Beijing, May 10: First Day, First Impressions
On the first morning of our tour, looking from the window of my Beijing hotel room, I saw a sunny day with less smog than I had expected.
This was the first full day of study and sightseeing for our group. The previous afternoon we had arrived from Chicago, checked into our hotel and enjoyed a group dinner, but we had not done very much else except unpack and get some rest.
On this morning two groups were exercising in a parking lot below; one group was uniformed (probably police or security guards) and assembled in a formation, obeying spoken orders from a leader. The people in the other group were wearing street clothes, practicing Tai Chi, accompanied by music coming from a speaker somewhere.
Beijing International MBA Program (BiMBA)
Jackie Qin welcomed us to the BiMBA campus. He and his colleagues Tony Liu and Yi Xie were to be our teachers and guides for the next ten days.
We presented a gift book from Chicago to our BiMBA hosts. Standing (left to right) are professors Jackie Qin, Tony Liu and Yi Xie. John Rogers, our tour leader, is seated at left.
Below, one of the BiMBA classrooms.
The BiMBA campus occupies a well restored old palace on the grounds of Peking University.
A tour of the Peking University campus was followed by a lunch visit to a pizza restaurant opened by an American entrepreneur, who described his experiences with doing business in China. He was not at the table at the time of the picture below, however.
