Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Informal Interviews
(note: I'm adding a bunch of posts at once, which means there are a couple new ones below this one. Go read them first if you havent seen them yet. I'll wait.)
Because my meetings with the local government got cancelled I had nothing scheduled today. Fortunately, my friend David arranged his days off to have some time while I'm here so we spent today hanging out. We visited Pavillion shopping center, a nice hgh-end place that opened just days after I left last year, and I picked upa few things for folks back home. We had a great lunch at Crystal Jade in Lot 10 where, proving I am not really Malaysian, I did not take any photos of the food (but mmmmmmm, it was good!).
I'd met David last year of course, but he was working crazy hours and after my first night here we didn't see each other again. But I read his blog and since about January we've been talking a lot and getting to know each other better, and so it's nice to finally spend some time hanging out together
David is a photographer so we went down around KLCC and he did some photos of me, then because it is scary hot we headed inside to Coffee Bean and got some chilled drinks and talked for a while. We got to talking about some of my research and suddenly I found myself interviewing him regarding some aspects of my work that deal with Chinese culture in various countries (other friends be warned, I wll be posing some questions to you, too!). I think we ended up sitting there mor than 2 hours and it's quite likely that session was far more important than any of the "official" meetings I am having this week.
Later we headed out to Midvalley because it's one of those places people always blog about but I'd never been there. I had wanted to take him out for a belated birthday dinner so we headed out for Korean food and he helped me with my chopstick usage so now maybe Danny won't give me a hard time again when I get home. I gave him a small present I'd picked up, nothing fancy like the new lens his friends here gave him but something I think he will like.
I'll spend sometime Wednesday going over my notes and refining questions for a couple other intervie sessions this week, and will try to get in touch with an American here for a conference of interest to me which is at a hotel dow the street from mine...I should probably be participating in this conference but I hadn't heard of it before now, so I will just try to pick his brain about the important parts.
Because my meetings with the local government got cancelled I had nothing scheduled today. Fortunately, my friend David arranged his days off to have some time while I'm here so we spent today hanging out. We visited Pavillion shopping center, a nice hgh-end place that opened just days after I left last year, and I picked upa few things for folks back home. We had a great lunch at Crystal Jade in Lot 10 where, proving I am not really Malaysian, I did not take any photos of the food (but mmmmmmm, it was good!).
I'd met David last year of course, but he was working crazy hours and after my first night here we didn't see each other again. But I read his blog and since about January we've been talking a lot and getting to know each other better, and so it's nice to finally spend some time hanging out together
David is a photographer so we went down around KLCC and he did some photos of me, then because it is scary hot we headed inside to Coffee Bean and got some chilled drinks and talked for a while. We got to talking about some of my research and suddenly I found myself interviewing him regarding some aspects of my work that deal with Chinese culture in various countries (other friends be warned, I wll be posing some questions to you, too!). I think we ended up sitting there mor than 2 hours and it's quite likely that session was far more important than any of the "official" meetings I am having this week.
Later we headed out to Midvalley because it's one of those places people always blog about but I'd never been there. I had wanted to take him out for a belated birthday dinner so we headed out for Korean food and he helped me with my chopstick usage so now maybe Danny won't give me a hard time again when I get home. I gave him a small present I'd picked up, nothing fancy like the new lens his friends here gave him but something I think he will like.
I'll spend sometime Wednesday going over my notes and refining questions for a couple other intervie sessions this week, and will try to get in touch with an American here for a conference of interest to me which is at a hotel dow the street from mine...I should probably be participating in this conference but I hadn't heard of it before now, so I will just try to pick his brain about the important parts.
