Jun 2008

At the beginning of the week, our trip to China was looking rather bleak. The good news is that on Saturday, we boarded our plane and left for Asia! The 12 hour flight to Tokyo was rather uneventful, which was good. (Got to watch The Bucket List, which is good, but a bit of a tear-jerker.) The bad news is that it's Monday morning, and we're still in Tokyo!

We arrived here about 5:30 pm local time and found out that our connecting flight to Shanghai had been connected. I really wanted to get mad at some Northwest employee, however, everybody was smiling and had an incredibly pleasant disposition, which makes it very difficult to get mad at them! Northwest put us in a local hotel for the night, gave us food vouchers, and told us to be ready to leave at 5 am the following morning. The six of us who were going to be on this connecting flight to Shanghai went to the hotel, enjoyed a sushi buffet (my first experience with sushi and I managed to keep it all down , and headed off to bed.

At 4 am, Monday morning, Jamie and I woke up (I watched the European Championship Final in Japanese, none the less), got ready, and headed down to the lobby, only to find that our flight had been pushed back again to 10 am. After breakfast, we now found out that it was pushed back to 12 noon. I'm not really sure what is going on, and we're pretty much just stuck here at the hotel which seems just flat out wrong since this is our first time ever in Japan and I'd like to see more of it than my hotel room!

Since today was supposed to be set aside for team building, at least we can get some "work" done while stuck in Tokyo (such as trying to find snakes in the nearby forest, since there was a sign warning "Be Aware of Snakes."

One of the interesting Japanese discoveries that we've made are the toilets! They have anywhere from 6 to 12 controls on them (some for heating the seat to the right temperature, etc.)! I had no idea that a toilet could be so incredibly complex!

Hopefully, we'll get to Shanghai sometime today. I'll keep you posted!!!

For those of you who have been keeping track of our "pre-travel" adventures, we have good news... the Chinese Consulate has finally granted us our visas!!! (I guess the third time was the charm.) That means we will have them in our possession a full 48 hours before we leave. I suppose we really don't need them until we actually leave, so what's the worth in fretting over them, right? (It's a lot easier to say that knowing that we have them now!) I won't bore you (i.e. Rob) with any more entries until we actually land in Shanghai two days from now. Until then....

I feel like the last 24 hours have been quite the whirlwind. A lot of good things have happened since then and things seem to finally be falling into place. The visa applications are in Chicago and being processed. We were able to get our flight changed so that we can leave on Sunday, July 27th with the majority of the rest of our group. The good news is that it wasn't nearly as expensive as others in our group had to deal with and that IBM will be able to pick up the majority, if not all of the cost associated with that.

We're getting to the point that hikers and mountain climbers face where the summit is within sight, but they are entering the roughest terrain of their journey. I feel like everytime that we go to Target or elsewhere to pick up a few supplies, we get home and make a new list of supplies that we need that is three times longer than our previous list! Despite being in a rather large city (Shanghai has about 20 million people living in it), it's tough to know what we'll have access to, so we (actually Jamie) is trying to be prepared for every situation we might encounter. It's probably better to err on that side of things rather than not being prepared, which is more my nature.

Well, I suppose I'd better stop procrastinating and get back to my list of things to be done before we leave. We'll write more later...

Here we are, five days until we're supposed to leave for China. For those of you who don't know our background, we volunteered to take teaching positions with Concordia Language Village to teach at English immersion camps in China for children of IBM employees. We just have one minor problem at this point... no visas!!!

We were originally supposed to be in Shanghai and Guangzhou for a total of 36 days. Because we are going to be there this amount of time, we had to apply for business visas as "guest lecturers". Unfortunately, the Chinese Consulate informed us that we had to get tourist visas and the maximum amount of time that we could be there on a tourist visa is 30 days. As a result, we had to cancel the camp in Guangzhou, which means there are at least 60 very disappointed Chinese children who will not be going to summer camp this year as a result. More stressful for us was that we now all have to change our flights.

Today, Monday, was spent trying to get that done. Unfortunately, only 2/3 of our team were able to get that done and send our visa applications off. (Not only is this process time consuming, it's rather expensive as well.) The positive of not going to Guangzhou is that now we will get to spend some time in Beijing and Xi'an taking in some of the many historical sites that China has to offer.

We're incredibly excited about this opportunity before us. The only stressful part, for now, is actually getting there. We should get our visas expedited and in our hands by Friday. We're both the type of people who like to have things planned well in advance, so to not have this done yet is really weighing on us, yet we're rather optimistic things will all work out.

We have an amazing team that has a lot of wonderful strengths. We've already been working very closely with two team members (Jessica and Venisha) to write the curriculum and themes for the entire camp (centering on different American cities and holidays/celebrations).

We're not sure how much email access we'll have in China, but we hope to keep this updated with news about our happenings in China and, hopefully, many pictures as well. (Otherwise, we'll just find random pictures of Chinese kids playing and photoshop us into them!)

Keep checking back in the future for more updates!!!