legendary hairy crab, originally uploaded by thisisjohnny.

after waking up at 4:30 AM thoughts of china’s legendary hairy crab dominate the morning. meeting and greeting local team members at people’s square I learn new chinese phrases and quickly test them out on late arrivals. its clear from the confused look on their faces that I’m butchering this beautiful language and should probably stick to “ni hao”.

we board our buses and depart for Shangjiang before 9:00 and a few false alarms, several u-turns, and two confused bus drivers later, we arrive at what I can only describe as a hybrid revolutionary museum / meditative boat ride through shallow calming willow reed waters. a strange juxtaposition of chairman blessed marriage certificates and see-saw rides on a back drop of IT team building fun.

morning festivities soon give way to lunch in a floating town of legendary hairy crab restaurants that exists for two-months out of the year. rows upon rows of these floating behemoths enclose a sprawling make shift concrete parking lot. inside our team of forty-some-odd IT developers and analysts are greeted by an entourage of uniformed wait-staff. dish after dish of local Chinese delicacies build to a climax of two individually hand wrapped crabs. the pictures ought to speak for themselves.

The rest of my day three photos can be found here

crowded shanghai subway train, originally uploaded by thisisjohnny.

i had a chance to get out and snap up a few photos before the jet lagged kicked in and discovered that shanghai is a lot like new york except everyone is asian and i’m not the shortest guy on the train. stepping back a few hours, I was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar face in a strange new land. Shanghai’s biggest sweet heart, Jane Xiao-Chun Yang was definitely a sight for sore-eyes. A short walk and a train boarding later, we’re now zooming into downtown Shanghai at 430 km/h (I’ve got the pictures to proove it).

you can view the rest of the photos here: day one and day two.

]]> http://thisisjohnny.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/shanghai-day-one/feed/ 2 thisisjohnny http://thisisjohnny.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/wii-bowling-is-serious-business/ http://thisisjohnny.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/wii-bowling-is-serious-business/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:59:04 +0000 thisisjohnny http://thisisjohnny.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/wii-bowling-is-serious-business/ ]]> yarly. if you don’t believe me, just check out the video below. Cliff “lefty” LaMason, Otto “SixPack” Rehm, and Sally “HighRoller” Pendergast are proof positive that the wii pwns joo nubs.

Thank you to my fellow leaders for putting so much time and effort into JTLC. Hopefully Tr. Khoa and I didn’t bore you too much with our rants and ravings on emotional intelligence. I think we can all agree that the kids are much better with tinker toys than we are. Thank god we’re better cooks though. See the rest of the photos here.