Chinese type restaurant where you took your shoes off to sit crosslegged on the floor at the low table. Not the most comfortable position for me, and my back was a little sore when I got back to the hotel, but a hot bath (doing a crossword puzzle) helped. I had a vegetarian 'hot pot' (kinda like 'shabu shabu' that we had in a Japanese restaurant in Hartford) where you cooked your own food in a pot of boiling water/soup, heated by a personal gas burner. With four of us at dinner having this and several others having other dishes that were heated similarly, it got pretty warm. As a "treat", Jerry found a piece of bloody rice cake (see below), that we both tasted and neither fell in love with. I forgot my camera but did take a couple of pix with my cell phone, that I'll attach to the post in the future, when I can dl them.

Tomorrow it's a two hour car ride to Taipei to see some customers, then on Wednesday, flying from Taipei to Guangzhou.

tom Monday 10:11 pm

Dinner in Taichung

For dinner, we went to this restaurant with really interesting architecture. The whole restaurant was made of stone and concrete made to look like it was built into a mountain. There were pools with fish and really odd art sculpture on the wall. Our hosts, Kevern and Jack (from Sou Le) explained that the owner and architect was a woman who was a little eccentric and liked to use materials from the place the building was constructed. Hence, the sidewalks were wood planks in concrete and the walkway coming into the restaurant was large, very uneven stones. Not something you'd see in the US because of the probability that somebody would sue when they slipped. A pic of the sinks in the restaraunt is above; the urinals looked about the same (but I'll spare you!). The pic of the toilet was blurry, so I didn't post it, but it was basically a porcelin hole in the floor, strange to see in this upscale restaurant, although they don't seem to cater to English speakers as nothing was written in English.

After dinner we went for a walk in the night market, with tons of people walking the street and stores and vendors selling food (mostly), clothing, watches, etc.

One interesting thing being sold are seen in the two pics here; Bloody Rice Cake! It looked like blood sausage, but made into a cake instead of a sausage.

Tomorrow we start work, training at our distributor's office and lab in Taichung, then visiting some customers on Tuesday before going to Guangzhou, China.


Ciao.

Made it to Taiwan

Well, the long trek to Taiwan is over, now a day to recharge the batteries. The flights were good, but the 6+ hour layover in LA was long. My cohort Jerry and I spent several hours in a bar/restaurant and had several beers, wines and food items and it's amazing how quickly the bill adds up.
We had a scare in LA getting to the plane as it was originally scheduled for 3:15p departure, but when we checked in the boarding was supposed to start about 3:25p. Jerry and I headed to the gate and got there about 230p and went back to a snack bar to kill some time before boarding. About 330p we went to the gate and saw no signs of our flight. The monitors didn't even mention the flight, so we wondered what happened; did the flight leave already??? Well, it turns out it had moved to another gate about 1/2 mile away and when we got there, everybody had already boarded and it seemed they were waiting for us.
The flight was about 14 hours long and I was able to catch maybe 4 hours of sleep, on and off, so when we got to Taipei about 9p, I was moderately rested and seemed like I'd be able to get to sleep when we got to the hotel. We're staying at the Windsor Hotel in Taichung, and it's about 1.5 hours away, and the car ride seemed even longer. It took a while to get tired enough to get to sleep, but I slept fairly well. I got up about 530a (had the alarm set for 730a), with my body seemingly ready to get up. I went down to breakfast about 7a, and they have a very nice buffet breakfast here.
Anyway, so far so good. Love to all,
tom