Today, after a long journey, I arrived in my hotel here in Wuhan. It is a Chinese-style hotel called the LakeView Garden Hotel and very different than my traditional Crown Plaza, Holiday Inn, Mercure or traditional type of hotel you find everywhere. So, yesterday I took the plane from Brussels to Munich, from there to Beijing arriving there noon local time today and the last step was an internal flight from Beijing to Wuhan. It has been a pleasant trip basically due to the fact that I was able to fly business class with Lufthansa, experiencing the nice dinner, the very good entertainment, the wireless on the plane and most important the ability to create your own bed and have a good nap without having to take all kinds of annoying positions. So, totally relaxed I arrived in Beijing. China was and still is an unknown country for me but the organization at Beijing airport was super. I did not make any wrong decision getting to my connection flight. Well done for me but also to the Chinese organization. From Beijing to Wuhan was about 1,5 hour flight and I enjoyed the nice views from the plane.

5 PM, more than a day after I left brussels, I arrived at Wuhan airport. Wuhan is not a small city - 8 million people (almost as much as the whole of Belgium :)). First thing I did was get me some money because they warned me that taxis here only accept cash money. And they also warned me that the majority of them do not speak any English. But I was prepared... had all the details of the hotel printed out in Chinese (thanks Mauricio for that tip). It took me an hour drive from one side of Wuhan to the other side but again I did not mind since I got a nice 'internal' view of the city. It reminded me immediately of Moscow: everywhere construction going on, new buildings popping up, lots of little shops but also major shopping malls and lots of neon lights.

The local welcoming committee was present and I got a tour of the classroom for the next 4 days. One word: WOW! I will show you some pictures during the next days. I am really looking forward to this gig. One surprise however, tomorrow the start of the class coincides with the inauguration of the new building and we will have a lot of press and companies listening to some speeches. And they are expecting one from us. Did not know that, but Mauricio is taking care of this, since he is the official guy from Redmond :)

Well, hope to keep you up-to-date on how it progresses. This trip together with the next one next week in Bangalore.