first day of "hard" working

Saturday 7 july:

Dear friends and family,

Today we had our real first working day! This morning at 9.00am one of the translators picked us up at the hotel with a taxi, to go to the marina.

When we arrived at the marina, we started immediately with training the translators.

It seemed that they studied their booklet well, because they allready new all the parts of the opti! We explained them the basics of the sailing. Afterwards we had a look at the ribs (motorboats) if they where ok, but they where sooooo dirty!

Together with mister Mu (local trainer), we had lunch in one of the hotels of the marina, it was very good: we ate dumplings (the best) ,chicken in sweet and sour sauce, seemushrooms (read: seeweed), fried fish in a kind of hard pancake, etc.

After lunch we were forced to rest together with mister Mu and during the rest we could persuade him to clean the ribs.

Because the ribs where so dirty. Apparently the chinese people don't know the word maintenance.

We were a real attraction all day long for all the locals, there were lots of pictures taken of us (paparazzi!!!).

For our daily transport to the marina they were so kind to offer us two lovely and really estonishing bicycles!! The trip to the marina by bike takes about an half an hour up hill towards our hotel. After our tour de france with arrival in Rizhao with at least three hills of out of categorie we took a dive in our pool. cool pool but strangely not deep at all. I guess for the chinese it is already deep enough. Note for Xiamen we also have a pool (indoor) with palm trees (plastic).

Tomorrow we will continue the cleaning of the ribs.W e are still waiting for the arrival of the optimists from nocsp. Today we had one opti of the marina where we could work with, and trained the translators with it, but tomorrow we definitly need some more boats!

Tomorrow we will also have a ceremony.

greetings from

Pia and Thomas

well arrived in Rizhao

dear friends and family,

we are well arrived in Rizhao, after a 3 hours trip by car. Vicky accompanied us.
We are staying in a very, very nice hotel with a swimmingpool, a sauna, a resting room...
The rooms are very nice, though smaller than our rooms in Qingdao but they are more luxurious.
For the first time of our trip in China we had a genuine chinese dinner with the general manager of Rizhao marina (it's a woman) and the local trainer of Rizhao.Our translators are not yet used to translate so it's quite difficult in understanding them.
The dinner was a real adventure: we ate lot's of things we don't want to know and some sheep bones, dumplings (very good), octopussies, noodles (very good), vegetable balls, and off course jellyfishes (horrible!!!). But we are happy having eaten these things.
As the chinese dinner culture subscribes there where a lot of toasts which we had to drink bottom up (ad fundum).

According to not having a night life in Rizhao, we bought some DVDs in Qingdao to amuse ourself here.
Tomorrow we start at 8.30am to train the translators and the volunteers.
The Rizhao marina is very nice, as well as the city, but it's totally different to Qingdao. For instance we are the only foreigners here so everybody sees us as an attraction!

greetings,

Pia and Thomas