Before we hurry on, we'd better explain one thing: We're in China, Zhanna and I. We're joined by our Chinese colleague Grace from Beijing. Together, the three of us have journeyed inland to Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Our morning began as so many mornings with the old panic and hurry. We needed to beat the morning rush hour of Beijing, which is treacherous and tricky. We were telling each other to hurry up through breakfast, we told the taxi driver to hurry up and we hurried to find check-in desks and after that we hurried to the gates. And then we waited for a while.

We were early, but we killed the time. Killing the two hours in the plane from Beijing to Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, was also easy enough. Arrival and get suitcases and get going... Wrong!

My suitcase was nowhere to be found. It obviously failed to hurry. It's on the next plane to Yinchuan, which unfortunately doesn't hurry either. It is two hours delayed and there is still no trace of my Samsonite.

We were picked up by the nice Mr. Huang and made it to the hotel where we experienced a number of challenges before we decided to just get started. We had some city officials waiting for us in Yinchuan High Tech Park. After a lovely lunch we hurried there. The driver was very good at hurrying. There was no trace of fear in his driving. Just for the heck of it, I asked him to hurry up.

I though we were visiting a solar panel manufacturer, but instead we ended up in a place that forges turbines out of steel. However, we did run into Rickey, the company's deputy sales manager, who spoke very well English and was willing to give us an interview. Okay, my questions were prepared for solar power, but with some adaptations we managed alright. And we went and saw the solar panels afterwards.

After a rather busy day we were back at the hotel for more troubles with this and that. But before we managed to do anything we were having dinner with a lot of officials around. Smile and greet and hope you have enough name cards. We ran out of name cards, but had a nice time with various important people in corporate China.

After dinner we hurried to the rooms. Only to find a bit of trouble again. Key card and internet trouble. Two separate incidents. If this ever gets published, we will know that at least one of these got resolved. At least partly.