First Impressions on Returning a Year Later

After a quick night's rest, I traveled across Guangzhou my first day back to visit my company's new facility located here.  This was a large state-of-the-art flavor processing plant and I had a chance to see some of the new technology I recently worked on in actual use (this is always satisfying for an R&D researcher).  Obviously there are no photos.  It was a pleasant visit and nice to meet some new colleagues.

It's always jarring to get here and see the huge volume of traffic, and as I said, the smog just hits you like a brick wall.  While a lot of the driving customs are weird to this PA/NJ driver, once explained, they make sense... let's just say they're trying to fit a huge amount of traffic into a small space.

The smog seems much worse than last year.  Last year, I'll admit that we were visiting during the height of the economic shut down for the New Year celebration, and this year we are about a week early... so economic activity in the city is still somewhat strong, though getting lesser each day.  Some days the sky is completely grey, while others, we can make out some sunlight poking through and just a hint of blue in places.

We ended our first day back with a small dinner with Vicky's family (mother, father, and Tiger's family along with her Godfather's family.