Made in China

I recently went on a work trip to Shenzhen China and Hong Kong. It was such an amazing opportunity and experience! I flew from NYC to Beijing and then onto Hong Kong which would have been a super long time on a plane had I not flown business class. Watching movies having dinner and flattening my seat literally into bed made it easier than most normal flights.

I was only in HK over night before heading into China. A car picked us up and when we stopped at the border a security officer came out and pointed a temperature gun at our heads and checked out temperature before we could enter China yeah it was crazy.

The view from the 23rd floor in my Hong Kong hotel.

We went to our office in Shenzhen and  met our team and reviewed samples before heading to dinner.... where after we sat they handed out plastic gloves to use to chew some meat off of the bone of something. Needless to say I declined and tried to explain I don't usually like to eat meat from the bone. Which was unfortunate because everything that had been ordered for us was on a bone, including the entire chicken that came next... face and feet on (just like in Christmas Story but nobody came along to chop the head of). after my initial shock the rest of the food was delish!

Dinner with a face...

And the hotel in Shenzhen was really beautiful, it was nice to be able to come home to this:

The next few days we toured factories which may have been the coolest (yeah is used the word coolest) thing I've ever seen!! Watching the actual production was an amazing experience!

L: Shoot the boxes slide down before being loaded on a container R: Hand-blown glass in process

L: Row of guys blowing glass R: Clay being sculpted.

This machine spins the ornament so they can paint/glitter stripes perfectly even.

This is one of the best moments I've experienced, I designed this ornament and I was watching in actual production, CRAZY!!

L: This machine makes 30,000 ornaments a day. R: This is how the round ornaments are painted.

Some things you can never un-see...

We traveled around Southern China visiting 5 factories so I got to see some of the land and the towns as well:

Everyone traveled around on these scooters, helmet less.

We had to stop to let these guys pass us.

The parking lot for all the factory workers.

And after 6 days of ornament review we headed back to Hong Kong complete with more car searches and forehead scanning ha! We stayed in Tsim Sha Tsui so walked around and went to the ladies market before we took the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong Island toThe Peak:

And on the last day I was super excited to come home and get back to normal until Air China was like umm no you will stay in Beijing overnight.... After an extreme amount of sass that was not well received I left Hong Kong for Beijing with a free dinner and comp stay in a hotel. So in an effort to make the most of this situation we jumped on the subway to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

The guards at Tiananmen Square