Weihai paradise

Hey all!

Finally some news from Weihai! Sebas and Martijn have arrived in Weihai on tuesday the 10th of July after a car trip from Qingdao. Sebas already stayed in Qingdao for 1 week and Martijn just arrived in China, coming from Amsterdam-Beijing, Beijing-Qingdao.

In Weihai the project is held on the international beach which is a very clean and excellent to launch the optimists, RIB´s, Catamarans and surfboards from. As you can hear, the sailing club here gots loads of good stuff. The whole project is managed here by a real cool guy from New Zealand, Lyndon Twemlow. He and some friends started a sailing club and hence came the idea to join the NOCSP program. As accomodation we´ve got a beatiful tent on the beach with a refrigerator filled with all kinds of good things (eg. Tsing Tao Pitsao :p).

Instead of staying in a hotel or other unpersonal accomodation we are staying at Lyndons and Zou Qing (another member of the sailing club) place. This is much more fun than staying in a hotel because we get into the family lives and learn so much more about their (chinese/new zealands) habits.

This week we will do the training of the translators which are actually the local trainers. They are very enthusiastic and learning as quick as a child of 4, they soak all the information right into their brains and are having so much fun at the same time. The weather here is sweet: only sunshine, no fog or smog so both of us get burned although Martijn looks like one big tomato right now.

Yesterday we did a big promotion and advertising for the project. We took four opti´s behind a car and drove into the city center. Everybody was watching us and staring at the opti´s. In the mean time we were giving advertisements with information about the sailing program and even the same evening the phone of one of the local trainers rang for an application of a kid to start sailing classes!

Next week we will start the sailing courses with the kids, looking forward to it!

Right now we will check the nighlife of Weihai, have fun so do we :)

PS: if you are used to a normal QWERTY keyboard, try to avoid the French ones zhich we are using right now, it´s horrible...