Man it was hot.

I was away from an Internet connection for a few days, I have a few entries written and already to go.  I'll post them retroactively over the next day or so.

But for now here is some of my impressions of Shanghai.

Everybody there is doing something.  20 million people all doing, selling, buying, building, cooking, playing, learning, shopping.  That's a lot of people doing a lot of things.

...and it feels like it.

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There is construction going on everywhere.  Buildings are getting built left right and center.  Jeff (my Chinese colleague) told me a joke about construction in Shanghai, it goes something like this:

"Did you know that there are ONE thousand construction cranes in the world and that Shanghai has TWO thousand of them."

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Labor is cheap.  I bought some chopsticks at a chopstick store in the shopping district on East Nanjing Road.  The store was no more than 500 square feet, tiny.  Inside there were about six customers.  And serving them? eight staff members.  Essentially each little glass display case had its own staff member.

Restaurants are another place where there is a surplus of labor.  For our fancy dinner overlooking the Bund we had at least four waitstaff taking care of us, they even poured your beer, refilling it after you had drunk it down a third, from the bottle sitting on the table right next to it...I mean I could do that.  It was actually a bit uncomfortable.

This is an example of inefficiency in the economy.  They may be growing at 10% a year but when they have restaurants overstaffed by at least double and stores by at least a factor of four it's a symptom of a not quite fully matured market.

The price of labor must increase significantly before this occurs first.

Did I mention it was hot?

Cool panarama shot by Rich from the Bund looking at Pudong and the Pearl.

Thanks to Rich for the great photographs.  Rich had a great camera and this cool tripod that could bend and grip things.