[Note: Read a more chronological account of Days 1 & 2 on calpolymbatrip.com]

As a short introduction, as part of Cal Poly’s MBA program myself and 32 other students traveled to China between June 15 and July 2. I was unable to make blog posts while traveling and will now begin a series of daily posts that add photographs I took during the trip as well as additional commentary (beyond what is provided via our class blog located at calpolymbatrip.com).

The first day of our trip was fairly uneventful. I woke up around 5am in Santa Barbara, said goodbye to my family, and took a 1 1/2 bus ride to LAX spending the time watching the early morning traffic and thinking about the upcoming trip. The MBA program was short and sweet, and I was glad to have an extra few weeks with my classmates — it seems that my favorite friendships always come about when time is compressed. Indeed, the trip will be the last time I may see many of my friends before I move my family to the East Coast at the end of this month.

As people began to arrive at LAX, it became obvious that everyone was excited to be taking such a trip. We were all chipper despite the very long set of flights, bus rides, and extra hoops to jump through. Our first leg to Tokyo (~11 hours, I believe) was for the most part spent wandering the aisles of the mammoth plane, socializing while enjoying the many benefits of an international flight. I am sure a few from our group grabbed cat naps during that flight, but it seemed most waited for the Tokyo to Hong Kong leg.

The seemingly arcane process of transferring from Hong Kong over the border to Shenzhen was also relatively painless. My one qualm was that I saw a “no photography” sign just as I was becoming interested in taking some real photos. The border, especially around 10 or 11pm, is quite fascinating, and not at all what I expected. There wasn’t the cadre of automatic weapon toting military that I anticipated, nor the throngs of individuals usually present at border crossings (perhaps the hour…). All in all, aside from the rush of cigarette smoke, and perhaps the general chaos of non-line formation, I don’t know that I would have been able to tell that I was actually in China.

I took only a handful of photos that day, and provide additional captions with each:

TAGS: China | MBA | Cal Poly | Shenzhen

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 5:37 pm and is filed under CalPoly MBA, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.