we're back and gone again

dear friends and family,

Friday 27 July

Today was our very last day in Rizhao. In the morning we had a race with all the kids. 4 groups of 10 children. We placed marks on their right arm (A1,A2...,B1,B2,...,C1,C2,...,D1,D2,...). Everything went quite good and everybody was very pleased.
Afterwards we had lunch with our chinese sponsor, Mr. Ding, The President of the marina, Mrs. Joe and some other people. It as again a typical chinese lunch with jellyfishes, seecucumbers and others.
Then we had to hurry to the hotel where we had to take our bags. Mrs Joe bought us some gifts and told us that we were expected at the marina to say goodbye to everybody. Arriving at the marina, all the kids were there to say us goodbye, we said goodbye to everybody and to all our "friends" at the marina.
When we got in the car we were very happy to go back to Qingdao and meet our collegues there.

On the trip to Qingdao we took a chinese ferry, what an experience.

Arriving in Qingdao Dirk and the others recieved us in the appartment, which was very special lighted and very nice.
Our first night back in Qingdao was a real Qingdao night!

Saturday 28 July

After a few hours of sleep. We woke up because we had to go working at beach No 1. Arriving there the weather was bad, there was so much smog that we couldn't even see the sea. So Mr Ho (Chief of beach No 1) told us that we had a day off. We did some shopping for the appartment, and watched some movies on our huge flatscreen.

Sunday 29 July

Our official day off! Everybody had a long sleep untill 11 o'clock. Afterwards we went to "fake city" where Thomas got crazy about all the watches and Pia about the sunglasses, the handbags, the shoes... Dirk and Thomas even had to drag Pia out of the shoe department. Pia was a bit disapointed because in China shoe size 42 doesn't exist and all the chinese people were so extremely wondered when they saw Pia's feet that they even called their neighbours to come and have a look. After a tyring day we watched (again) some movies.

Monday 30 July -Thursday 2 August

These days we just trained the Qingdao Kids. Nothing special happpened. We made the 7 rules of sailing:
1st Rule: no crashing with the boats!
2nd Rule: Don't go on or off the water until we say so!
3rd Rule: no complaining you're sailing!
4th Rule: Don't get stuck in the jellyish nets!
5th Rule: Go back to the beach in direction of our blue tent!
6th Rule: No waterfights!
7th Rule: Always keep smiling!


Friday 3 August

Today there was a lot of wind and rain so we had a day off again. Luckily we had the day off, because we still had a lot off things to do (shopping, packing our bags, blogging, cleaning the appartment).
Tonight at 20.50 we have our flight to Beijing. Tomorrow we are goin to visit The Forbidden City and The Chinese Wall. Sleeping in The Raffel's will give us a good rest.
Sunday we will fly back to Amsterdam and then we will com back to Belgium.

We are very sorry about the late update for the blog. But we had some troubles to get internet. Their isn't internet available on the appartment and the internetin the office wasn't working as well untill now.

We want to thank everybody for giving us the opportunity for the lovely time we had in China. We also want to thank everybody of the NOCSP and CYBP and of the local marina's. Especially Dirk den Hollander and Thomas Annicq who have been wonderful managers for us. We hope we can come back next year and will have a great time like we had this year. These 5 weeks flew away, but the memories will stay! Thank you for this great experience.

Greetings,

Pia and Thomas