China Trip

Hong Kong at Night, originally uploaded by alexswanson.

I took my first trip to Hong Kong and China in Feb of 2009. I went to visit contract manufacturers to build products for Bigfoot Networks. I left on a Monday morning, and was on airplanes or in airports for 23 hours! When we finally arrived, it was Tuesday night in Hong Kong. Then we went into China on Wednesday.

We drove about an hour and a half into China - our destination was Shenzhen. We saw high-rise apartment buildings the entire drive from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. The number of people in that area of the country is amazing.

We spent a day at each contract manufacturer that we went to see. One of the manufacturing campuses had 230,000 people who worked there. They had everything onsite - post office, restaurants, movie theater - it was like its own small town. Many of the workers there are very young. We were told that a good portion of the workers come out of high school or a trade school in central china, stay there for 2 years, then go back to their homes to start a family.

After we were finished with our visits, we traveled back to Hong Kong, and had a day there to do some sightseeing.

I have some more pictures posted here on Flickr. Drop by to check them out.