16th January 2008: Jiaxing Jackson

At 9am this morning, Helen and a driver from Jiaxing Jackson came to collect Chris and me from the hotel. After a 2 hour drive from Shanghai to Jiaxing, we finally reached the factory. Ray was there, so we stopped for a short chat over lunch. Ray had to get going to Yinshan, so he had to leave straight after lunch.
Following lunch, Fion and Elane took Chris and I to a small historic village. The village was the same spot they filmed parts of Mission Impossible 3. All the residents in the village try to live in the traditional way, as much as possible. The town had many rivers and canals, which could be used as transport of goods and people, however it was more common to walk along the banks of the canal instead, because the village was only small.
We stopped in a small museum with some more silk, calligraphy, and pottery. Most of the captions were in Chinese, so Fion and Elaine had fun trying to interperate some of the signs for Chris and I. We stopped for some traditional Chinese Toffee, and some smelly tofu. I had never tried smelly tofu before, but had been told about it by Ray, Peter and Mauris. I was very brave, and tried eating a piece. It wasn't as bad as everyone had made me think it would be!
Once we were sufficiently chilled to the bone, we jumped back into the boss' BMW, and headed back to the factory.
Fion took me on a tour around the factory, showing me where the Oates products were made. I got to see the handle rolling/welding machine, and the powder coating line. They also showed me a giant injection moulding warehouse that puts Oates to shame! They had so many dies and so many machines! I was very surprised by how large their operation was. Fion then showed me the assembly area. They assemble everything by hand, and have a big conveyor that carries all the products down through the crowd of assembly staff. I was a little disappointed that they were not assembling any Oates products while I was there, but I guess that's just luck of the draw.
Fion introduced me to Jiaqing, the engineer who I usually deal with for drawing approvals and such. He was surprised at how young I was, which made me a little flattered. He was very nice, and agreed to come to dinner with us.
Over dinner, Jiaqing taught me a couple Chinese words, and helped me figure out the correct way to eat some of the more exotic Chinese dishes. I tried eating duck's tongue, but passed on the chicken feet.
After dinner, Chris and I were dropped at the hotel. The hotel was really nice, and was situated on the main tourist attraction in Jiaxing, South Lake.
Chris and I said goodbye to our friends from Jiaxing Jackson, and took our things to our room. Then we headed out again, searching for a Starbucks. We knew there was one somewhere in the city, because we had driven past it. However, after wandering around for a couple hours, we had no luck finding Starbucks, and headed home to our hotel. The one good thing about our fruitless search was that we were able to catch a rick-shaw through the city streets while we searched for Starbucks.