I tried to keep up with daily posting during my trip to China a week ago, but I only managed to do so the first four days. Now, I continue—we are at day five. The title to this post comes from the hilariously funny speech that Will Ferrell held at the graduation ceremony for the Harvard Class of 2003. Let’s hit it:

Day Five—April 10: The programme for today was a daylong visit to Novozymes’s production facilities in the Tianjin Economic Development Area (TEDA) 2-3 hours drive outside of Beijing. Actually, the length of the drive varies greatly with traffic—and traffic grows at enormous speeds. In fact, some Danish expatriates we spoke to said that they could feel traffic volume increase week by week.

As usual, our chartered bus for the week was waiting for us outside the hotel to take us to the Novozymes facility. After a one hour drive, we entered a remote parking lot (a huge one) with hundreds of taxis and buses. Clearly, this was a maintenance centre of some sort and not Novozymes’s facilities. What had actually happened was that the driver was dissatisfied with his boss about some kind of pay issue, and he had decided to take us “hostage” until he had it his way. We did not know whether we had actually driven one hour in the wrong direction or how long we were going to stay here at this taxi/bus place. In Will Ferrell slang—We are now in Russia! But this happens in Communist China as well. After three quarters of an hour, we were on our way again, and I fell asleep for the rest of the ride.

After a long drive we arrived in TEDA, which is a huge development area. Many multi-nationals are placed here, and you can see countless production facilities. The area is designed as a grid like an American city, and it is expanding all the time. You sense pollution the minute you get there, which is actually not that different from the feeling you have in Beijing. Novozymes is one of the cleanest production sites there, and they receive constant awards for the sustainable production.
At Novozymes we met their finance manager and one of their production managers, who also gave us a tour of the plant. Most of all, it resembles a brewery, and it also smells like it—at least in the fermentation section of the plant. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to photograph inside the facility, so you’ll have to do with one from the outside.

The day ended in an ever-so-infinite car line on our way into Beijing—we had started getting used to it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 4:59 pm and is filed under China, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.