finaly a new update

Since last update many things have changed; instead of Pia, Thomas and Sebastiaan, now Barbara, Jan and Taco are teaching here. Barbara and Jan arrived yesterday, on Tuesday, Taco already on Friday last week.

Last Saturday the training for the translators started with Taco and Sebastiaan, who left yesterday and went to Weihai. The translators were very enthousiastic when we taught them how to rig the boats. they also already read the book so they knew most of the terms, which made us very hopefull and happy. but when we told them to get ready to get into they boats, it appeared that only three of the; could swim. the rest didn't want to go. great. we told them it would not be a problem and in the end we could get 4 of them with us.

Sunday we were told to come to the marina again and although Sebastiaan managed that we only had to come in the afternoon, we had some troubles waking up after a long night. that appeared to be useless, because when we got there the translators had other things to do (waiting for something) and didn't know who we had to teach instead. we decided not to wait and went back to play paintball with some of Sebastiaan's friends.

Monday morning when we got back to the marina, againg no one knew whe had to train. and off we went again. to the computer city and the older part of the city. in the afternoon the translators suddenly had time, so we went on the water, this time in optimist. when we were finished everyone had made his first rounds in an optimist.

Next day Barbara and Jan replaced Sebastiaan and again we went sailing, just as we did today. after three days of sailing everything is going very well and the translators can already sail way much better then the chinese trainers, who have already been sailing a week longer. though most of the translators are sailing very good, their english is a bit disappointing. they are volunteers for the olympics who have been given to us by the governement. this has two main disadvantages: their english is not as good as we had expected because we had not the ability to choose them ourselves and they also have many others bosses next to us, who they have to obey to as well. this means that there can be changes in the programm any time, like today when they suddenly had to attend a very important meeting of five minutes for which we had to wait an hour which was special for the camera for which the chinese wanted to show as many people as possible. for tomorow the program is not certan yet either.
some pictures: First our sponsor in Qingdao