China Immersion Programme 2010, 11th May to 24th May featuring: Huangshan, Shanghai, and THE WORLD EXPO! The initial advertisement is very hot, so hot that people who just applied one or two days later might not get the place! Well, to be counted as one of the 33 lucky ones chosen to come to this amazing trip, I felt... nothing special then. But if you ask me now, I would say: I'm extremely glad that I went for the trip, and felt just special, just so nice to be in the company of 32 other good fellow Science faculty friends! And also 5 staffs (adults): Prof Liu Ruchuan&Wife, Prof Liu Xiang-Yang, Caroline, and Lee.
Together, the 38 of us met for the first time in the Singapore Changi Airport, and then flew to Shanghai Pudong Airport in a quarter day flight.
From there on, we met our tour guide, Mr.Tang and the driver who came to the Airport and picked us up on the way to...
SuZhou!
On the way to there, I've moved around and talked to the strangers there as much as possible so that they are no longer strangers as soon as possible, and give, I meant really gave the effort to remember and memorize everyone's name. Well, after such a long journey, and still another long trip on the bus, it is almost inevitable that most of the people in the bus slept. We have about 50+ seats for 40 of us (including the driver and guide) and some of us took some liberty of taking 2 or more seats (me?). Anyway, it was clear to me at first, that there are groups of people forming, those who sat together knew each other before this trip and therefore forming small groups of like-people. There are those who are totally new to the whole group and tries to befriend the people beside them too.
As for me.... I knew Chee Kong, Wei Juan, Ivan, Ronald, Benz, Clement, and that's about it... some of the others know me, cause I formed a facebook group for our trip before the trip!
As such, the first person who replied to me in the group, Lu Chen, is to be my room-mate and buddy for the whole duration of the trip.Anyway if you're too busy looking at the pictures, you can appreciate that it is totally unnecessary to bring a camera to such a trip. Cause everyone else brought it! Ok, you got to make sure that not everyone has such a mindset....and do bring your own camera if possible, it is unfair to leave all the hard work (of taking pictures and uploading to facebook) for them! Well, for my case, I forgot to bring.
Well, anyway look at our first hotel to stay in!
Hua Hua in the photo!
Si Min and Xin Jie in front of a big screen TV!
It was all so ancient China looking style... and the atmosphere..... I got to tell you I'm so conditioned to the notion that cold air=aircon air=clean air, that I initially mistook the cold air in China to be quite clean. It really makes me feel like staying there for a long long time..... (Maybe I'll migrate there)
And the first dinner there...(all the meals are covered: included in the budget) Well, I can feel happy every single meal, every single one.... but not too happy as there are a lot of wasted food left.... not everyone has my appetite for food. Well, on my table I did my best (along with Benz).
Benz, me and Ivan looking at my food frenzy.
This dinner way overcompensate for the initial small lunch we had on the plane.
That lunch was 1/4 or 1/8 of my dinner.
Of course, after that I can't stand properly and was a bit drunken. That's when they wanted to go out to SuZhou and travel and look around the place and take pictures... etc... I was asked by Lu Chen to go (first of many times) but at last, my "prefer to stay at home/hotelness won over, and I just surf the TV channel there (Over 50 channels all dubbed in Chinese, even the English series!). I was watching the 3 Kingdoms that Ruby Lin was supposed to play a character in. There was Liu Bei and Chao Chao, apparently, it was still far from her scene, just that I didn't know then and kept on pursuing the 2 episodes per day whenever I can in the hotel. (It turns out that the episodes that she appeared in came out only after the trip.)
So I missed out on these beautiful sceneries:
Wow, these are much much more beautiful than many of the other things we see in the whole trip. Well, that's it for day 1, for day 2, I'll have to make another post it is getting too long here.
Thanks to Wei Juan, Xin Jie and Ronald for their photos!
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