We Arrived! 我們到了！

Team arriving @ Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport- Saturday, May 10 

36 hours later, the LC women’s basketball group has officially arrived in Shanghai, China. Despite some of the struggles with the beginning part of our journey, the team has been enjoying every step along the way.
    

During the seven hour delay at the Hainan Airline gate in Chicago O’Hare, I loved watching my team gather to play their favorite game of Catch Phrase. There was a ton of energy and excitement with the group, realizing they all just wanted to get this journey started and experience China, including me.

Photo Gallery from first day

All of our inexperienced flyers did very well on our long flight and handled it like pros. We were able to catch a few Z’s, watch a couple movies and enjoy our first taste of real Chinese.
  

We had another delay in Beijing when we missed our connecting flight to Shanghai, but once again, we enjoyed our time together in the airport hotel lobby. I was able to teach the team to play Skip Bo, one of my favorite card games when I was in college. After we all settled down for a couple hours of sleep, we were back to the airport to board our final flight to Shanghai Saturday morning. A few of us practiced some of our first words in Chinese-hello & thank you-while enjoying some comforts of home-KFC and Starbucks at the Shanghai airport.

After settling in to the hotel Saturday afternoon, the group was able to visit Shanghai Finance University (SFU). Lakeland and SFU initially signed a sister school agreement in 2006. We were greeted with a warm welcome and met Linda Huang Yi for brief orientation. We were also introduced to two of SFU’s current students, Cynthia and Bill. They are both assigned to our group as student assistants this week. Cynthia led the group on a campus tour of SFU, where the team was also able to see where they will play on Monday night. SFU student assistant Bill announced that he will be coming to LC next fall in the foreign exchange program to study accounting with two other current SFU students.

Following our campus tour, we headed to an on-campus restaurant where the group had a quick tutorial of chop sticks from David Lynch, our Lakeland professor leading the tour. Some picked it up very well and others went a little more hungry this evening from technical difficulties with the eating utensils and strange new food. This authentic Chinese dinner included some very interesting dishes like squid, fresh fish and blackened chicken broth.

Stay tuned for some of the insight to the sights tomorrow while we explore Shanghai.
Coach Vande