Wasted the better part of a day

I went down to the Kerry Center to register for the conference which starts tomorrow. Not only were they not taking registration, the concierge said there was no such conference taking place at the Kerry Center. He phoned their conference and catering people, he phoned every number I had, no answers.

I decided to eat lunch. I had Shwarma, but it wasn’t very authentic, more like a chicken wrap. Real Shwarma is cooked by a balding, greasy Lebanese guy who is sweating and smoking and likely dripping both into your sandwich, which only adds to the flavour. I also had two glasses of beer and dessert. I put it on my American Express card, which earned me a 15% discount. As I was telling Salina in Shanghai a better class of people use American Express.

I started SMS’ing because I had just read the Multimedia Entertainment China 2005 webpage this morning, I even blogged about it. Now almost twenty years later their website is long gone. My receipt clearly said the Kerry Hotel Beijing. I was worried I was out 5000 RMB. The one person who I had talked to was unavailable and my phone seemed to be on the fritz too. I bought more minutes in the shopping center attached to the hotel and finally learned that I didn’t have to register. The conference does start tomorrow (the 19th) at the Kerry Center.

I have no idea why the concierge and all the staff didn’t know about it. I also don’t quite understand why the Exhibition is at the World Trade Center and starts on the 20th instead. I was not the only person confused by this, hopefully Nicholas Negroponte and the other speakers end up here on the right day in the correct location, I’m pretty sure they have better information than just the website.

I’m so busy just now. Too busy to help people, something I’ve become known for to all but a few of my classmates. I’m so looking forward to Friday, hell Thursday afternoon. In addition to the conference, the assignment and the final exam I still haven’t started preparing for, despite taking my textbook with me today. I also have the Tsinghua MBA Exchange Students party tomorrow night, which has FREE BEER compliments of Carlsberg. On Tuesday, Dave of the Church of Beef, is organizing some sort of Brazilian BarBQ eating extravaganza which I’d also like to attend.

All this does not leave a lot of time for studying and my trip to Shanghai as well as the death and rebirth of my Mac also ate up a lot of my time. I also missed the Tsinghua Finance Forum which I was supposedly helping to organize. This isn’t surprising considering who was my contact. I wasn’t terribly upset, I’m just too busy and as always I have a lot on my mind.

One thing I did learn is it takes over an hour by subway to get to the Kerry Center from Wu Dao Kou. Maybe it can be done quicker using buses but I doubt it. Same goes for taking a cab, especially during rush hour it will be slow. I have to factor that in when getting up tomorrow.

Another thing I learned was the closest train station is Yong’an Li which is right by the Silk Market so I got a lot of practice saying 不用，谢谢.

This entry was originaly posted on December 18th, 2005, it was last edited on May 19th, 2024 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Beijing, China, Conference.