We woke up early and loaded onto a bus that took us to the Great Wall in Badaling, a 1.5hr trip.  As we drove into the mountains, the scenery was amazing.  We had a tour guide on the bus that none of us could understand except David.  All we remembered was how loud the volume was!  Badaling’s Great Wall point is perhaps the most touristy of the Great Wall destinations – cheap souvenirs, fake wood entrance (think Matterhorn or Splash Mtn), and speakers blasting Kenny G (I kid you not!).  We were a bit taken aback by this introduction to the Great Wall.  But, once we all made it up to the wall itself and began our climb (we climbed from tower 4 to tower 9), our initial skepticism was washed away.  This wall truly is amazing, especially when you consider it took decades to build, 10 thousand people, and it spans approx. 10k miles in total!!  This is one experience I will never forget – just like the Taj Mahal in India.  How lucky we are to experience 2 of the greatest man-made feats of engineering in one trip!!

 By the end of this Great Wall experience, we were in high spirits.  We felt on top of the world; the Mayfield Fellows are prepared to tackle any obstacle; any challenge or issue we know we can navigate to a solution.  Like getting back home:

Well, eventually we found our bus and made it back to Beijing.  Our final event was a good one — dinner with some of our Haas classmates and some of the 2010 new admits!!  We ate in a very cool area called Hohai, which is a bar/restaurant area surrounding a small lake.  I don’t remember the name of the restaurant where we ate, but it was very tasy!  We crammed 12+ folks into a small private room and had a blast.  I wish I had a picture of this event, but I had already used up my 2 GB of memory space on my camera (yeah, I took ~600 pictures on this trip!!)… 

And that was that.  We woke up very early the next day, caught a cab to the airport, and spent the next 24 hours traveling back to the US through Hong Kong.  Our Mayfield Trip 2008 has come to a close and now we are on to beginning our summer internships.  What an experience!!  We met with so many successful folks on our trip from VC, law firms, etc – some great contacts.  We saw some amazing sites, and experienced some of the finer aspects of the Indian and Chinese cultures.  And we ate (and ate, and ate) some extremely delicious, and occasionally adventurous, meals.  I have to shout out some kudos to Uday and David for their excellent job in being our tour guides, translators, food experts, etc in India and China respectively.  Thanks guys, you were great!!  And with that, I am signing off – Mayfield Fellows 2008 trip blog is officially complete!!

Our last day in Shanghai was productive.  Brian had been on a mission since we arrived in China to go to the Shanghai Museum.  We decided against going Saturday afternoon because the line was wrapped around the building – we thought we’d be clever and show up early on Sunday morning to beat the crowds.  Well, little did we know, Sunday was a holiday (Children’s Day), so the line was even longer in the morning, full of families waiting to get inside!!  Once inside, we experienced four floors of very cool, historical artifacts.  I took lots of pictures of many of these exhibits, here are a few of my favorites:

We had one last meeting that day with NEA Ventures, and one last evening on the town. We then said goodbye early Monday morning. 

Beijing — our last leg of the trip, home of the summer olympics (in ~2 months). I have to say, I’m not sure they’ll actually be ready for the games by then!  Lots of construction is happening all over town, restoration of lots of the sites, etc, but I cannot see how the city will be ready by the start of the games.  Reminds me of that commercial for Coke (or something) before Athens where the sprinters ran through a construction site of workers finishing the stadium!

Yesterday we visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, right in the center of Beijing.  Quite cool, although we found ourselves very ignorant of the historical significance of what we saw.  I need to review my 8th grade world history books I guess…

We ate dinner at a famous restaurant renowned for its Peking Duck dishes.  I can say we certainly had opportunity to eat duck – pretty much every part of the duck!  I can elaborate later, it was a new, and actually delicious, experience!!

Today, we visited the new Olympic Stadium and surrounding area – there is quite a bit of Olympic excitement all around town, and the new structures are quite amazing!

Well, this is my last blog entry from China – we have one last day, which I am very excited about, as we will be traveling to the Great Wall for a day trip!  Should be a great way to end our Chinese experience.  I will finish out our Mayfield trip blog after I get back to the states, so stay tuned!

But first, business: Mayfield business to be exact. We were lucky to set up an appointment with one of Shanghai’s top IP lawyers of Watson & Band. We had a great discussion over tea about China’s regulatory processes, entrepreneurship and the law, and of course, the big question of how china is addressing violations and piracy of foreign IP.

We have explored several areas of the city over the last two days. The best I can say is that the city is divided into East and West by the Huangpu River. Most of the areas we’ve visited are on the West side. One of the great Chinese experiences is the Nanjing Road, with shopping galore for everything you can imagine, both fake and real. We were lucky to be there after dark and the lights and excitement of the area were fun. It got real interesting when we noticed one store selling pig faces (yes, it’s true)!! No one bought one, in case you’re wondering…

Today we explored a different part of town, near the famous “Bund” area of Shanghai. This area (which will remain nameless, someone please fill me in!) was a mix of local shopping area into an extreme tourist area. In the center of this tourist area is the famous Yuyuan Garden — this place is beautiful! We spent the better part of an hour exploring the nooks and crannies of the place – coi fish, rock formations, pagodas and all! Beautiful! (and surrounded by some great dumpling places I might add…)

Well, besides the good times during the last two days, we’ve had a great time exploring Shanghai’s nightlife as well – the French Corridor has Kaan’s favorite bar: Beaver. Known for it’s mean foosball table and relatively cheap beer. Tonight’s bar of choice was Luna, in some area I can’t pronounce. Expensive, but great fun! And near our favorite restaurant of our Shanghai experience, one that (again), I don’t recall the name, but it specializes in Taiwanese dumplings. Good thing Wende of the IBD team was there to show us the proper way to consume dumplings!!

We have one more day in Shanghai, and Brian is dead set on visiting the museum. One more meeting, and one last dinner hurrah, and we’re off to our final destination of our Mayfield trip, Beijing! More to come soon!

After this trip, we headed to the airport and said goodbye to India, and Hello to China – first stop, Shanghai.

Yesterday was our first full day in the city. Despite the layer of fog/smog over the city, we still had a great day. We visited the famous Orient Pearl Tower that gives visitors great views of the central part of the city. We also enjoyed a boat cruise along the Huangpu River that runs through the city. Both experiences were great fun, although we all noticed the fact that the city is pretty dirty. The air quality is suspect and the river water was not anything you’d want to swim in… But we were amazed at how developed the city has become over the last 10 years as we compared pictures of the downtown skyline within the Orient Pearl Tower.

We had great timing as we were also able to attend the Berkeley Club of Shanhai’s alumni event at the beautiful Westin Hotel. We met up with our fellow classmates who are in Shanghai on IBD, ate delicious hors d’oeuvres, and networked with Berkeley alumni.

Today we are off on more adventures as we explore this huge city, and perhaps a visit to our IBD friends’ office! More to come later…

Today was a great day.  We stuffed ourselves with a delicious (and free!) breakfast buffet from the hotel.  We then made our way to the India Gate, a national military monument that remembers the 80k soldiers who died in WWI. 

We then went to a very cool tomb (Humayun’s Tomb), which was in fact the inspiration for the Taj Mahal!  The grounds were beautiful, and I got my first upclose view of bats!!  I can’t wait to see what the Taj Majal is like, because I think this tomb was fantastic…

We will spend a day traveling to the Taj Mahal tomorrow, and then, sadly, we leave India early the next day…  We’ve loaded up on great Indian food, after tomorrow, we’ll switch to phase two of our trip and begin gorging ourselves on Peking Duck and Dim Sum in China! 

(Pictures have been uploaded to my previous posts, FYI – check them out!!)

After this meeting we were in high spirits.  Little did we know our next meeting would turn out to be quite an adventure.  We were to meet with GE Research’s Director of IP at 530pm in an area of town called White Field, a 1hr trip.  We had hired a personal driver with an SUV, which was a good decision as a monsoon began to pour down on us as we left our hotel!  The drive was quite “interesting” — from the flooding roadways, to the auto-rikshaws and buses seemingly trying to hit us, to the car that we actually did hit (!), to hearing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” over and over and over again whenever our driver backed up…yeah, let’s just say we were happy to reach White Field.  But that wasn’t all.  GE Research employs over 5000 people and is a huge campus.  And yet, actually finding the place was nearly impossible!  We persevered and found the campus, had a great meeting with the Director – a great example of “Intrapreneurship” in India with GE.

Now, that wasn’t the end of our adventure.  The ride back was just as hairy – I’m just glad I wasn’t in the back of the car as 2 buses nearly rammed into us (Kaan was lucky, let’s just say)…!  This journey is a little hazy for me though as I zonked out.  All I remember is two things – 1) the crunch of a motorcycle hitting a tree near us (not our fault, or was it?), and 2) momentarily waking up and seeing the side of a bus within inches of my face.  But we made it, and all was well.

Today was much tamer, our day off – some sightseeing and well needed R&R. 

Tomorrow is our last day in Bangalore, and then we hit the sweltering heat of Dehli!  But we’re tough.  We’ll pull through, don’t worry!  You can count on the Mayfield Fellows!!!

We were productive today as well, as we had a great meeting with a venture capitalist with the Seed Fund, an early stage investment house focused on Indian startups dealing with education, IT, services, etc.  It was a great meeting that almost never happened as the taxi drivers we commissioned didn’t know where the building was at all!  Somehow we made it, on berkeley time of course (which is acceptable in India I’m told…).

To cap the night off, we just returned from a fantastic dinner on the rooftop of a hotel near the “Gateway of India” monument, which is on the water off of downtown Mumbai.  Great views, super chill music, and probably some of the best Indian food I’ve ever eaten were had.  Plus great company of course.  Which leads me back full circle to the lesser half of the group who were intelligent enough to get enough sleep this morning.  Ah, the art of spin…!

We head to Bangalore tomorrow VERY EARLY, leaving at 4am.  Looks like this blogger will be running on fumes, but that’s the way I roll.  Next time…pictures, I promise!!!

For those of you who don’t know what the Mayfield Fellows program really is, it’s basically a program for entrepreneurial focused, engineering- and science-background grad students at UC Berkeley to experience the start up ecosystem.  We are mentored by VC’s, find summer internships at start ups, and travel to other hotbeds of innovation (ie: this is why we’re traveling through India & China!).

Today was a blast – we had an opportunity to meet with one of the Mayfield Fund’s India partners.  This satisfied one of our trip’s goals to meet entrepreneurs or venture capitalists in India/China.  It was a great conversation and we learned a ton about the state of Indian entrepreneurship and venture capital inestments in only one hour!  I hope this is the first of a chain of great conversations that will balance our trip between play and education!

More to come, stay tuned!  (and hopefully some pictures too)  But now, I sign off to finish the 2nd half of the Manchester United / Chelsea football championship game!  Cheers all!