The car ride from Shanghai to Hangzhou is about 2.5 hours, and the hotel where the conference speakers were booked in Hangzhou is amazing. It's so new that you can't even google it yet. I have a beautiful large room overlooking a large expanse of woods and lake! The hotel is ultra luxurious and very glitzy; and inside, right at the front door, is a huge tank of the beautiful red coy fish supposed to bring luck and good fortune.
The first day at the conference was busy with conference sessions, tea break, conference sessions, lunch, conference sessions, tea break, conference sessions, and then a long dinner where I was introduced to the Chinese wine culture. Now, the Chinese sure can drink wine! And traditionally, many a business contract is signed at the dinner table after going around the table and toasting each other multiple times. I actually lost count of the number of times we toasted each other...It's a typical way of conducting an official or business dinner here. My own wine consumption was limited to a tiny sip as each toast was made but one is supposed to empty the entire glass of wine or beer with each toast - and accompany each toast you must to avoid offending anyone.
The official meals have been pretty typical as well going by all the lunches and dinners in the various restaurants where we ate. We sat at large round tables with a huge lazy susan as an unending stream of piping hot dishes kept appearing and being placed on the table. And as "susan" spins gently around you keep helping yourself to whatever you want as it passses by you, dipping into the serving bowls and lifting out with your chopsticks greens, peas, broccoli, spinach, eggplant, lotus roots, all forms of tofu, crab, shrimp, fish, clams, squid,chicken, pork, beef, duck, etc. in various preparations... It's quite a lovely experience as you share a table with a large group of colleagues and associates, dip into delicious food, sip wine or beer, and enjoy good conversation.
Underlying it all was my acute awareness of how many developmental skills (to use the language of early childhood education) are being called into play at these meals: listening and speaking, responding appropriately, going around the circle toasting each other in appreciation and with gratitude, carefully reaching out for foods, being attentive to whether someone else is helping themselves to a dish before spinning the lazy susan, handling the chopsticks deftly without dropping food all over (!), attending to your neighbors and asking if they would like something you were helping yourself to, asking them if they'd like more wine if a glass appeared empty, the importance of trying a little of everything to show recognition, respect and appreciation to the host... There was a clear sense of the self as being more a member of a larger group rather than an individual, and the importance of cultivating relationships rather than just signing a paper contract...