I've got some catching up to do...

Sorry for the wait...get ready for a loooooooooooong one....

So, when I last left you, I was just an international bigmouth. Now, I'm an international bigmouth who has climbed the Great Wall of China!!! Ooohhh....aaaaahhhhh. But, no use getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning. If I repeat a day, I apologize...but right now the computer won't let me view the blog, just enter new ones and I can't remember if I wrote about Sunday or not. So here it is:

Sunday, June 3: We woke up after getting a total of 4 hours sleep since we were up all night singing the many songs we thought they should have had at karoke. We had a blast and thought we were pretty cool. So we woke up, reluctantly, and got ready. Now, there are pretty much only two things I will wake up at ridiculous hours to do: #1. travel to someplace that's not North Dakota and #2. shopping. And shop we did. (Yes, I am using sentence fragments....so any grammar junkie will just have to live with it...*coughVICTORIAcough* :) Carlson, Elizabeth, a student from USST, and I went to Yu Gardens to tackle gifts we had to get for people. Interesting tidbit: on most English maps, it is called Yu Yuan Gardens...however, 'yuan' in Chinese means 'garden' so really it's like saying Yu Gardens Gardens. As we were shopping, we heard music coming from the street. We looked over and there was a parade rounding the corner. They had people playing instruments and two very long dragons like you see in pictures of parades. We asked the Chinese girl who was with us what it was all about. She had no clue. So we just saw some random parade. It was interesting and I took a couple pictures. We walked to Nanjing Road. Elizabeth and I broke down...so we went to a Pizza Hut and got some stuffed crust pizza. Man...it was delicious. We were having cheese withdrawals. In my book, Pizza Hut is okay, but I refuse to go to a McDonalds here. A girl has to have SOME boundaries. We went into a KFC in Beijing, but they didn't have biscuits...so I didn't eat there either. We walked around a bit more, went to a book store where I bought some Chinese books for Shanna's friend's little boy, walked to the Bund, hung out there for a while, then caught the bus back home. I can't really remember what we did that night, but it was probably something along the lines of: hung out in the room, played cards, ate at our restaurant, watched a movie, or any variation of the above.

Monday, June 4: We woke up, got ready, and took the bus to the Bund. Then we walked around for a bit trying to find Deloitte's offices. Deloitte, Touche, and Tohmatsu is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms. I know many UND alum who work there, so I was able to get in contact with someone they knew and visited the firm over in Shanghai. Their meeting room was up in the 30th floor of a building, so it had some pretty commanding views. Elizabeth and I met with Wilfred Cheung. He is a manager at Deloitte. He was born in Hong Kong and moved back and forth from there to the US several times. He got a degree from a university in Texas (don't remember which one) and started out with Arthur Anderson in LA. We all know how that went, so a year or so later, the firm went kaput and he joined Deloitte in LA, then PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong, and finally Deloitte in Shanghai. He showed us around the office. They have about 7 floors in one prominant building and are hiring more people. I asked him about the work load in China versus US. In China, everything falls on the calendar year, so the books close every December 31 and annual reports are due on April 30th. No extensions. So their busy season is at a whole new level compared to the US. And it's no picnic in the US. Very interesting information. Also, I asked him if I were to transfer to the Shanghai office, would I have to learn Chinese? He said it was no problem, people either speak only English or only Chinese and many people can speak both, so any level was okay. He gave us both a set of chopsticks with Deloitte engraved on them as a gift for visiting. It was definitely informative and interesting. We took the bus back home and again did some variation of the above hang out, eat, play cards, explore, etc...

Tuesday, June 5: We got ready and took the bus to the Bund. As you can tell, Bus 33 is our friend. We take it almost every day. One end of the line is the Lotus Center, which is a great big market (think Chinese K-mart) which is about a 10 minute walk from our hotel and a 45 minute bus ride to reach the Bund. Then we took a cab to Xintiandi. This is the international part of town. Elizabeth and I met with Grant (one of the guys from the Central Michigan group) and his girlfriend's brother Robert to have lunch. We were going to try to meet up with the whole CMU group before they left, but it didn't work out and Grant was the only one who stayed after the program. We ate at Wagas which had really great pasta and smoothies. After lunch, they were going to pick up some glasses they had made, so we went with them. Robert's parents are actually living in Xintiandi. His dad works for GM and got sent here with his mom. They live in a high rise apartment with a great view. Their apartment is paid for, but they said it would be about $6000 USD per month to rent!! So we went with Grant, Robert, and Robert's mom to the eyeglasses place. I was very tempted to buy a pair for myself. To get "designer" frames with prescription lenses is less than $30. At these prices, you can see why I have no trouble spending money.... After that we took the subway back to their apartment. We also met Grant's girlfriend and her dad. We watched 'The Game' on an illegal DVD, then took the bus back to campus. We had office hours for 3 hours...one guy showed up and asked a few questions, but mostly we just checked email and facebook and whatnot. Why can't all work be this easy?

Well, it's almost 11pm. At 11 they will kick me out and lock the doors so I guess I will wrap this up. More to come.