First days on the job...

I apologize for not updating this recently. We've had some technical difficulties lately, but now I'm up and running for good, I hope!

For the last two days, we've been getting down and dirty into the actual business of Hometown China. It began Tuesday morning with a tour of the school that we will be hosting the camp at. The school is a boarding school for 300 junior high students. While the building is old, the technology is fairly modern (aside from the “squatties” in the bathroom instead of normal toilets and urinals). They have a huge auditorium for large group instruction and plays, wonderful athletic facilities, and a very nice computer lab and classrooms. Unfortunately, they have a ton of mosquitoes as well. The fact that the weather is incredibly humid (like the Midwest), hasn't helped matters at all.

Tuesday was spent mostly taking inventory of what we have on hand and preparing for two IBM presentations to parents the following day. After a long day's work on these things (including two practice runs through our presentation), we headed back to the hotel for dinner. Jamie has decided that Chinese food (the stuff you actually get here) is nothing short of wonderful. (I personally enjoyed the Japanese food as well, but then again, I really like seafood.) We've started to become functionally proficient in using chopsticks to eat. My only problem is that about halfway through the meal, my hand is so tired from gripping the chopsticks that it's very difficult to pick up my food! Hopefully my grip strength improves over the course of the trip!

While here on Tuesday, we had several revelations. First of all, the air is very dense over here. Although the cities in China have a reputation for being very polluted, I think it's more due to the humidity than the pollution (which to be honest, isn't any worse than any other major US city from what I've seen). Secondly, the drivers are insane! On at least five occassions, the car that I was in has done a U-turn in the middle of the road with oncoming traffic coming! Red lights appear to be a suggestion, rather than a law. Pedestrians definately do not have the right of way either!

Wednesday, we went to two different IBM offices to put on productions for parents and children who are considering attending our camp. We explained what the camp was all about and the goals of the camp and then took the attendees through what a typical day at the camp would be like, using several skits, songs, etc. We then did our best to answer questions that they had, although, most of that discussion took place in Chinese so I don't have a clue what questions they were asking. (On a side note, I don't think I've picked up any Chinese since being here other than "hello", which only gets you so far!) The morning presentation went very well - the parents and kids were energetic and really excited about the program. Unfortunately, we outnumbered them (13 staff members, 8 in attendance), so we probalby didn't get too many new people to sign up from that one! After lunch back at the hotel, we went to a second IBM office. This time, there were about 40 people there to hear our presentation. Seeing the look on their faces when we did our skits was priceless! Most of them were in the younger elementary age, which made Jamie very excited, and we think many of them will sign up by the end of the week. At this point, about 30 students are signed up and we'd like to see that number closer to 50 by next Monday when the actual camp begins.

After that, we headed for downtown Shanghai to do a little sightseeing. We hit an open-air market which was, well, interesting. We learned that you can bargain with the shop owners to get your goods at 30-50% of the actual listed price. (Basically, if you pay full price, you've been taken for a ride.) Secondly, most of the goods that these shops are selling (shirts, jewelry, dolls, etc.) are cheap knock-offs of the real thing. Jamie and 4-5 others were considering buying some dolls and jewelry from one vendor when our Chinese guide, Flex, told them that everything here was fake, which made for a very crabby shopowner! This was also our first experience seeing people cook on the street! The most interesting thing that I saw was a deep fried small animal of some sort (either a frog or rat - I couldn't really tell). I was not bold enough to try any of these adventurous foods, but may work up the courage to do so later on. For the Americans who were sick of local cuisine, there was a Starbucks, Dairy Queen, and McDonalds in this market as well. The whole market (taking up several square blocks) was incredibly crowded, but rather clean despite the fact that I didn't see a single trash can in the place! Many people have remarked to me how dirty China was when they came here. I haven't really found that to be true (aside from seeing a guy urinate on a wall just outside of the market), although, the part of Shanghai that we are staying in is pretty modern and we haven't seen too much outside of it yet.

After that, we walked to a place called the Bund. The best way to describe it is that it's similar to downtown Manhattan, but more of it. It's right on a river (I can't remember which one off hand) and at night, all of the buildings light up which is quite is amazing. I hope to put some pictures up of this shortly.

Once our adventure at the Bund was over, we headed back for the hotel and most people went to bed! Most of us still have not recovered from the flight and once we actually sleep through the entire night, it will still probably take a while to get caught up on sleep! (That's where I'm headed right now!) There will be many more stories, I'm sure. Thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers! We'll keep you posted....