Blog!

At Friday we have the ever so fantastic China Day Fair at KTH! Our fine partners Volvo Group, Ericsson, Volvo Cars and ITT will be there to recriutand and mingle with brilliant students! Whether you are from KTH, SSE or any other school, if you have any business around Valhallavägen, come by and say hello, introduce youself and dream of the future!

Be there, and as we say; never say no to Panda!

Love from the Project China Pandas

Yesterday almost all of us in the project group visited SCTC’s 30th birthday in the World Trade Center in Stockholm. It was a mingling session of two hours with speaches of chairman Mr. Bo Landin and the Chinese ambassador Mr. Chen Mingming! We met some interesting people there and were again convinced that the Sino-Swedish realtions will strenghten in the future! For all students interested in business between Sweden and China the future looks bright!

Love

Elina

This year’s project members all wrote about their best memories in the Report Book (Get a copy on Sep. 24^th!).  Among the moments that are mentioned are our banquette at the Swedish Pavilion’s VIP section, meeting China’s future president and living in the Chinese countryside. Being a part of Project China, a project with such great history and reputation, makes you realize that as a student at RIOT or SSE so many doors are open to you. It is really up to you to decide where and how far you will go in life.

This is an opportunity for you to lead Sweden’s largest International student project. You will work hard and the rewards are plenty, far more than I could ever have guessed. Your goal will be to develop and expand Project China, and how you do it is totally up to you.

Deadline for applying is September the 26^th. Send your CV and a short motivational letter (in either Swedish or English) to: recruiting@projectchina.se

If you wish to find out more, do not hesitate to contact Xiaying or me.

Yours truly,

Hanna

I Svenskan hittade jag denna intervju med Annika Rembe, generalkommissare för Expo 2010 angående hennes nya anställning på Svenska Instituet! Svenska Institutet har också väldigt fina böcker om Sverige och svenskar för de som är intresserade och lyckas haffa en!

/Elina

Hope you been enjoying your summer so far? We certainly have, because Sweden is just fantastic with blue skys and so much sun that just looking at the sun through a window gives you a tan!

I feel the need of updating you all on waht we are doing. The Report Book is starting to look like something we can be proud of and just in a week and a half we will start the correctional readings (can you say that?). We have also started to prepare for the number one event of the fall; China Days! Dates and other goodies will be posted soon!

As always, keep an eye on the blog and you’ll find out what is new for the moment!

Love

Elina

Oh and Ps. Don’t forget to tell all your Chinese friends on exchange at KTH this autumn about China Days!

Last Sunday we arrived to Beijing from Hong Kong, our last domestic flight to our final destination in China. Hong Kong was wonderful, not what I had expected but still charming and friendly. Comparing HK and Shenzhen on mainland China is tricky. I have never experienced such great difference crossing a border as I did when we went back to Shenzhen from Hong Kong. What’s sparkling in HK is lost in Shenzhen and what made me feel like home in Hong Kong got lost in a very different culture. Now, I have been travelling in China for almost a month but I still believe it takes more to feel like home than just getting to know someone elses culture.

China is wonderful in many ways. It’s exciting and beautiful and alarming and different and loud and funny and polluted and lush and everything you can imagine. It’s millions of individuals with different lives but something that connect them. Things I cannot understand fully and things I wish I could connect with. But I still feel more home in Hong Kong just because of that hint of culture I can connect with. Because people who live there are used to people like me and I to them. Because Hong Kong is the ultimate melting point of cultures. Cultures that melt together and create one piece of beautiful humanity that live crammed together as individuals. I love it, and yes that was my love letter to Hong Kong. If you ever get the chance to visit, do it! Hopefully you’ll love the people and the air of this town as much as I did!

Grey clouds and heavy rain haunted us on the peak in HK…

Finally I would like to share some pics from antoher peak – the Great Wall! Me, Maral, Jonathan and Xiaying took a tour to visit this human presentation of power yesterday. Our mascot came with us…

/Elina

Soon students in rural areas in China would discover that Ericsson is their best friend. Because there are limited access to good education resources and low PC penetration in rural areas in China, Ericsson is planning to develope a mobile learning suite that provides “colorful education resources” to learner via low cost mobile phones. This is a really smart move since, though there is a lack of computers in the countryside, there are plenty of mobile phones and at least in the areas that we visited, the mobile signal is pretty good too!

More communication, more education and better life in rural areas in China! Coming is an interview with Ericsson about how this works in detail. Keep tuned!

Although I only stayed in Hongkong for half a day, the differences are there, ready to be seen! From home-made 3-wheeled taxi vehicles to big comfortable Toyota taxi cars, from half-developed Chinese market selling construction materials to big shiny shopping malls, the differences between the countryside and major cities in China are huge, and many. Being a country with 70% of its population living in the countryside and top 5% of the population holding more wealth than the remaining 95%, China is seriously divided.

Some of us from the project team lived with a farmer for one night in the countryside last week. We cooked noodles with open fire, made our own bed in the basement and played cards with the locals. It may not be the most comfortable night we have experienced with mosquito bites, heavy rain and no electricity, but it was definitely the most special and memorable one.

Put aside english which is totally useless in rural areas, people in the countryside has a very strong Chinese dialect which made the communication a bit hard. But still the Project team has got some really interesting stories to tell in the Project Book.

I want to share some of pictures from the countryside, along with some pictures from Hongkong, just for you to compare.

Hong Kong is amazing, and i wish all of you who can to come here! This certainly is the pearl of our journey so far, I think.

Anyhow, coming up is an interview with SCA tomorrow! They made this funny commercial:

You will also get some more info on Commute Greener!, the app for the sustainable people! Did you know you can reduce your carbon dioxid foot print by 30 % or more by using this app? I’ll start using mine as soon as I hit Stockholm!

Tomorrow is Midsummer Eve! So don’t try to contact us unless it’s an emergency like if someone pooped your party and you need a new one …

Lots of Midsummer greetings and love

Elina