Sunday 16th. Finding a new supplier in Indonesia
Jemma here -We arrived in Indonesia yesterday, from Hong Kong. We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday spent the night with friends in the beautiful Deep water Bay area. However we might have had a little too much to eat and drink in Wanchai, being keen to put jet-lag at bay, and it was a tough wake up call yesterday at 6am to return to the airport in to fly down here, we were both pretty quiet on the 5 hour flight!
We're staying in Jakarta, the capital city of Java, the most densley populated island in the world. There's little in the news about the recent earth-quake, but as it was in a remote area of Sumatra and the warnings of a Tsunami came to nothing, it seems, for most of us, to have passed by.
The temperature here is a debilitating 33 degrees and 85% humidity here which makes coping with the tiredness a bit tougher. However all our meetings are at our hotel, so not having to travel on the national domestic airline or spend much time on the roads is a relief going on past experience!
Potential suppliers today have arrived, from cities in Central Java, with lorry loads of furniture samples, made to our templates. The hunger for a contract is apparent, and we especially felt sorry for the two guys who'd driven for 12 hours in a tiny truck through the night. The reason for night travel is that, being the month of Ramadan, they are fasting during hours of daylight (even water was refused in our meeting) so travel at night allowed refreshments along the way.
As always, we now haved to decipher what was 'really' said in our meetings; communication is tricky in the sense of language, as well as culture, and we need to be sure that a new supplier will do their best for us once there is 6000 miles and just email between us, as containers full of mistakes are costly.
Our final meeting is about to take place and then we can relax for the evening and hope for a night uninterrupted by jet lag ( a couple of bottles of wine do help here with Brandy Alexander night-caps). We've a 6am start tomorrow to fly back to Hong Kong. Here we will meet our colleague, straight off the flight from the UK, and then get the ferry to China where we have daily visits to restoration factories to select restored antiques for our Winter collection
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