Wednesday started, as usual, with breakfast in Cafe Cha here at the
Shangri-La. They have an enormous breakfast selection (Western, Chinese, and Japanese options), and I’m doing my best to work through it all while I’m here.

After breakfast, we took the bus out to IBM, where we spent all day locked in a hot conference room talking Academy business. Near the end of the day, I managed to escape for a 30-minute walk, but that was it for excitement.

But after the meeting ended for the day, we set out for the Heaven and Earth Theatre to see the China National Acrobatic Troupe in Reverie. The show started dramatically, with two acrobats being lifted in a ball:

and then continued with two young female acrobats twisting themselves in knots:

After that, I gave up trying to take pictures and just marvelled. I bought a DVD to bring home; it won’t be the same, but it’ll still be worth watching.

After the show, we walked to the East Gate shopping center for dinner (in a Western-style restaurant, which was something of a surprise), and then back to the hotel, where I collapsed. It had been a long day.

I’m looking forward to playing tourist over the weekend. Today, though, was work again — the first day of the IBM Academy TC meeting. Since there were 20 of us making the trip from the hotel, they arranged a bus for us, and unsurprisingly, the bus took a different route than either taxi yesterday. En route, we passed what I hope is a museum rather than an operational facility:

China may have been a Communist country a few years ago, but those days are long past:

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his luck?”

Eventually, we arrived at the IBM China Software Development Lab,
which is a few minutes away from the China Research Lab. The two groups are planning to co-locate in a new facility in another few months; in the meantime, CSDL occupies a floor of the conventional building in this photo:

I don’t know if there is a car park nearby, but the bike lot sure is popular. And the elevator makes me feel safe:

We’ve been inside all day, but when we got to our afternoon break, I went outside for a breath of fresh air, only to discover that today is less pleasant than yesterday was. And when I returned to the meeting, I found that I have Gobi all over my shoes:

so I guess I’ll try out the shoe shine service at the hotel tonight.

But first, we have dinner scheduled at the Beijing Da Dong Roast Duck Restaurant. I’m looking forward to it — lunch was sandwiches from Subway (no better and no worse than it would have been in California).

Dinner was worth waiting for (even worth the hour-plus drive to get there!) — besides the duck, we had at least ten appetizer courses (mostly vegetarian, but also chicken, beef, and fish as well) plus fruit for dessert and, of course, duck soup. I would go back any time — though I must admit that dinner was something of a splurge tonight. There were about 30 people at dinner, and the bill came to just over RMB 4000 (about $500 US, or $16/person, including drinks). In contrast, dinner last night cost about $4/person, again including drinks. And for the dishes in common (fish and chicken), the cheap restaurant was better — I may go back there later in my stay.