From the Airplane...

If you are going to move to china, I recommend leaving more than 30 minutes to pack.

This may be an obvious point to some, but somehow I didn't think of it. But after a whirlwind morning of going through all my clothes (except most of my business casual wear which is conveniently in Atlanta) and moving out of my place in less than an hour, I got all of my stuff out of Schwab and myself and my bag and backpack onto Air China flight 986. Maybe I shouldn't have gone to that baseball game last night and should have done at least a little packing instead. But that wouldn't have been nearly as fun.

It has really been a crazy last 8 days. Last Tuesday night, I had a call with my new boss at Kijiji (www.kijiji.com.cn or view our UK affiliate at www.gumtree.com) and accepted his job offer to move to Shanghai. Two days ago, I got my official offer to join Softbank's Venture Fund in India. Today I am on a plane to China. While I had been in preliminary talks with them both for a few weeks, getting the timing and details to work out were far from certain.

A final point worth noting, my official offer for my job in India arrived via text message Tuesday afternoon. I replied and accepted.

As I wrote in my last message, I'm hoping to use this blog to stay in touch during my three month Asian adventure this summer. We'll see how it goes. Tentative plans are as follows:

Beijing/Great Wall - 3.5 days
Shanghai - 4 weeks of work in shanghai
Rural China - 1 week of travel somewhere
Northern India - 2 weeks of travel
Bangalore - 4-5 weeks of work in Bangalore

Any suggestions of if anyone will be in the same place (or wants to visit!), let me know!

First post from Beijing to hopefully follow soon.