I still cannot believe that we spent this past week in Shanghai. The whole trip is still a blur.
I hope that I’m out of this damned wheelchair for the next one. Being stuck in an airplane seat for twelve hours, unable to get up and trot off to the toilet, is NOT my idea of a good time.
Shanghai, on the other hand, is.
As a city, it defies description, because there just are no words to adequately describe it. Imagine a Lego city designed by Disney and you might come somewhere close. Great, crenellated, tower-blocks of apartments, vanishing into a murky, polluted, sky, and lit at night like Tomorrowland. Wide thoroughfares straddling immaculately groomed center-strips with delightfully topiaried bushes. Everywhere carefully cultivated greenery designed to soften the effect of a frenetically constructed new city, springing up like some alien mushroom invasion - seemingly overnight - to attract western commerce to mainland China.
If that sounds as though I didn’t like it, you’re wrong. Linda and I LOVED it!
In all my world travels I have never, ever, felt such a rush before. As Bill, our son would say, ‘It pops!’
Next to Shanghai, every city I have ever known pales in comparison. There is a vitality that is palpable; a feeling that everyone there is snapping their fingers - and looking to do business.
…And that’s why I was there.
The Convention Center is a large, sprawling, single-storied, complex - laid out in the form of an equilateral triangle - in the south-east corner of the city.
Upon entering, the first impression is that everyone seems to be shouting. If this were in London or LA it could be irritating. With the shouting being in Mandarin, however, the effect is rather like entering a vast aviary, full of raucous, tropical birds.
Nothing can prepare you, however, for the noise level in the first hall we entered…E2.
I was in front of a main speaker-tower at the Isle of Wight Festival the year that Hendrix played there – and that was a Vivaldi sonata compared to Hall E2!
Even with one’s fingertips jammed deep into one’s ear canals the noise was still loud enough to crumble tooth enamel.
Poor Rick Shubb had his booth in that hall – and soon found out that, even nose to nose with a prospective buyer, it was impossible to hear what was being said - even with their spittle blurring your contact lenses.
Rick is one of the mildest, least flappable, people that I know, but, at that show, I saw a Rick I had not seen before.
Maybe it’s the Oriental martial arts that he and his wife, Linda, have mastered - but the Rick I saw that day was not someone I would ever like to have angry at me. He charged into the Show office, with Richard Kelsden of Saga, towed along behind him like a kid’s balloon – and the noise level magically dropped!
I was there to try to locate some companies who could manufacture some of my accessory items, which would allow me to keep my prices down. Rather foolishly I assumed that an international trade show would be conducted in at least one European language in addition, of course, to Chinese.
Wrong!
I constantly saw really attractive booths bearing items that were made by the same processes that I could use to make my products – only to find that the booth staff spoke not one word of English – or French, or German, or…or.
Next year I shall be sure to arrange for an interpreter.
I did manage to – I think – get across to a few companies what I was looking for, and left my R&D address. Now all I can do is sit and hope that they get back to me with samples.
On the subject of ‘attractive’, never have I seen so many astoundingly beautiful women.
It was very difficult to keep my mind on business and I was constantly having to say to Linda, ‘What girl? No, I didn’t notice her - I was looking at that display of chromatic tuners.
Oh, THAT girl? No, I don’t think she’s that special. Not like you, darling.’
Some show impressions that stick in my mind:
A violin accessories booth also selling battery operated wine coolers - and radio controlled helicopters!
I saw two guys, who should know better, surreptitiously buying one, each averring loudly that it was for a nephew. (I wonder if David (Saga) Gartland’s is still flying. Mine suffered a slight catastrophe against the light fitting in my hotel room.)
In Hall W3, with the clangour of metal shred music rebounding from the walls, I came across a sweet lady playing a viola da gamba. The sound, so ethereal, so incongruous in that setting, held me entranced for the best part of an hour – and the first thing I did upon my return to Germany was to buy myself one, to start to learn this winter.
The meeting at the Thomastik-Infeld booth, with Peter Infeld to give him the go-ahead to sell the strings that I designed for him back in 1975, in North America as well as in Europe.
What a charming host he is – and the booth-folks are such fun to be around.
As always, the high-point of any trade show is the quality time that Rick, Linda, and I can spend in the Executive Lounge of the hotel.
It costs a little extra to get Lounge access, but it’s worth every cent. Where else can I restock my library of shaggy-dog stories and agonizing puns, whilst savouring a crisp glass of dry red wine, or a bitingly chilled Beefeater’s and tonic?
This hotel even let us order from the room service menu, and have the food delivered to the Lounge…so that we could settle in for the evening and not have to venture out and subject our lungs to the quite awful pollution that Shanghai residents have to suffer.
For Linda, Shanghai is synonymous with shopping. On Sunday she braved the pollution and headed out to the old city in search of silk. She returned with a smug look on her face. I wonder if I shall look as happy when the credit card bills arrive.
So, now we are home again – and the entire house is a shambles.
Linda’s new kitchen is, finally, going in - and the contents of the old kitchen are spread about the house until the last shelf shall be mounted, and the new cooker shall fill the gap in the new work-surface that, at present, gapes rather like a missing tooth.
My office, being somewhat large, has become the repository for most of the cooking pans which are now balanced, uneasily, upon each and every horizontal surface.
Merlin, our two year-old flat-coat retriever, has discovered that if he causes a pile to come crashing to the floor it will produce a highly entertaining flow of obsceneties from his lord and master…and so is born a new game.
On second thoughts, maybe the Show wasn’t that loud, after all.
