Day 12 Friday March 10th.

This morning we had a presentation and discussion with Shelby McKean from
NarrowGate. She is Todd McKean��s wife (from earlier in the week) and is the
managing director for NarrowGate, the company they set up several years ago.

NarrowGate works with factories (small goods factories) to help them come up
with a work plan to improve their processes and environment in order to
better meet the compliance requirements of Brands and Multi-Nationals. It is
a small company (4 consultants, Shelby and Todd��s father). It was really
quite inspiring to listen to her. It gave me several ideas for paths that I
could take with my career at Nike.

My allergies are raging right now. I am sneezing a lot and on the verge of
an asthma attack all of the time. I know it is the smog and dust in the air
here in Beijing. The dust is coming from the Gobi Desert. There used to be
trees between the Gobi Desert and Beijing but they were cut down years ago
and now it is just a big dust bowl with industrial and metropolitan smog
mixed in. I finally saw the sun today, it looked a lot like some futuristic
vision of the world in 100 years.

We went shopping at Wang Fu Jing. Yachin and her friend Bing Bing negotiated
me a great deal on four Chinese prints representing the seasons. I also
picked up another English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionary, along with
an additional carry on suitcase.

Yachin set it up so that we could all go to the Chinese Opera in the
traditional tea house setting. It was great! I bet it is even better when
can understand all of the words. Yachin did a good job of translating.

After the opera we were all standing outside the tea house waiting for cabs
to take us to the Karoke place when we were accosted by several beggars. I
was ignoring them which evidently pissed off one woman enough that she hit
me. John promptly yelled at her. Man do I wish I knew how to say ��Go to
Hell�� in Chinese. Eventually as we are all milling around trying to get a
cab a bus driver offers to take us to the Karoke place in his bus, for 100
Yuan. I can��t believe we took a bus. One of the public transit ones.

Karoke was great. They just started bringing in cases of beer. Only the
first couple of cases were cold, after that they were all room temperature.
Karoke ended at about 2 so some of us went on to ��Ho Hi�� and others went
back to the hotel. The little hole in the wall (literally) in Ho Hi was
practically closed but of course they stayed open for 7 westerners. We
finally called it a night at about 4:30. I am too old for this crap.