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

We set out together, heading for a distant temple a couple of hundered meters up the slope. As we began the stairs were broad and thick with people. But about the same time as we started to sweat heavily the crowds began to disapear. At some point by our remote temple we lost Hanna och Maral, and we had to continue without them. And when the staris turned skew and petit Emma turned on another path.

Now, Marie and I were determined to reach the top. And as we got higher up we found ourslevs mostly alone, sometimes in company of chinese workers rushing past us carrying heavy loads on their backs. And finally, trough rocky sections, closed entries and slippery stairs we reached what was the highest point possible, at 1180 meters above ocean.

This took approximatly two hours. The slide down took 30 minutes. I don’t know if it was becuse we took a straighter way down or if gravity just works that way.  But it was amazing, rushing down on slippery steps in light rain. Again watching chinese workers carelessly flying down past us, with steady feet on wily ground. For fractions of seconds we were lost, picked left or right by chance, found a lake with boats resting on the dry bottom and then finally realised we were out. Back where we started, laughing at the hilarious events of the past three hours.

At 1180 meter!

Thanks to all of the companies and all our new chinese friends who shared this special time with us!

We welcome you all to follow us as we continue to create an amazing Report Book, and a smashing China Day in Stockholm!

Keep tuned, the blog isn’t dead yet!

Love

Elina

Do you know that Volvo Ocean Race is one of the top 3 professional sailing events in the world?

Do you know that Volvo equipment was used when China upgraded the Tian An Men Square area for its 60-years anniversary ceremony?

Do you know that Volvo has contributed with about 2000 buses in the EXPO area to solve the transportation problem on the EXPO site?

Do you know that Volvo is one of the top 25 companies, ranking 4 among European companies, according to Wall Street Journal, that are most successful in Asia?

For those lucky Fudan students who woke up early today and came along to the Volvo Factory visit today, they did not only hear about the things above and the Volvo Group in general in a presentation by Volvo’s CE Region President Mr E.Wedekind, but they also ate a delicious breakfast and got the chance to see an exhibition of Volvo Construction Equipments and see what’s happening on the very site where people are making those giant machines of top-notch quality!

I was amazed by the exhibition. Well, I have seen a lot of Volvo machines on the construction sites several times, but it’s such a “wow” feeling to get to see all the world-class excavators, tractors, engines and city buses all brand new gathered at the same place! I somehow thought about the movie “transformers”—–high tech and simply awesome!

The production factories were really cool. The factory, ranking one of the four largest within Volvo has about 160 workers in total. They were all highly experienced and all well taken care of. They also have an impressive just-in-time-delivery system. It only takes them 3.3 days in average from inventory to deliver those top quality machines.

So for all of you who are interested in Volvo, and all of you who joined us in the factory visit, send your application to Volvo today or come to Sweden Day on Saturday at Fudan University to know more about Volvo!!!

Sweden day is whole-day work fair at Tsinghua University. This year with Ericsson, SCA and Volvo as our gold partners, we are really going strong since all of them are well-known and popular companies to Chinese students. This is the fourth year we are arranging Sweden Day at Tsinghua University. We have really built upon our earlier experiences and now we are good at this! With the ambassador doing the opening speech, tents rigged and companies settled down, Sweden Day is ready to ROCK! This year, besides the traditional work-fair we also added more cultural elements to Sweden Day. There is a quiz competition about Sweden at the Volvo tent, there is a photo exhibition of Stockholm, and more over we’ve got a midsummer pole and danced around it!!!

We are also having fun. There is a waboba station where you can throw balls that bounce on water, there is “paint your bag” station where you can be enviromental-friendly and paint and design your own cloth bags(stop using plastic bags!), there is street dancing show on the stage, there is orientation competition, there is even a station where you can pimp your bike with blue and yellow bands…it’s just that there is a lot more…!!

Of course there are companies and they are receiving a lot of attention from the students.

Well all this would not have been possible without the help from the Swedish embassy, SSE and Riot. Also big thanks to ASIC at Tsinghua university and anyone who worked hard together with us today to make the magic happen!

Still one awesome Sweden Day at Fudan University to go on 0613! See you soon!!