Sharing the Point: China!

Follow us at http://shareingthepoint.org  First stop Beijing China!

First off we were taking quite the risk in flying from Sydney the evening following the last day of the Australia SharePoint Conference to fly 9 hours to Guangzhou.  As soon as we hit the ground we had a 3 hour layover.  I’m the adventuresome type, so I was like hey we’ve already got our tickets.  Let’s go kill an hour at some market or something.  I negotiated with the taxi desk and got them down as cheap as they’d go and we jumped in a couple of cars.  Mark Miller, John Anderson, Paul Swider, and Rob LaMeure and I jumped in two cabs and headed toward the town.  First stop the taxi’s think, hey these guys are looking for food, let’s stop at Mc Donalds, that didn’t make us happy so it was then KFC.  Ok, that was enough.  I had to do some serious negotiation to get the drivers to take us further.  "It’s just fields" he would say.  I was like… take us to a market, and he would say, the super market is closed.  Some times it’s hard to get the message across, and we had one of the better English speakers.

The community itself was very accepting.  As you might expect Japanese tourists to want to take photos with gaijin. We immediately became rockstars and celebrities like never before.  The Chinese SharePoint community was super excited about seeing Paul Swider and was asking him for his autograph.

You can grab my slides "Avoiding Failed Deployments: SharePoint Worst Practices"

 

After that we continued on, but lost track of the other car.  I saw a gate that looked like a china town looking gate and asked the driver to turn around, and figured we needed to get off the highway and try some side roads.  We found a little tent with a couple frying up little buns

 

Sharing the Point Crew… Enjoying the Great Wall of China

There’s a lot more to say, but want to get this posted!