It has been some great days for you guys;
It has been some marvelous days for me, too!
Sept.8, I took half day off to rush to the airport to greet my fellow IMCers '12. This group of Medill IMC students, 35 people in total, traveled from the U.S. to Asia to visit Seoul, Shanghai and Taipei for a total of 3 weeks. For many, this is quite a lifetime adventure and memory; for me, this is the first time in history that I can showoff my beloved motherland to the top marketers-to-be. This chance is something Huge.
This simply is the reason why Anya Cheng, Jessie Mai and the elder alumni such as Joseph Lyu, Alan Huang will actively get involved in the planning and the information sharing along the way. People's generous participation is also the key to make fellow IMCers visit such a pleasant, joyful, and unforgettable one.
Aside from their company visit to
CHIMEI,
HTC and
TsingHua University, on Saturday Sept.10, Alan and I took the group for one-day Taipei City tour.
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall,
Eslite bookstore,
Bellavita, and
Taipei 101 amazed the group, because these spots were a mix of traditional & modern Taiwan. IMCers learned about our park exercise culture: casual dancing, street dance, martial arts, to name a few (SYS Memorial Hall); our reading (read-holic?) lifestyle- 24HR bookstore with numerous free seminars to attend for all is truly cool (Eslite); the venue for the rich & the flagship fashion show stage (Bellavita); and about our anti-earthquake engineering pride (Taipei 101). I also tried to blend in as much marketing insights as possible to share with the group, so that they might find the sightseeing more meaningful and "rich" in context. Their questions or reactions to things as well helped me a lot to discover the beauty of my land, and to realize the difference among our culture with others.
In the evening, we all joined the welcome party & Northwestern University alumni dinner, which we had around another 30 alumni to celebrate the night with. That was the time I heard all the happy people talking about their love about Taiwan:
"Impressive! There are so many alumni showing up tonight to greet us~ There were only so few on other sites."
"Taiwanese people are all so nice! They have treated us so nice during our company visit. Restaurant or vendor staff are so kind to us. Even pedestrians are so helpful guiding our ways, which they totally don't have to!"
"Food here are so amazingly tasty! An evening visit to a night market is simply not enough!"
"People here dress in style. Not cheesy, not too over, looks just right, feels like they're loving their life"....
I thought these were amazing enough, but I was completely under-estimated the real hype.
The hit of the night, however, happened AFTER the dinner. I took them to
CashBox KTV. Originally I was worried about if they would get bored easily, maybe due to the lack of English songs, but I was totally wrong. TOTALLY.
Swear to God, that WAS the MOST EXCITING KTV experience I've ever had in life.
Ever.
There were so many great songs for all to sing, new or old!
It is Absolutely not a problem if one room can only get limited mic or not-- Everybody in the cabin are singing, dancing, having fun at the same time anyways!
Even if the video does not show with the branded MV, people were happy "studying" our videos/singing culture~
Not a single person was bored. People took turns grab the mic or hop on the stage, or push other classmates to be the star of the song.
Everyone is merely SO Happy :)
That was an exhausted day, but I remembered the full joy in my mind. Thanks to all of you, I got the precious chance to learn again the beauty of my home!
~to be continued....~
