Trip to China!

More about Saturday - I am somewhat forgetful!!!

2008-11-02T18:40:00.001-08:00

Oops – when I was writing my post for Saturday, I asked my mom what else we did that day (I wrote it on Sunday). Neither of us could remember at the time – you know how that goes. But, I now remember that I forgot three very important things that we did – it is funny how as soon as you stop trying to remember, it all comes back to you.

Before we went to lunch, and after the museum, we went to a silk rug making store. They have women working on different rugs in the store we went to, but generally the rugs are made by women out in the country. There are three different grades of rugs – silk and cotton (light traffic), silk on silk (heavy traffic) and another silk on silk that is for wall hangings. The difference between the three types is that the silk on cotton rugs only have 300 knots per square foot, while the silk on silk rugs have 625 knots per square foot, and the wall hangings have 1700 knots per square foot. It was pretty amazing to compare the work that these ladies were doing to the needlework that Mom does – I know how long some of her projects take and these rugs were far harder work. I forget the exact figures, but I know that some of the rug projects (e.g., the larger wall hangings) could take one person a couple of years to complete. That is working 4 – 5 hours a day for two years. I don’t know how a person keeps motivated, or how they read the patterns.

And after we went to the Yuyuan Garden, we went to a market to do some shopping – what an adventure that was. There were people everywhere – we followed Jay and Steven through the market to a silk shop – where they grew the silk worms, harvested their cocoons, and then used the silk for making cloth or comforters. \

I guess that silk worms sometimes cocoon together (coziness factor I guess) – and those cocoons are not good for making silk thread, because the strands are all tangled up. So single cocoons are used for making silk thread (it takes 8 cocoons to make one strand of thread), and double cocoons are stretched out to make duvets (it is quite a process to stretch them out). Lots of people bought the duvets to bring home – I will be curious to know how they compare to down duvets!

After the silk shop, we had free time to shop in the bazaar. It is an experience that is hard to describe. I did some serious shopping – buying a beautiful tea set that I really didn’t need, a purse that I really did need, and a few other things that were complete impulse buys. I got many comments on the new purse – which was kind of nice. We were given two hours to shop – and honestly, after an hour I was done. I got a coffee at Starbucks (31 Yuan or $ 6.20 Canadian) and bought a shirt for my barista at Starbucks at home. She will love it.

So, those are the things that I forgot on the November 1st day – sorry for all the confusion!

Sunday November 2nd

2008-11-02T14:50:00.000-08:00

Today is our final day together as a group – and that makes me sad. As I sit here and write this tonight, we are all winding down for the night – some of us will be heading back to Canada tomorrow and 13 members of the delegation will be staying in China for the post-delegation extension.

Today we got up early and went to the Bund – the waterfront. We got to see that on one side are the heritage buildings, and on the other side of the river are the giant skyscrapers and high rises all built in the last 18 years. It is pretty impressive to see how quickly development can happen – but I personally liked the heritage buildings better.

There was a little tea house on the Bund, and most of us joined them at nine a.m. for a tea ceremony. I don’t think they were used to having such a big group – but it was fun. I learned the difference between green tea, oolong tea, and black tea (green tea is unfermented, oolong is half fermented, and black tea is fully fermented), and got to try several different kinds of tea. My friend Mary came to mind when I was at the tea house – I am bringing her home tea so that she can experience a little bit of China as well.

The highlight of my trip came after we were at the Bund. We visited a neighborhood in Shanghai and had lunch with a Chinese family. It was amazing. First we went to their Senior’s Centre and watched the Granny Chorus – they are between the ages of 71 and 87 and were very interesting to watch. The first group of ladies danced for us in very colorful costumes, followed by the group singing us “The more we get together” in English. They asked us to sing a song, so we sang a portion of the national anthem and then “If you are happy and you know it”. I saw some tears around the room as we finished.

Then we were separated into groups of 8 to go to our lunches. Mr. Ming was the father in our family, and he and his wife are both retired. They live with their son, his wife, and their grandson in a three bedroom, two bathroom condo on the 23rd floor of their building. We were welcomed into their homes with open arms. The meal was fantastic – I think Mr. Ming’s wife cooked about 15 different things for us – my favorite was a spicy chicken dish with peanuts and chilies. Mr. Ming also worked very hard to teach us a little bit of Shanghainese – some of us weren’t such good students (I tried to remember the words, but he spoke so quickly!!!).

After our wonderful lunch, the guides took us to a Chinese Farmer’s market – which was an eye opener for sure. It was a street market, so there were times where scooters were coming through the market like it was an open road. There were animals and body parts that we would never see at home (some cool, some gross), and at the end of the market were live animals (ducks, chickens and pigeons) for people to take home to butcher.

I think the most interesting thing about the market was the fact that meat is just put on the display table for people to buy. Not wrapped, not refrigerated – this may seem unsanitary to us, but it works for the Chinese people. And we noticed that there wasn’t much waste either – pig’s ears and feet are sold here and used in everyday cooking.

We had a few free hours after the market, and I think that people were doing last minute shopping and wandering around Shanghai. I, however, was not. I was napping. In the last day, my feet have swelled up to twice their size – which isn’t making me feel so good. But I wasn’t going to let it stop me from joining everyone for our farewell banquet at 6 p.m.

What an amazing meal and visit that was. Everyone looked beautiful and we had dinner in a hotel on the Bund. They played English music (who would have thought you would listen to Sarah McLaughlin in China), fed us wine (Mom had three glasses) and we got to spend our final evening together (lots of pictures were taken, including a video by Sarah Sark. She put her camera on the lazy susan and twirled the lazy susan around – everyone at her table was laughing about it.

As we said our final goodbyes to the people going on to the extension, we made sure that we were able to keep in touch. Linda Rammage got everyone’s email addresses and will be sending them to us. I am excited to have made so many new professional colleagues as well as so many new friends.

Saturday November 1

2008-11-02T05:52:00.001-08:00

Saturday November 1, 2008

Today was another tiring, amazing and fulfilling day. There are so many things to describe – I don’t even really know where to start! We started our day at the Shanghai Museum – it was opened in 1996 and had four floors of everything you could ever imagine related to Chinese history.

The top floor was minority costumes, furniture from way back when and currency (I didn’t check out the currency section), and the best section in my opinion was the ceramics and pottery section on the second floor. I took hundreds of pictures (again!) and although I didn’t think I was a museum person, I enjoyed the two hours that I spent there.

There was a wonderful gift shop where mom and I got some more souvenir shopping done – and the prices were amazing. Books for Ryan, magnets for me – I am amazed at how little it all cost. After the museum, we all hopped back on the bus to go to our Dim Sum lunch.

Dim Sum in China is much different than it is at home. Here food was still served on the lazy susan in the middle of the table. However, the difference was that many of the dishes were “finger” foods to be picked up with your chopsticks, rather than dishes to be scooped with a spoon. I am not sure if there were other differences, but that was the main one that I noticed.

After lunch we went to the Yuyuan Garden – what an amazing place! Steven shared with us all sorts of history about it - most of which I heard but can’t remember in the right order to put on paper here. But there were many photo opportunities – I was able to get a few pictures of mom and I that I will be printing out for friends and family.

Dinner was on our own last night – Harold, Kathy, Louise, Connie, Mom and I went to the Hong Kong restaurant recommended by Jei. It was a quick walk there, but on the way, Louise engaged one of the street vendors, which was a bit of a humourous situation. He kept chatting with her, and he jokingly said he would wait for us outside the restaurant. He was gone when we came out, but it gave us all a good laugh.

Our dinner was nothing short of excellent (as all of our meals have been on this trip). However, ordering it and eating it was a bit of a challenge. Yes, they had English menus. No, that didn’t really help us much when it came to ordering. All of the foods had a number, and you basically checked off on the order form the items that you wanted. Harold and I were feeling exotic so we ordered duck tongue and pigeon – it turns out Harold is much more adventurous than I am – he ended up eating most of the exotic foods.

After our dinner we took a walk along the shopping street behind our hotel. The street was completely lit up at 9 p.m. and we got to do some toy shopping for my nephews. There were still deals to be had (six big containers of gum for $ 4.00), but the prices were a little more like I had expected in regular stores in China.

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

First of all, Happy Halloween to all at home! I am currently sitting on the bus composing the first part of this post for my blog – hopefully my battery power will last throughout the whole day. Today we are off to the Little Tiger Kindergarten for the morning – the guests are off to the Jade Buddha Temple this morning.

We were scheduled to observe the children at the Little Tiger Kindergarten, but there was a bit of a glitch – the children and their parents were off on an autumn field trip today. These outings happen on the last Friday of every month, and there was no way to reschedule the outing just because of our visit.

The Little Tiger Kindergarten has a variety of programs that serve the hearing impaired and communication impaired children in Shanghai. They run three different programs – the Rehabilitation Centre and the Outpatient Centre, which are just for children with disabilities, and the Kindergarten program, which is for both typically developing and disabled children. All three programs service children ranging in age from 2 – 6 years old.

At this point in time, there are more than 100 children participating in the Rehabilitation Centre and Kindergarten Program. The Rehabilitation Centre has nine classes of six students each – these children are all communication disabled children. The Kindergarten Program has four classes of 15 to 20 students per class (80 % typical kids, 20 % disabled children).

The Rehabilitation Centre involves group classes for the students, an hour of individual training every day, as well as significant parent training programs. One of the questions that the presenter asked us was how to speed up the process that they have going to allow them to service more kids – I personally believe that they are doing an awesome combination of services and the kids’ progress shows that.

It costs 3000 – 5000 Yuan per month to send your child here – a two worker family may make double that (so ½ your monthly income goes to educating your child). The government is not much involved in paying for these things – hopefully, that will change over time.

The Little Tiger Kindergarten is also the place where Speech-Language Pathologists receive their clinical training. It is associated with the East China University, and the University Program started a Speech-Language Pathology training program in 2005. So far they have enrolled 120 students to complete Bachelor’s degrees, and there are currently 30 students doing graduate work at the Master’s and Ph.D levels.

After discussing the Little Tiger Kindergarten in the morning, we went for another amazing lunch. We were honored to have our Chinese counterparts from Little Tiger Kindergarten and the University join us for lunch – giving us time for conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Our afternoon was spent learning about the College of Preschool Education and Special Education at the East China Normal University. Dr. Yueng presented an overview of the College, which includes three majors (Special Education, Psychology and the Future of Special Education, and Speech and Hearing Sciences). The college is the first of its kind in mainland China, and was established in 1997.

The Speech and Hearing Science major was introduced in 2004. This means that they have just graduated their first class of students with their bachelor’s degrees (17 students in the spring of 2008). Their curriculum differs from Canadian training schools in some ways (they get to take a course in Music Therapy), but they cover the same general areas of learning that we do at home. They also have started a small number of research projects as well – it will be interesting to learn more about these projects over time.

One of our delegates is a Angela Fong, who is a student completing her Master’s degree program at the University of Toronto. She did a wonderful presentation for us in the afternoon which outlined the statistics related to and set up for Speech-Language Pathology education programs in Canada. It was very informative and I know that I learned a lot about how training programs may have changed somewhat since I graduated. Thank you to Angela for that presentation!

After such a busy academic day, we were able to re-join our guests and go for supper. Another fabulous meal – and for me it was a little bit better than other meals because I got to drink a DIET COKE with my meal. They have been few and far between, which for anyone who knows me will attest, is a huge thing! We also got “ice cream” for dessert – it was good but it was definitely different than the ice cream I was used to.

The best part of the meal time I think was getting to see silk embroidery – both watching the woman doing it and looking at the finished projects all over the gallery. The prices ranged from $ 120.00 US to $ 28,000.00 US, but considering how much time went into the projects, they would have been worth every penny. I will upload many pictures of the pictures, but Yvette and Darren bought a really nice piece, as did Wendy. I wish I had brought more money with me, because I would have been bringing a small piece of art home with me too.

We took a boat tour of the Huangpu River after dinner – it was a little misty so it was sometimes hard to see the buildings. However, it was great to visit with everyone – and now here I am, back at the hotel, bidding everyone good night as I get ready to climb in. I still owe everyone posts describing Tuesday and Wednesday – I will get to them as soon as I possibly can!

Check out the links section - it has a link to the pictures!

2008-10-30T07:00:00.001-07:00

2008-10-30T00:46:00.000-07:00

Thursday October 30, 2008

I apologize for not having Tuesday and Wednesday’s blogs completed yet – I thought that I would start fresh with today’s blog and then catch up on the other days when there is a little more time!

So far today, things have gone extremely smoothly – there is something good to be said for traveling with a tour group. Wake up call was at 6:30 so that we could have our check in luggage packed up and outside our room at seven o’clock. No need to worry about getting your luggage to the bus, to the airport, or even to the check in desk!

After that, I had enough time to have a leisurely breakfast and play a little scrabble on Facebook! We all congregated in the lobby at 8:30 (we were even somewhat early I think), and hopped on the bus.

Lixin filled us in a little bit on Shanghai – did you know that 70 % of the skyscrapers in Shanghai have been built since 1990? She says that Beijing is like a mature woman – it takes some time to fall in love with her, while Shanghai is a young woman – love at first sight!

The flight was completely uneventful – which was nice for once on this trip (lol!). People were seated alphabetically, so it gave time for conversations with new people, and sometimes, time for a nap. The food on airplanes in China is much better than at home (I think I have already said that once) – they even offer you seconds if they have extra food available.

Landing in Shanghai we found out it was a little wet and drizzly. This changed our plans for the afternoon a little bit. Originally, we were set to spend a bit of time at the Bund, which is an important tourist attraction in Shanghai. It stretches one mile along the bank of the Huangpu River. But without nice weather, we wouldn’t be able to truly appreciate it’s beauty. So instead, about 2/3 of the people went for a 50 minute reflexology foot massage, and the rest of us checked into our hotel.

We have a new cultural guide for this portion of our trip – we left Mr. Chi behind in Beijing. Our new guide, Steven, gave us a brief overview of Shanghai, and then Jei gave us more information after we dropped the rest of the group off to have their feet played with (just kidding!).

Here is what I have learned so far about Shanghai:

· 10 percent of all construction cranes are working here in Shanghai
· There are 18.5 million people living in Shanghai
· There is a natural divide in Shanghai – the Huangpu River
· Shanghai became a county 700 years ago and was a fishing village and had many rice patty farms
· In the good old days of the 19th century, getting “Shanghai’d” wasn’t such a great thing, as it essentially amounted to being kidnapped and forced to work on a ship sailing to–in most cases–Shanghai. Certain bars in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, in fact became notorious centers for the practice.
· Shanghai will be hosting the World Expo in 2010 – please see the link to the right of this entry for more information. It looks pretty cool!

Tonight we are off for dinner and then to see an acrobatics show - I will write more after that and let everyone know when pictures are uploaded (it's halfway done now - 215 pictures for you all to see)!

Monday October 27th

2008-10-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

After 10 hours of the deadest sleep that a human being could experience, I woke up to begin our ambassadorship program. I noticed a few differences between our hotel room and a North American hotel room - small things like the luxury items that they provide - in Canada we get shoe shine kits and things like that - here we get toothbrushes, combs and Q-tips. I am not sure which choices are better, but I know I used the items in this hotel more often than I use the ones in hotels at home.

We began the day with a wonderful breakfast - the hotel did a wonderful job of providing a combination of western and chinese cuisine (spring rolls and hash browns all on one plate). After breakfast, we spent a couple hours being briefed about all the important things to know about China (see the list below) - and then we were off on our first adventure of the day.

Things that are important to know about China:

- China is the third largest country in the world, only after Russia and Canada.

- China's population is 1.3 billion, with 16 million newborns annually; 7.5 percent of the population is over the age of 65.

- China covers four time zones. However, they all follow Beijing time; it is the only official time throughout the country.

- China's written language is standardized all over the country, but there are about 150 different spoken dialects (Mandarin is the official language)

- in written language there are 40,000 pictographic square characters in total, of which 10,000 are in current use and 3,000 in very common use.

- the majority of women's toilets in China are basically porcelain urinals in the floor - Western style toilets are not super easy to find.

Our guide Lixin informed us that one of the goals of our visit was to try several different kinds of authentic Chinese food. Our first meal was a wonderful lunch at the Tong Fulin Restaurant - the food tended to be more spicy and was indicative of a more traditional Beijing fare. The serving style in China is so good - plates of food are placed in the middle of the table on a lazy susan and you just serve yourself the foods that you want. Canadian restaurants should take lessons from this style of serving (less wait, more choices).

The professional delegates spent the afternoon at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology of Beijing Tongren Hospital (I didn't realize that otorhinolaryngology was so hard to type!!). There was a lot of walking from site to site (the Beijing professors wanted to show us all of their services and sites), but we got to see many different things. The first place we stopped was the Rehabilitation Centre for young children who have newly gotten hearing aids or have gone through cochlear implant surgery. We got to observe three infants during their therapy sessions (one child had only had his hearing aids for two weeks).

Important information to know about disabilities in China:

- they have fewer than 500 audiologists and fewer than 200 SLP's.
- when clients have voice surgery (e.g., for vocal nodules), there is no one to follow up with therapy post-surgery (e.g., no SLP to provide voice therapy).
- due to the lack of SLP's, Chinese practioners have trained other people to do what we as SLP's do in North America.
- there are 27.80 million hearing impaired people in China - 20.04 million have only hearing impairment to deal with, the rest have multiple disabilities.
- audiologists often take their medical training first, and then take their audiological training after, giving them a great wealth of knowledge when they provide services to clients.

An ENT from the Tongren Hospital did a wonderful presentation about statistics related to hearing impairment; and Linda Mazzucco Peter provided an overview of the assistive technology programs available within Ontario.

After our professional visit to Tongren Hospital, we had a free evening available to us. However, the majority of people attended The Legend of Kung Fu at the Red Theater. It was amazing. There were children in the show as young as six, and they appeared as well trained as the adult Kung Fu artists.

The Legend of Kung Fu focuses on a young boy found wondering outside an ancient temple somewhere in China. He dreams of becoming a Kung Fu master. But things don’t go according to plan. The young monk called Chun Yi (the pure one) has to overcome many difficulties and temptations before he conquers and finally gets his sacred goal of enlightenment.

After the show, we headed back to the hotel, where I fell into bed again; looking forward to a good night's sleep before heading out on a professional visit again.

What an amazing few days!

2008-10-28T02:10:00.000-07:00

I first have to apologize for the tardiness of my post - there has just been so much going on and it has taken me a few days to recover from the flights and such! But I hope that this evening I will be able to fill everyone in on our journey and our time in Beijing so far.

Let's start at the beginning of our journey - last time I wrote I wasn't even in Vancouver. The trip from Grande Prairie to Vancouver was uneventful, as was checking in for our flight to Hong Kong on Friday October 24th. Mom and I eagerly waited at the airport - we were part of the smaller group flying out on the 2:55 a.m. flight on Saturday morning. I was able to sleep on the hour flight (we traveled 10,480 kms in an expected time of 13 hours and 44 minutes) but there was nothing comfortable about it.

Unfortunately, there were significant head winds impacting on our flight, and as a result, the flight took at least an hour longer than expected. This meant that the nine of us missed our flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. Linda Rammage was with us, so that set my mind at ease a little bit!

Canadian Airlines should take some lessons from Cathay Pacific - they were very accommodating after we missed our connecting flight. We were re-booked onto a 3:00 p.m. flight (we got into Hong Kong around 9 a.m.), and they gave us complimentary hotel room and lunch vouchers for our stay. Now, we didn't spend a great deal of time in the hotel rooms, but after a 14 or 15 hour flight, it was nice to be able to just sit down and relax, wash my face, and take a breather!

So, after a little shopping in the airport, a beautiful buffet lunch and time getting to know a few other delegates, we all got on the plane for Beijing. That flight was about three hours long (nothing compared to the Vancouver-Hong Kong flight), and finally, we arrived in Beijing!!

That was not the whole adventure, however! When we arrived, we made it through customs (which was quite an easy process, actually), and went down to the arrivals level to pick up our luggage. When we came to the baggage carousel, there appeared to be a few too many bags to account for the nine of us. This was quite accurate - in fact four of us had lost our luggage in transit between Vancouver and Beijing!

It was a long and drawn out process to fill out the documentation for the four of us who had lost our bags. Describing the type of luggage we had (Green 22 stands for a Green pull type suitcase of any size - just in case you were wondering!), ensuring that the names and addresses were correct - all of that took another 45 minutes at the Beijing airport!

Thank goodness Yan Jixin was waiting for us when we finally exited the airport. She was very patient, and when we found her she whisked us into the bus to take us to the hotel. We arrived at the hotel (Five star - it's a beautiful place), got settled in and had a bite to eat, and then it was off to bed. The only benefit of not having arrived on time was that we didn't have to try to stay awake during the afternoon - as soon as we got to our rooms we were able to fall asleep.

And fall asleep I did!

1 flight down, 3 more to go!

2008-10-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

Good afternoon all!

It is currently 5:26 on Thursday afternoon - and I have begun my journey to meet up with other delegates for this wonderful trip to China. I should tell everyone a little bit about myself before I start rambling on about much else.

I have lived in Grande Prairie, Alberta for the last seven years. I am a private practitioner working within the school systems; focusing mostly on serving the preschool to Grade 3 population. I also have private clients who receive funding for services at their home; the majority of those clients have autism and working with those clients is my favorite part of my job.

For me, one of the most exciting parts of this trip is that I was able to invite my mother, Judy, to join me for such a wonderful experience. I will be meeting up with her in Vancouver tonight, and we will spend the day shopping and hanging out tomorrow before we get started on the long flight to Hong Kong and then on to Beijing!

Who knew that planes left the Vancouver airport at 2:55 in the morning? Definitely not me. I have travelled before, but nowhere quite as far away as this. I will be ok though, because I can sleep on the plane - hopefully the jet lag won't be too bad for me!

Welcome to my blog!

2008-10-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

First, I would like to say hello to everyone that is following this blog.... I will be the first to admit that I am not a Pulitzer prize winning writer. What I am, however, is someone who plans to journal and scrapbook every minute of this trip.... so why not share my journal with fellow Canadians at home!

I hope you enjoy the information, pictures and any other things that I am able to post - and please comment and ask questions at any point. I hope there are other delegation members who are willing to share their experiences as well. I look forward to hearing from others joining me in our People to People delegation as well as from people at home!

Nicole