Day 0 and Day 1
We arrived in Shenzhen yesterday evening after a very tiring adventure.
We all met on Monday morning at EPFL for an entire day of pitching training and preparation for the trip. Marc gave us some good information and facts about China before the trip. After that, we took the bus to the Geneva airport, the plane to Munich, transferred to our next flight, took the plane to Hong Kong, the ferry to Shenzhen, the metro, walked to the hotel and finally… we arrived! The city is impressive with its super tall buildings that don’t even fit in the frame of my camera (how frustrating is that?), so many lights everywhere, new symbols and a writing we cannot read (except Marc), advertising for objects we don’t even know existed, etc. So many things to discover and streets to explore.
We went to a Chinese restaurant near the hotel and, as we couldn’t read the menu (see the picture), we let our waitress Cherri decide for us all! We ate tendons, pork fat, shrimps, goose’s legs, etc. It’s very exciting to try the local food!! Eventually, later in the evening, after a really nice walk in the streets, we went to the hotel to get some sleep and be ready for our first day of work.
Day 2
This morning we all left the hotel around 8:30 am to go to x.Factory. It took us around one hour of public transport!! Apparently, it only takes 20 minutes by cab.. I guess next time we will try this interesting solution as it is an other affordable solution.
The x.Factory campus is beautiful with its peaceful, modern and spacious architecture scattered by many green parcels. We were warmly welcomed by three x.Factory members who showed us around the facilities and what was at our disposition. We settled in a coworking area with long desks and super comfortable chairs. We started with our first meeting in China, settled individual tasks like pitching, PCB design, blog posts, website, etc, and wrote that down on a beautiful whiteboard (see picture). During the afternoon, each one of us concentrated on our own tasks but we had the advantage of being together in a same room so we could help each other. In the end, the day went pretty fast and we enjoyed a lot working at this coworking space. Tomorrow will be an other day at x.Factory where we will try to finish and send to the production our PCB.
