On April 1st at 8:00pm, Nathan and I got on a train to Shanghai. We got the soft sleeper so we got to sleep on a soft matress and had a lot of room. The train ride wasn’t that bad for comfort and it provided for an interesting ride. There were two other people in our cabin area. They were really helpful and even were telling us where to go and not to go in Shanghai. After the train arived in Shanghai we got to the subway and rode to the Peace Hotel to meet Nathan’s parents. From there we went to the hotel they had been staying at. We had breakfast in their hotel. The food was all really really good. It was a mix of Chinese and western styled breakfast. I think more western styled than Chinese. It was a buffet so I ate a lot of breakfast. I had eggs, sausage, potatoes, some Chinese vegetables, a couple slices of toast, a bowl of cereal, and some orange juice. I was set till supper after that!

After breakfast was our time to see the city. The first thing we ended up not really doing a lot during the two days we were there but it was still enough for me. The first thing we went to see was the MAGLEV train. It is a really really fast train that levitates off the ground using magnets. Since it isn’t touching the ground there is no friction. The top speed we travelled at was 453kph . All the vehicles on the road near the track looked like they were standing still. Too bad the ride only lasts like 10 minutes. The seating inside the train felt very much like an airplane. After the train ride we walked around on Nanjing Road. We ate at pizza hut for supper. It tasted like regular pizza hut but seemed like it lacked in toppings, cheese and meat. After supper we went to the tallest building in China. . . the Jinmao Tower. We went on the elevator to the top. The elevator moves very quickly. I took like 40 seconds to get to the top. At the top we got to see the whole city. Too bad the weather wasn’t that good and the pollution was blocking out view of the cityscape though. After this we went back to our hotel and went to sleep. The next morning we again went to see some sites. The only thing we saw was the bund. It was a park type walking park thing beside the river. There were a lot of people here and it wasn’t very exciting. The weather was nicer so the city looked more beautiful with better lighting. After we were done with the bund we had some McDonalds and then went to the airport for out return to Jinan.

After we got back, we arrived just in time for the F1 race. Was that good timing or what? I thought I would have missed the race.

Well, as everyone knows, it is Easter. In China however, people don’t get these days as holidays. That means that I am at work. I don’t mind though, since if I wasn’t working I would just be sitting around anyway. Yesterday was the last day that Nathan’s parents were in Jinan. So they wanted to do something in Jinan so I went with Nathan and his parents for a walk up the mountain. I thought that the walking was some good exercise. In case you are wondering, the mountain is called “qianfoshan” or å?ƒä½›å±±. That translates to 1000 Budha mountain. I brought along my camera so you can see some pictures.

For supper on Sunday we all got invited by Emma to go out for supper. It was really really good. My favorites were something like pumpkin ball things, and the lotus root things. The place we went to was really expensive looking. There were, I’d imagine 40 greeters at the door that welcome you when you arrive. Then when you are being escorted to your eating room there are more greeters every 10 feet. It was really strange and something that would cost a fortune to do in Canada.

Now today, Monday. That means back to work. I don’t know entirely what the day is going to bring but I’m sure I will get something to work on.

I thought I might as well upgrade the blog. I think you could have figured it out on your own by the different look. Hopefully you enjoy it.

In other news, Nathan’s parents are here. It has been strange having people here. I haven’t done anythng much since they have gotten here. Nathan took them out for supper yesterday. Today we went to RT-mart and bought some food. Not much though. . The only thing we bought that I don’t think we would normally buy would be some vegetables and dumplings. Dumplings were a good suggestions since they are really easy to make. All you do is put them in with some boiling water. They tasted alright, although you never knew what the middle of each dumpling was going to bring.

In news unrelated to me or China. Has anyone else been watching tv. . My favorites at the moment are Amazing Race and Survivor. I never thought I would ever say that in my lifetime. My favorite part of this season is how one team is totally dominating over the other team. I think it is hilarious that the one team is constantly losing during the elimination rounds. The one tribe only has 3 members left. Enough about that tough.. My other favorite show is Amazing Race. This season is starting off really awesome. The best team ever has got to be Rob and Amber. They are constantly going through the race in the most unorthodox fashion. They are bribing people off, getting help from the police, and stealing taxis from other teams. I never imagined that scheming and this kind of behaviour would fall into the Amazing Race. I just hope that if Rob and Amber ever do end up in last place it will be a Non-Elimination round. I’d also like to thank my brother Ben for all the hard work he has been doing in helping me to be able to enjoy all this great television

I’m sorry about the delays in updating. Last week was an interesting time. On Monday the 14th, a delegation came from Regina. There were 3 people from University of Regina, and 3 more people from the City of Regina. It was interesting to be in a meeting to be meeting the mayor of Regina in Jinan, China! I thought it was funny and laughed in my head. I uploaded some pictures from the visit. Also, to my surprise, on Tuesday afternoon, we went touring with the delegation. They visited Jinan University. I thought this was really neat. We went to the University to listen to the mayor speak for an hour about Regina to the students. After this, we left the classroom and went outside where the students got to ask questions. I thought it was really interesting the questions they were asking. The most common questions were, “what are you doing in China”, “how long have you been in China”, “what are some things that are different in China that in Regina”. They all seemed very surprised and excited to see us. Also, we got to goto a meeting between the Mayor of Regina and the president of the Jinan University. This was the first time I had been to a meeting that required the use of interpreters. I also uploaded some pictures of a model they had of the Jinan University. There was a lot of construction going on here. After this we had a really good meal but we didn’t get to eat with the delegation. We ate with some other people. It was really really good food!

After this eventful day, not a lot happend. So it has been a couple weeks of more working now. I finally decided to update since today should be a holiday. At least it is a holiday in Canada 🙂 I don’t mind working on Good Friday though. I am thinking that spring is here in Jinan for sure. The weather always seems to be quite nice out. Although there will occassionally be a cool breeze. I am enjoying the lack of snow and ice that I keep hearing about on the news and weather reports for Regina. I have uploaded some pictures of some spring flowers that just came out into bloom. I think that the trees should be leafing out soon since they look like they are budding. People in the office say that Jinan has a short spring so that means that summer is right around the corner. It should be interesting, and hot!

Not much else to talk about. Nathan is picking his parents up at the train station today. They are going to be here for the weekend. They are on a tour across China. Next weekend, Nathan and I will be going to Shanghai to visit them there. I think this should be really interesting since I have never been to Shanghai before. I will make sure to take my camera since I know there will be stuff I can take pictures of.

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This past weekend we got to go DVD shopping for the first time. I think the government is trying to crackdown on the sale of pirated dvd’s because we had to goto 3 or 4 places to finally get someone that sells them. So we finally found a store that sells them. . They had a list of dvd they had but unfortunately it was in Chinese. So the people that were helping us, Clark and his wife from the office, got one of the sales people to bring out the dvds so we could go through and pick them out by hand. The dvd’s were kind of strange though. . they said they were “HDVD”, and each DVD had 4 or 5 movies per disc. I initially thought they might be mpeg4 but it turns out they are like VCD or mpeg1. This means the quality is lower but it is still playable in a regular dvd player. I didn’t end up buying any from the market but Nathan did. For some reason mine and his computers don’t seem to like some of the discs, but other people with Chinese made drives will read them. This seems really strange. After we went shopping for dvd’s we walked back to CVIC. We stopped at RT-mart and bought some food. We then went back to Clark and Janice’s apartment there they made the food. It was really good. After that we went for a walk over by Shandong University. It was an interesting day.

Today, Sunday, I basically just sat around the apartment all day. I washed some clothes but basically just watched tv all day. It was a good relaxing day.

I just thought I’d give a little update to my adventure. I haven’t really done much in the past couple weeks so I’ll just give a quick summary. We went and bought a new pot and new frying pan for our apartment. The old ones were sort of falling apart and needed to be replaced. So we spent what would be $13 canadian for new ones. They should work out well and maybe increase our choice of foods. So far the only thing we have cooked has been noodles. Anyone is capable of making those. Just boil the water add the noodles and cook them. The same time we bought the new cooking instruments we also bought some cheese slices, margarine, and some ham. So I expect for us to be able to make some sandwichs maybe. . who knows. Then today, Lily from work led us at lunch time just down the street 30 seconds and we bought some eggs. I’m not sure the prices in Canada but we bought 10 eggs for $0.50 Canadian or 3.5 yuan. I’ve never really shopped before but there were all sorts of eggs. Nathan didn’t want to stray from the normal white eggs, but there were also brown eggs. The brown ones seemed look larger than the white ones. It doesn’t matter what the outside looks like its whats in the middle that counts. Well I better get back to work.

Not much new recently. I just bought a camera so you can all expect to see more pictures coming from me. I will upload them to the gallery. The link is found on the the side of the page near the top. I will take pictures of all sorts of things just so that you can see what I’m talking about when I try to describe it over here. I uploaded some pictures from the Lantern Festival that was on Wednesday. I ended up having to send a video to regina and the upload was really slow. Since we had to wait for the upload to finish to be able to confirm that someone in regina received it we had to wait. It was going to take 3 hours or so, so Emma said that we could go and enjoy the festival. Lily took us to a really cool restaurant. She said something like it is a “fast food” chain in Taiwan. I thought the food there was really really good. Lily ordered some of the best food I have ate in China so far. There were some different types of dumplings. The one dumplings tasted like peanut butter in the middle and were in a soup type of stuff. I really enjoyed them. There was also some other food that was all really good. I was going to take pictures of everything but didn’t think of it till the food was almost all gone. After we finished eating we went to a big park in the downtown region of Jinan. I think its called Silverplaza or something. I am not quite sure. Its a huge park area. Underneath the ground at the park is a huge shopping mall. Since it is the Lantern Festival there were so many people here. I imagined that there would almost be as many people in this area as there are in all of Saskatchewan. It was that full!! It was also funny, people would be saying “hello” and I would say hello back. One person bumped into Nathan (he thinks for sure on purpose) and said “I’m so sorry”. It was really funny. I wanted to take a picture to show the huge number of people but I wasn’t able to pull my camera out in the crowd to get a good shot. I did end up taking some pictures of some boats in the moat type thing. As well as a picture of a huge statue thing that represents a spring, I believe. After we were done at the festival getting a taxi was really fun as well. It probably took us 15 minutes to get a taxi. Overall it was a really fun night. I also took some videos using the camera but they didn’t turn out that awesome. Since we were in a car moving at night they don’t really show a lot. You can find them at http://www.demyen.ca/china/video/ The AVI files are the better encoded ones so it would probably be better to get those. Just right click on the file and save it to your computer. That usually works best. Well it looks like the end of holidays and festivals for a while now. At least until May, then another long week off work. I’ll keep trying to update often although I prefer to update when I have interesting stuff to say.

Well after a week off of work for the Spring Festival holiday I returned to work on Wednesday. It seems strange to take time off work to celebrate a holiday I don’t normally celebrate. I guess it’ll come back to haunt me though. I doubt they celebrate easter so I imagine I’ll be working on good friday and easter monday. Work has been interesting. I haven’t really done a lot of work so far. Mainly it has been checking over documents to make sure they are good. This task is very reminiscent of proof reading. Something I didn’t do all that much back in school. I haven’t done anything to do with computer science though. That could change though as soon as some projects get started.

The holiday was interesting. On the eve of the holiday I ate supper with some people who work in the kitchen. There was dumplings which I guess are traditional of this holiday. They also taste really good. After we ate we just sat around for a long time. They barely spoke English and I could barely speak mandarin. It was rather interesting. At midnight we went onto the roof of the CVIC building and watched fireworks. I must say I have never seen fireworks like this before. There were fireworks going off in all the directions around you. If I was blind I would probably be thinking it was a warzone and we were getting bombed. I doubt I would ever see anything like this in Canada. It’s also probably the first time a lot of people there saw anything like it as well. Since fireworks have been banned in China for a long while now. I think someone said 20 years but then someone else said over 10 years. (This was tuesday night). The next item up on our holiday was Friday. On Friday Nathan and I went with Barry, David, and Cynthia from work to goto a festival type thing at Daming Lake. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of going to the exhibition but a lot less rides and a lot more of vendors. We went on the bumper cars, the ferris wheel, the flipping thing, and the roller coaster. All of them felt safe and were a lot of fun. Although I think I might have been too big for the rollercoaster because the looping made me hit my face on the side above the padding. It didn’t hurt and I was ok though, so don’t worry. After the rides we went walking along the lake festival. There were a lot of food vendors and people selling all sorts of stuff. Many of them are traditional chinese items. There was a lot of other stuff going on as well. Some magic shows. some performances, some rides in a carriage thing, and some weird games. We missed it but there was cock fighting. I am pretty sure that kind of thing is illegal in most places in the world but I guess its not in China. The only food I ate at this place was some sugar coated fruit on a stick, some cotton candy, and some lamb on a stick. It was all tastey and alright. After we were done walking around we went out for lunch. For lunch we had hotpot. This is where everyone sits around the table and puts the food into the pot in the middle to cook. There was a lot of food and I really liked it. The other time I had hotpot it was each person having their own pot; this time it was one big pot split into two. I ended up sitting on the spicy side of the pot. It was good but after a while my mouth felt like it was burning from the amount of pepper I was eating. After we ate lunch we went to Karaoke. This is quite a bit different from Canada karaoke. Here there are smaller rooms designed from like 10 people. Each group gets the room to sing in. I thought it was a lot of fun but the selection was pretty terrible. We decided to switch locations after about an hour because the service wasn’t very good. So we went to a better location and it was really nice. I didn’t really like singing the songs they had but I thought I better keep singing because they seem to think I’m good. Now, I’m not sure if they are saying that because they have never heard a white person sing in person before or maybe they were being nice. I also pretended to sing the Mandarin songs. I would sing all the characters I knew and it was funny for me. Some songs I might get to sing like 10 words. The only english songs they seemed to have were stupid boybands and celion dion. So I ended up singing some backstreet boys, and my heart will go on. I was trying not to laugh when I sang that last one. I gave it my best celion dion voice. After we finished Karaoke, we went for barbque. This was really really good. It is basically meat on a stick for the whole meal. We ended up eating a lot of lamb and . . maybe called cartildge .. and only 1 stick of beef. The beef is more expensive. For a drink there was beer. It was a different brand than the Tsingtao but it tastes very similar. I would definitely recommend “barbeque” coming to regina. Although, I’m sure the price would be increased dramatically. The next day now, Saturday, Cynthia and Barry are going to take us out for pizza. We went to a small restaurant to get the pizza because it would be cheaper and more convenient thatn Pizza hut. They were really slow and kept making excuses why the food was being delayed. Oh well it was really good tasting and I enjoyed it. After the food we hit the streets and bought ourselves some fireworks. They were really fun to play with. My favorites were the high exploding loud ones. We lit them off on a not so busy side street. Another one of my favorites were the firecrackers. They were extremely loud. I’m sure some people from Canada would be mistaking them for gun fire.

That was pretty much the end of my outings on this holiday though. After that I spent the most of my time sitting around the apartment relaxing, watching tv. For food I ate mostly instant noodles. Although on Tuesday, I went to the cafeteria and got some food. That was really interesting. They had a written menu I got to choose from to pick what to eat. . I wasn’t able to make out anything. I am able to read some characters that are written perfect but this was like reading someones handwriting in English. I ended up going with the one thing I knew, mi fan. So I got some rice and then they made us some other dishes. I think I would like to call them surprise dishes. They ended up being not bad. The one that I remember was tomatoes and eggs. I really liked this one.

On Wednesday I installed the Chinese language thing so I can type the characters on my keyboard. This is really cool. You better watch out though. I might just send you a message on MSN in chinese next time.

I just thought I better give an update. It is actually past the two week mark but its still close enough so this is my Second Week Update. My second week here went very smoothly. I haven’t really done much work at work yet. I will occasionally be helping with the English translation of documents and as well I also have the English training to do with my co-workers. Overall though its isn’t very busy. I am also spending some time trying to learn how to read and speak Mandarin. I’d have to say my progress is going quite well. Mainly in part to the Mandarin I learnt in elementary school. Some people seem surprised when I can partially tell what they are talking about.

Now onto the food. During the last week was what can basically be called the pre-spring festival day. On this day, Tuesday, there was a whole lot of fireworks and firecrackers going off. Also there is some tradition, or something like that, that says you have to eat dumplings. So for supper Barry, and David from the office took us for some dumplings. They were really good and I very muchly enjoyed them. We ordered the dumplings and the other dishes at the company eating hall. On Wednesday for supper, we got invited to supper by Lily. We ate a whole bunch of different things with one of her friends, Carol, from school. They picked out a bunch of really good food. My favorites were the Lotus vegetable things and also the celery. I really like celery. To drink we had TsingTao(sp) beer. It seems to be the most popular brand over here. We got the food in a restaurant a small walk away. Then on Thusday, we got invited by Kevin and Nancy for roast duck. This was again a really really good. I think it tasted somewhere between chicken and turkey. I would definitely recommend this to anyone. Again, we drank the TsingTao beer. This time a little bit more though. I’m going to say around 2 bottles. Nowhere on the bottle does it mention the alcohol percentage, and when I ask anyone who is with us that speaks Chinese they don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. So I’d have to say its just regular beer. We ate it in a restaurant about 15minutes away by taxi. At all the meals there seems to be a lot more food than all the people could eat. I’m always ending up way overfull after I’m finished eating.

I know, it isn’t a week yet, but this is my first week in China Report. Don’t forget to check back later with more updates from the People’s Republic of China. I feel that my presense here will be felt. China is a strange place. The strangest things that I have noticed so far are that the traffic flows completely different and the sheer number of people. Having hardly never left Saskatchewan before, I never could have imagined how this many people could all live in the same area. When I took a walk down the street it seemed as though I must have passed more people than in all of Regina. When we took taxis places or even any vehicle for that matter I got to see how the traffic flows firsthand. In a normal place traffic generally follows rules and stays to those rules. In China, the traffic doesn’t seem to have any rules. The cars will battle for position and will not back down to anyone. They also will go against opposing traffic in order to gain position. The traffic also gets very congested but it hardly ever actually slows down. The cars will get up within inches of one another but never seem to touch. This magical force that all the drivers seem to possess is something only ever seen in movies.

Now on to the food. The food I have been eating generally has been coming from the company’s dorm’s cafeteria. The food selection so far has been reasonable and there is always plenty of food to be able to eat. Using chopsticks seems to be a rather hassle having seen the power of a fork and spoon. The food always includes some meat and vegetables. Nothing that I haven’t ever seen or eaten before.

I registered most of my electronic stuff with customs today in prepartion for my departure. My time left on this continent is growing short and I am feeling very anxious. I still feel, in my head, that I have a lot of stuff to do before I go.

Today is a good day. My passport came back with the Chinese Visa inside. That means I’ll be able to go to China in 8 days. I still have so much stuff to do before I go. I sure hope that I don’t forget anything before I go or else it could be a long while before I see it again. I think I better start making a list of things I need to bring along.

Welcome to my blog. If this goes well I might be updating this on a regular occasion. If this doesn’t work out then I won’t be . . I don’t really care all that much. It seems as though time is progressing quite nicely and China will come right away. Only 10 days left till I’m gone.