Uniforms at the USA Pavilion

Staff members in the USAP wear different uniforms based on their departments, and each is unique and colorful. The Student Ambassadors, kitchen staff, cleaning staff, guards, office workers, waiters, IVG employees in the retail store and quick-serve restaurant, can each be identified by their color-coded clothes. When I first arrived, Student Ambassadors wore tailored grey slacks or knee-length skirts and long-sleeve button down shirts that read "USA Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010 on the breast pocket (males) or sleeve cuffs (females).Later, some staff members decided to change the uniforms to reflect the heat, so we had a contest to design the new uniform and then everyone would vote. The winning uniform was khaki shorts and a white polo shirt with blue trim and a diagonal blue stripe running across it; the USAP logo adorns the left side of it. The kitchen staff are all given black hats and white chef coats with the USA Pavilion logo on the left breast pocket. They sold one to me, and embroidered my name on the pocket for free! It is my favorite souvenir from our pavilion! Office workers, the staff, dress professionally with nice shoes, slacks, dresses, and the ocassional tie.

Sometimes, we have a special uniform item donated by one of our corporate or state sponsors, such as cowboy hats or space suits from Texas, Hawaiin shirts from Hawaii, blue t-shirts that read "Powered by CITI," and rumor has it Oakley wil join the ranks of sponsors with free sunglasses during the second session of Student Ambassador shifts.

Time schedule for life and judges

Some people still claim that there is a proper age and timetable for college careers and life in general, and attack people who are "behind schedule." Admittedly, I am older than the average MBA student; in my class, we range from 22-35, so I am not the oldest, nor am I the youngest. This would be forgivable if I had any professional work experience in an office, in the field I am specializing in, or in any real accomplishment not related to education. As it stands, I do not; thankfully, only a minority of people remind me of this. My uncle and aunt wrote on the congratulations card for my bachelor's degree "Good job on the 10-year university track," my great aunt and uncle said "You are behind in development and in life," and my supervisor at the USA Pavilion has been especially honest and observant with me.

Every department has been alloted a budget to go out as a group and eat together; this will bind people as a group and enhance morale within the department. On one night in July, the Finance department went out as a group to a local hotpot restaurant. My supervisors Jun and Emily and my coworkers Carol and Jing were also in attendance. I have been in situations before where I was the only person who does not understand what the others are saying, for instance at my friend Ilya's house where only Russian speakers live, and my friend Shaul's house where only Hebrew speakers were at the table with me. Needless to say, it makes one extremely uncomfortable. That night in July, all four of my coworkers decided to speak only in Mandarin; being ethnically Chinese, they speak it far more fluently than I do. As if that weren't enough, when Jun ordered the food he said "Mark, you're obviously not on a diet so I should order a lot of food." He asked if I wanted beer, and I said yes; unfortunately, no one else did. So not only was I the only one who did not understand what was being said, I was also going to be the only drinker. To be fair, at a couple of points during the meal, he spoke in English for my benefit. "Look at Emily, Carol, Jing and me: Emily and I graduated from top universities in China, Carol graduated from Cornell, and Jing graduated from UCLA. You are not even in a state school, only a city university." "You only have work experience in restaurants? Who referred you to this job anyway? You are at least 5 years behind in life, what are you going to do with yourself?" Although the drinking of alcohol might have softened the blow of some of this honesty, I did not want to be the only drinker; this would have been even more uncomfortable if that were possible. After I finished eating, I got up to leave earlier than the rest; Jun said "No, we're all about to leave, you can go home with Jing and Carol." So I was effectively trapped at that point, but luckily he just decided to say things I would not understand for the rest of the meal.

I did try to counter his attacks by saying things like "If you could only see me 5 years ago, you would congratulate me instead of telling me how old I am. I could still be delivering pizza, waiting tables, making sandwiches, or any of the other myriad jobs I have had in my life; instead, I decided to go to school and change my life." He, like some other people I will probably always encounter, will always harass me about my age. I have noticed, and been told by other people, that Chinese people tend to be extremely honest and things we would not say to one another (your acne looks bad, how much money do you make?, how much was your house?, you're quite fat, etc.) are common expressions here. Chinese friends have told me not to care about them and that older people like him are usually the ones to say those things. I have heard them so many times that I have to let them roll off my shoulder or else I will go crazy and start fights (not good).

Anyway, I try not to get angry to his face because I want a recommendation letter from him at the end of my time at the USAP. It gets more challenging as time goes by, unfortunately.

Typical work day

On a typical work day, I will wake up at 8:00 am and look out from the window of my Donghu Expo Village apartment complex to see the Expo grounds; the massive China pavilion always impresses me with its size. Once I am ready for work, I walk to the Expo employee bus stop, where the bus going to the Expo picks up employees every 15-20 minutes. I go through the ridiculous security station that is really only for show (since one person per pavilion is given a "Security Station Free" pass) and then get in line to ride another bus to the USA Pavilion. Once there, I greet my supervisors who ask about the status of my VIK project and then say "Good job;" after that, I go to my desk, turn my computer on, and withdraw my VIK notebooks and folders from my filing cabinet. Following that, I make a timetable schedule for my shift: a list of company representatives to contact, coworkers to harass for helpful information, and physical receipts and invoices to review and translate. After all of these steps, before the end of my shift, I have to review the spreadsheet in which I record my work and make any necessary changes. This helps me go about my day in an organized fashion.

After making my lists, I open my email inbox to check for responses from the previous day's emails. If there are email responses from our pavilion's corporate sponsors, I read them and respond accordingly; otherwise, I open my contact list spreadsheet and begin contacting corporate representatives. Most of the time, I have a contact name and email address that were each given to me by either the sponsorship department or Jake Parker, one of the supervisors in our pavilion. The email I send will diplomatically thank the representative for helping to sponsor our pavilion, explain who I am and how I know his/her contact information, and politely ask for any records they have of VIK goods given to us. If I only have a phone number, it becomes more difficult; sometimes, the receptionist does not speak English, so I have to use my Chinese ability to achieve my goal of speaking to the representative. During my conversation with the representative, we usually decide to only speak over emails from that point on, as that is the easiest and most convenient way to transmit data. If I have already emailed a representative but have received no response for several weeks, I will politely resend my request; this has not happened very often, but there is the occasional representative who has not checked email since returning from vacation. Whether I call, email, or send a follow-up email, I always make a note of it in my VIK spreadsheet.

The best way to get new contact information or follow up on other requests for information, is to directly contact the sponsorship department, Jake in Operations, or one of the IVG (Australian company we contracted our restaurant and retail services with) supervisors. This is one of the many times where patience and good relationships help: they are all usually busy with their own jobs, so I have been told many times to "check back later," "ask me another day," or "who are you again?" One of the sponsorship department employees, Stephanie, is the supervisor of the state sponsorship relations; I have helped her out numerous times with various tasks, so she helps me get contact information when she can. IVG supervisor Dominico often helps me with my requests for contact information, like the names of our Gallo and Ecolab representatives, and any new invoices he has for delivery of cleaning supplies or wine.

Somewhere in between various tasks, usually about 12:00 pm, I will gather other employees and head to the staff cafeteria across the street for delicious and ridiculously cheap food.

After lunch, I will continue working on the task of contacting representatives, then I move on to transcribing information from various invoices and receipts that have been given to me. Usually there is at least one new Wal Mart receipt, sometimes I have a new Dell delivery notice, and if I am really lucky there will be some information I requested from IVG. The items delivered, date, and usage are all required in my spreadsheet, as well as a physical copy of the invoice; if the information was delivered in an email, I will print the email and file it away in one of my VIK folders.

A few times per week, I have another task to perform at some point throughout the day, such as lifting heavy things, handing out money to students, traveling to the bank and back, traveling to China Mobile to pay a bill, walking to one of the Expo offices to check for mail, organizing invoices and statements in large binders, or compiling and processing receipts for expense reports. These other tasks break the monotony of office work somewhat.

At the end of the day, I usually check my VIK spreadsheet to make sure it reflects all work I have accomplished over my shift. This includes any new delivery data I have received, purpose and usage information, contact information changes, and I make sure the new dollar/RMB totals for our VIK received thus far are accurate. After I complete that, backup my data on my flash drive, and log out of my computer, I will say goodbye to my coworkers and supervisors and walk to the bus stop to return to the Expo Village.

Food in and around the Expo

Living in Shanghai: Food inside the Expo Village and the Expo park

One of the most important questions to deal with every day is “What should I eat?” The answer to this question can be difficult, considering the culinary diversity surrounding and within the Expo Village. For every price range, time of day, speed of service, and distance from where I live, there are several options.

Within the Expo, there are several overpriced restaurants such as Bubba’s BBQ, NY Pizza, Masala Art Indian Cuisine, more than one sushi restaurant, Crazy Chicken, and several others. All of them were expecting far more business than they received, and some of them actually were not expecting much business but were forced (coerced) into opening a location inside the Village.

NY Pizza was one of the restaurants that did not receive as much business as its owners had expected (imagine pizza hut with 4 people inside on a Friday night). Maybe it’s because the crust was too thin and plain, the service was too slow, and they fell victim to the mistake of not bringing appetizers before the meal (very common in China).

Bubba’s BBQ was insanely expensive as well, but at least the food was somewhat tasty. Bubba came to China expecting to make a killing off of the money that visitors from all over the globe brought by taking advantage of how isolated the Village is and how much trouble it is to go elsewhere for food.

Masala Art Indian Cuisine is like many Indian restaurants: overpriced yet tasty. The menu contains a wide selection of Indian dishes from many different locations in India, several of which I have eaten and enjoyed.

For those Expo Village residents who have neither the time nor the money for one of those restaurants, there is always Family Mart; Family Mart is a common and popular chain of convenience shops throughout many cities in China and Japan. They offer several daily necessities, a large selection of beverages, prepared foods such as sushi and sandwiches, etc. It is the perfect option for parties (Qingdao is a popular and very cheap beer in China), late night meals, and even as a meeting place at one of their several tables.

Inside the Expo, there are many interesting and delicious options for park visitors and employees alike; KFC, Wishdoing, Papa John’s, Kung Fu Combo, Burger King, and Pizza Hut are several of the well known brands of restaurants available inside. Each one has lowered its variety in order to speed up service, for example Papa John’s only offers 4 different pizza options and they are cooked far in advance of when they are actually sold. For those without much money, there are several convenience stores (like Family Mart), small food booths with cheap stuffed buns and special Chinese desserts, and the many excellent staff cafeterias (staffeteria, for many of us). The one I would routinely go to has a wide variety of intricately prepared foods, rich with nutritious soups, vegetables, fish and meat options, a dessert booth with ice cream and muffins, and a beverage counter. All of the food there is incredibly cheap, mainly because it is subsidized by the Expo Bureau, and is thus unavailable to guests (the food can only be paid for with food credits deposited at the Expo Bureau itself). Almost all of my lunch breaks were at the Staffeteria so I saved a lot of money over eating at Family Mart or Burger King.

Many of the various pavilions also had small restaurants in which you could buy mostly authentic food from that country; the spices, vegetables, and preparation methods were all brought by the people who left their countries to work at the Expo. The Sri Lanka pavilion has excellent curry sauces, meat pies, and breads; the Norway pavilion has a delicious, fresh, and wide assortment of Norwegian seafood dishes; the Pakistani pavilion has BBQ shish kabobs, traditional Pakistani curry dishes, rice casseroles, and more; unfortunately, the USA Pavilion outsourced its restaurant and retail management to an Australian company called IVG, which decided that fast food (Quick serve restaurant) would be cheaper and thus make more money than serving various American foods would have been.

FedEx visits USAP

FedEx Visits USAP

FedEx is another one of the USAP’s cash-only sponsors, and as part of the sponsor level they were on, they were allowed to schedule several special events and lectures using either our conference/dining room or the 1776 Lounge (bar and lounge area). Many times over my first 2 months at the USAP, I would tell everyone in the Sponsorship department that, because FedEx’s headquarters was in my city, I would greatly appreciate the chance to meet some of their representatives when they visit our pavilion. One time, I had the chance!

Many of you will recall that, at the USAP, I was responsible for delivering the payment to China Mobile to pay the bills for all the pavilion-sponsored cell phones. On July 9^th, I left the USAP at 16:00 to deliver the payment to China Mobile; when I arrived, I discovered that I had left the check at work in my file cabinet! I returned to the USAP at 18:00 to retrieve the check and upon my return to the USAP, I decided to enter the VIP entrance to climb the stairs to the second floor office. The stairwell leading to the second floor of the pavilion on that side opens directly across from the dining room in which a special event was being held. I had a strange feeling that it was FedEx’s event, and sure enough when I asked a random suit-wearing man “Which organization is having an event tonight,” he told me that it was FedEx and that he was representing an American office. I told him that I was from Memphis and a USAP student ambassador, and he invited me to the event to meet several Chinese and American FedEx employees!

The event’s subject was corporate social responsibility, with a focus on the environmental impact of industrialization and overconsumption. After the first lecture, I was introduced to the representative of FedEx Shanghai’s corporate outreach and social responsibility office, and she was very happy to meet me. She has visited Memphis, including the FedEx hub, headquarters, and Graceland, and was eager to establish outreach connections with a student group I was involved in, called GCC (Global Chinese Connections). The power of luck and excellent timing has won again in my life!

Harmful Mold

The danger of rushing construction

The Shanghai Expo is staffed partly by several thousand volunteers and employees, some of which live in the area adjacent to gate 6 of the Expo, called Expo Village. Inside Expo Village, there are several ethnic restaurants, shops where you can buy antiques, a convenience shop and 2 apartment complexes. The apartment complexes, Donghu (where I lived) and Jinjiang (where I wish I had lived) are different in regards to their facilities and construction: Jinjiang apartments have a computer for use by the residents, machines to dry clothes, and weekly maid service, while Donghu has more land area, beautiful landscaping, and illness-causing mold inside the walls of the apartments. Several of my coworkers at the USAP have had terrible allergic reactions to the mold, symptoms of which include difficulty breathing, abnormal acne and skin rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, fever, and more. The mold is due to shoddy construction which left areas in the walls where moisture could come in, and Shanghai being as humid as it is, moisture settles in.

Eventually, our repeated complaints caught the ears of the supervisors who contacted the main office of Donghu apartments and threatened to cease rent payments on all rooms until the problem was solved. The problem has been treated as cosmetic, meaning that the staff members responsible for cleaning projects were sent to scrape the mold off the walls, scrub them, and then paint over the areas. The deeper issue is not being solved.

After Donghu failed to solve the problem, USAP staff needed proof that the rooms contained harmful mold, so lucky for us, Ecolab is one of the USA Pavilion’ s sponsors and cares about its well being. Ecolab is a chemical sanitizer-producing company that has supplied many of the required cleaning solutions as part of their sponsorship agreement. After investigating several rooms, they discovered that most of the rooms had water damage but only 2 had dangerous mold; this meant that the people who claimed illness from non-dangerous mold having rooms had to be suffering from something else entirely. Hooray for experts!

On a personal note, many of you will notice that I have facial hair in several of my pictures; this is because I was afflicted by a terrible rash and acne on my face. Since leaving Donghu, my face has cleared up significantly, so the people who said it was not due to the mold were obviously wrong.

Reconciliation and division of duties

Reconciliation

One of the many tasks that the finance department must perform every day is to count the remaining cash in the office and balance it against the book value of accounts; this is a critical step in order to know precisely how much money the USA Pavilion has, because the account balance that can be checked electronically only tells part of the story. As soon as cash is dispersed to a person or department, the value muse be recorded and subtracted from the previous total to calculate the current balance. For example, if the Dance America department needs 400 RMB to pay for some special fabric for a costume, the department head will come to the finance department and explain it; we will then either advance the money or instruct him to prepay and submit an expense report for reimbursement. If the money is to be prepaid, we make a note in the journal and have the department representative write a letter with details for us to keep on file. If a shipment of office supplies arrives at the USAP, it will most likely already have been paid for; if not, the deliverer submit’s the invoice and we disperse cash accordingly. In June, we had a problem with one of the printers that Dell donated to us, so the IT department head received an advance payment to use on a new printer from Best Buy. We recorded both the initial payment to him and the refund of change when he returned. Most computer parts have been purchased using this method of payment, though several times we had to reimburse various IT department employees for their purchases.

Other than equipment purchases and expenditure reimbursement, we also must record the payment of stipends to the student ambassador employees and the Chinese volunteers who represent our pavilion and are not paid by direct deposit like other staff members. The fact that the stipends are all paid in Chinese RMB notes complicates the reconciliation process in two ways: first, the estimated amount of expense reimbursements and student stipends must be withdrawn from the bank weekly and second, three student ambassadors are authorized to disperse the funds.

On Mondays, the supervisor of our student ambassadors and volunteers prepares the payroll spreadsheet that compiles names and payroll amounts, and subtracts penalties based on absences/late arrivals. Once we have that list, we combine the amount of cash on hand with the estimated expenses to reimburse and the payroll amount to students, and then we know how much to withdraw from the bank. Although most of this passes through our hands, the final review and approval of our CFO and/or his assistant are required to make out the withdrawal slip for the bank. Two of the finance department’s student ambassadors would ride to the bank, withdraw the money, and return to the pavilion to begin dispersing stipends for the day. That is when the second problem arises: 3 different people are authorized to give out stipends, so each must know what the others have done and the job must be coordinated to ease reconciliation at the end of the day. We must 1) count the cash into equal stipend payments, 2) ask the student to recount and sign in their designated signature column 3) sign our own names and record date dispersed in their designated columns. If several students arrive at once, as they often do, it can be very distracting and sometimes a signature or date can be omitted. Although the students arrive to collect their stipends during their breaks, we must be sure to remember not to allow the student ambassadors to rush us into making mistakes. This last issue has caused some problems with recording that have led to frantic calls to students asking if they forgot to sign and leaving work late because we couldn’t figure out why the numbers were wrong. There was a day when two of the students in the finance department calculated large discrepancies, and for 3 days there was no solution; we spent hours watching video surveillance of every place the money had been, recounted the cash and all of the week’s reimbursements several times, but at last it was clerical error that had resulted in the miscalculation and there was no actual missing money. This is a lesson in the importance of separation of duties and responsibilities in the workplace, even within a single department.

VIK: DELL

Dell is an American corporation that is a favorite supplier of computers and information technology-related equipment to many different institutions around the world. It is from Dell that schools like the University of Memphis supply all of their PC needs, and many other schools also fill their need for equipment through it. Dell's representatives approved the proposal to be one of the sponsors the USA pavilion, so our sponsorship negotiators drew up a contract and Dell decided on an amount to give that was to be divided between VIK goods and cash donations. The VIK goods donations included the equpiment used in our office, such as printers, laptops, desktops, monitors, and all manner of accessories for each. In a small office on the bottom floor of the USAP is the server office, in which there are more Dell donations like gigantic servers, accessories, monitors, desktops, and more laptops. These servers enable several different mobile desktop applications, such as enabling the access of files that people can save on one computer and access from another, applications such as Microsoft Office 2010, and many other network functions.

Each of many deliveries to our pavilion was documented by Dell and sent with delivery documentations like invoices, receiving sheets, etc. Unfortunately, they were delivered before we had a department dedicated to recording the receipt of these goods and filing these invoices. When I began to explore the Dell case, and since then, the only invoices given to me were several months old and only covered 12 out of 26 different deliveries. This led to obvious difficulties for me and potential danger for those in our pavilion who would be vulnerable and responsible for any auditing discrepancies. Lucky for us, we have a responsible and knowledgeable contact on the Dell side; this contact gives us all the records from their side, usually an updated Excel spreadsheet with extensive amounts of information. Some of this information includes cumulative unit delivery totals by unit, dates they were delivered, market value of each, Dell's profit margin, total prices for market values and the amounts Dell has spent in both RMB and USD. This is really the only way for us to verify how much we have received, given the fact that almost every department needs computers: the employee staff room has 2 desktops, the bar has 2 laptops, VIP reception department has several at each of its desks, sponsorship department needs them, IT department, communications, protocol, not to mention all of our supervisors and of course our commissioner general. The emailed spreadsheet is not enough, however; we need surveys conducted by the IT department to find out exactly where each of the delivered devices are. Comparing each document to each other and the scarce receiving documents, we can thus develop ample proof against any accusation of fraud and have all necessary proof ready to deliver to auditors when they arrive.

Value of Value in Kind: Walmart

By far our most complicated VIK goods supplier is Walmart, from which we have many sources of information. For example, There are multiple people who have collected receipts from various shopping trips to Walmart, deliveries to the pavilion or Expo Village, and there has been usage by IVG, the company that we outsourced our retail and food service management to. These receipts cover many different types of items such as daily necessities, appliances, and furnishings for the student ambassadors residences; office supplies like furniture, writing utensils, staplers, etc for the pavilion; supplies and food for several parties we have thrown in the pavilion, and even paying some labor with Walmart credits.

For the student ambassador apartments, we purchased insect spray, sunscreen, televisions, microwave ovens, dishes, clothes hangers, and so much more; for the most part, these items were purchased in person by multiple staff members, which complicated my job to an extent (chasing them down to retrieve receipts). Finding the receipts was only the beginning however; once the receipts for these items were given to me, I had to make dark copies of each receipt in order to preserve the record over time; next, I had to translate the tiny, mostly illegible, sometimes nonsensical Chinese characters and phrases into names of items in order to verify that they were in fact being used for the purposes of the pavilion or student ambassadors. This was an impossible task for an American with only 3 years of formal Chinese instruction, and was actually exceedingly difficult for many of the native Chinese people in the office. In order to make up for this and to prepare for the time when my coworker Carol could translate the receipts, I entered each receipt's items by code, quantity purchased, and unit price into a separate sheet that had several embedded functions: first, in order to prevent Excel from converting a 10 digit item code to a format with commas, I had to save the Item Code column as text; next, I had to format the Unit Price and Total Price columns to be currency format using the Chinese currency symbol; the Total Price column is a product function of the quantity column times the item price function, and the total receipt amount is a sum of the Total Price column. Upon verification that the amount on the receipt matches that of the sum of the items in the spreadsheet, I reference the totals of each sheet in order to calculate the total.

Update, 7/21 - Upon examination of a workbook sent to me by one of my supervisors, the work I have been doing has been somewhat in vain: he had already entered the Chinese characters, quantities, prices, and totals of many of the receipts I've been working on. I can easily copy the characters and paste into translation web sites. This helps me to proceed with my job assignment of calculating the value of the VIK goods, which can help us prepare for the inevitable audit.

Another help for me with this task is that the sponsorship department gave me the phone number and name of a new contact at Wal-mart today! I called her and we arranged for her to give me their records of how much credit we have used. Great Success!

I want to do as much as possible over the next week.5, because next Friday is my last day here!

Value of Value in Kind: Motorola

The next sponsor I need to talk about is Motorola, the electronics manufacturer. Incidentally, this blog post ties in with the China Mobile cell phone bill blog post. In order to be granted the status of sponsor and all of the benefits that accompany it, Motorola gave the USA Pavilion several cell phones to use in our day to day and work tasks; this is a huge relief to many of the employees who must use their personal cell phones to entertain delegations from various sponsors, deliveries from suppliers, solve logistics problems, communicate with coworkers, etc. Not only can this lead to very expensive China Mobile bills, but it can also be very taxing on your cell phone battery and loss of privacy on your personal phone. The solution for this is to assign Motorola-donated cell phones to various staff members and allow them to use company-funded cell phone numbers from China Mobile. The spreadsheets with lists of phones received, their serial numbers, and partial lists of those they were assigned to were given to me by Jake; from that point, I researched the market value of each of the donated phones on various web sites such as Motorola.com. Some of them were so obsolete that the Motorola site no longer sold them, so I had to explore other sites like Amazon.com and Google.com; I also did not know whether I was supposed to find the highest or lowest prices, but therein lies the conflict of interest: Motorola wants to donate a large dollar amount, but we have to keep them honest by looking around.

The next problem I encountered was that some of the phones were not being used for various reasons: some were never functional, some had batteries that were faulty, some were just too large and obsolete to be practical, and others were just unused because people don't want to have multiple phones in their pockets. I had to track down all of these phones to discover who was using them, if they had been transferred to other people, lost, returned for whatever reason, or still working well. I am the manager of the Motorola phone inventory spreadsheet, as well as the one person who has complete knowledge now of which phones are actually in my possession. It will be this way until my contact at Motorola sends me the complete list of what they have donated to us thus far; this calls into question the issue of business ethics! What happens when a person who is leaving your business in less than 2 weeks has the most complete knowledge of your inventory? A less ethical person might take advantage of that situation, but everyone who knows me knows that I care about acquiring things in a legal and honest way.

Next in VIK series: Walmart. It's a doozy.

Company cell phone accounts

Our labor force in the USA Pavilion consists of the 1)Student Ambassadors and the 2)Full time staff, each of which has different pay, working conditions, levels of responsibility and respect, etc. Sure we get air conditioning, chairs, more leisure time, access to bathrooms, computers, refrigerators, and we get to take our lunch breaks whenever we want, but there are downsides to working in the office; more specifically, to working as a staff member in the office. The reason I have to fill out so many expense reports is that there are times before and after official working hours that special projects/extra tasks need to be completed and were not during working hours. This can lead to many extra expenses, one of which is cell phone bills to clients, coworkers, sponsors, delegations, entertainers, and more; the solution for this is, rather than reimburse people with tons of expense reports every month, we have company cell phone accounts. These cell phone accounts are assigned to specific people, and one of my tasks is to locate these people and enter their names next to their corresponding phone numbers in a spreadsheet titled "Cell Phone accounts." I have tracked most of these numbers to specific people, but certain other numbers are idle and we pay a minimum monthly fee for every unused line in order to have it ready for the next person who needs it. At the end of every billing cycle, we receive a package of invoices that record every fee for for every account, listed by phone number. I tally all of these accounts using Excel spreadsheets, double-check all of my work, and then email it to the assistant head of my department, Emily. She then makes out a check, gets all necessary signatures and stamps, and sends me to China Mobile to pay the whole cost in person. But wait, there's more.

I can't go to just any China Mobile location; I found out during my very first experience paying our bills that most locations only accept cash payments, and after two redirections and several hours of walking and taxi rides, I finally made it to the correct location for paying with checks. Once I arrive, the worker assigned to helping me begins to enter each individual bill for payment; sometimes their scanner gun is working, and when it is not working they have to enter each 15-digit account number by hand. After every invoice has been entered into the list, they will examine the check, call over the bank supervisor, and continue with the process. Some of my visits have been unsuccessful and frustrating for several reasons: maybe the check is unacceptable because of some small error, it has been slightly creased, the signature is in the wrong place, or some other reason that makes the trip useless. If you count all of my trips to China Mobile for the purpose of paying the bills, including the first two China Mobile locations who found out I could not pay with checks, I have had 6 unsuccessful attempts and 3 successful attempts; thus 50% of my trips have been wasted time, energy, and taxi fare (which I reimburse myself for!). Usually it's on my day off or after work, so it's especially disheartening.If they accept the check, then they go through and double-stamp every invoice using a special red stamp and then I go on my way with the invoices in my bag. Having a cell phone when I go is absolutely critical, by the way, because sometimes they do speak English but most of the time they do not. My Mandarin speaking ability is okay, but not good enough to find out why they have problems.

My next VIK blog will be about Motorola and how I match their donations to my efforts in getting the bills paid.

Value of Value in Kind: Marriott

One of our VIK accounts that I must update monthly is that of Marriott which, as a sponsor, donated several hotel room stay credits for our representatives to use. There are several different locations and styles of hotels and executive apartments available for a set number of vacancies, the total number of which was available on the first Marriott-related spreadsheet I ever saw. Every subsequent monthly workbook was updated with the number of room credits used during the previous month, for instance "10 rooms used in Marriott [Location name] during [month]." I then opened my spreadsheet "Marriott prices," which I assembled from an old email that was saved in "Outlook file format" which, when not working on a computer with Outlook installed, cannot be viewed in any other program. In order to type in the price and multiply by the number of rooms used in the various months, I had to somehow install Microsoft Outlook 2010 without having matching instructions from the University of Memphis's IT website (instructions only given for Office 2003 and Office 2007), so I installed my Hotmail account in Outlook (a huge waste, but necessary). I went through each of the Marriott location worksheets calculating the market value of the room usage for the month. After I calculated the last value for hotel ratesThe workbook consisted of several sheets: Totals and the titles of subsequent sheets were the names of their various locations in which we have credits. The Totals sheet has a sum function next to the cell "Total for " that I use to link the products from every sheet to a master sum function and eventually total out the usage for the month. Once I have verified the arithmetic and number entry, I will attach it to an email and send it to my supervisor Emily; the body usually contains the total for the month to give her a heads up. What she does with the information is to record it in our monthly financial statements as "Income," and that's how important my job can be sometimes. They constantly impress upon me the difficulty and relevance of what I am doing, and though it can sometimes seem routine, there are so many facets and people I must speak with to get data that it keeps me in my toes. Much like everyday life here!

Value of Value in Kind: EJ to the Gallows!

Next in my responsibilities for reporting VIK goods is to find the fair market value of these goods. One of the most complicated and time-consuming goods that were donated to our pavilion is wine from E.J. Gallo wineries. In order to be an official sponsor, the Gallo representatives have given many hundreds of bottles of their wine to be used at our discretion. The number of donated bottles, as well as the price we should consider when reporting the bottles, are both important. Once I had received the number from the receiving department, it was time to determine prices; my task was to locate the lowest (bulk) price for Gallo wine so that we would know what to charge IVG, the company we outsourced our restaurant and retail store management to. IVG also manages the lounge area called 1776 which is in one of the wings of our eagle-shaped pavilion, in which they sell various alcoholic drinks to VIPs who come through. Up to this point, we have not charged them for the wine that they sell because I had not found the lowest official bulk price at which we could sell it to them. During my time researching this quite elusive number, by which I mean it was hard to find a bulk sale price for a wine that is already cheap) I discovered how highly rated Gallo wines are among less expensive wines. I explored several alcohol-selling web sites, ebay.com, amazon.com, Chinese distributors, American distributors, several specialty sites, bulk and B2B web sites, etc. I even went as far as to email the “contact us” link several times, and I almost followed my boss’s suggestion to call Mr. Gallo (wherever he might live) at home to ask him about their wholesale price.

I was at the end of my imagination when a girl I had helped out in the office a few times gave me the names of various sponsor accounts, the representative from our office who was dealing with the company, and even more contact information. Eventually, this led to a final contact (Sales manager) who today gave me the information in a spreadsheet, including number of bottles donated, brand names, wholesale price, total price in Chinese yuan and US dollars. Tomorrow, I will insert the total value into my “VIK Thus far” spreadsheet in Microsoft Office 2010 and then my bosses will be very happy with me.

Oh and yes, we use Microsoft Office 2010 in the USA Pavilion. Through 2.5 months usage, I perceive few noticeable differences from Office 2007, and in fact some features are less convenient. I’ll discuss those in another blog post.

Memo that I sent to my supervisors today

To: Ma Jun, Emily Huang

From: Mark Wlodawski

Re: VIK status and bank transfer status

VIK Status

The VIK goods record as of this date is attached to this memo in the spreadsheet VIK thus far; several accounts include the most recent data gathered directly from sponsor contacts in their emails or spreadsheet attachments.

· I have verified several of the Dell deliveries according to their items and dates, but the market values come directly from Dell.

· I am still entering data from Wal-Mart receipts and spreadsheets given to me by Jacob

· Motorola representative promised to update me very soon on their donations

· I contacted the E.J. Gallo representative in order to request their bulk prices, no answer yet

· Several other accounts, such as Laticrete, have completed their sponsor obligation according to emails from our contacts.

I plan next to continue my attempts in contacting representatives and acquiring data. Several of the contacts have been unresponsive, so I have been working together with the sponsorship department to meet other contacts.

Documents that serve as records of receipts, such as delivery notices and various emails and spreadsheets, are being held as printed records in one of my folders and are available for perusal.

Bank Transfer Status

I maintain a running spreadsheet record and a folder with all records of these charges given to me. As of July 7, I have received claims from 5 different employees who each have more than one charge. I will forward that to Emily by July 28.

Beginning of description of VIK

In reporting financial statements, all sources of income must be listed in their various forms: cash and physical goods. Cash is easy to report, as it is clearly visible within bank accounts. Bank statements can be requested at a moment's notice to examine bank account details, including usage activity and current balances. Physical goods must also be tracked and recorded according to their fair market values, in order to properly account for depreciation and such.There is far more difficulty in recording the donation of physical goods on financial statements than in recording income or even donated money. The USAP organization was funded by donations from private sponsors, including city and state governments, a university, but mostly corporations. Some of them donated physical goods in return for certain sponsorship or advertising rights and privileges.

These donated items, called Value in Kind (VIK) goods, are promised at varying amounts inside various contracts. the amount of delivered or purchased goods must be recorded on income statements and backed up with data and records proving the receipt and purpose of usage. This can present a problem if an organization has a time constraint and has no unified, streamlined system of information. A problem I have encountered is that during its infancy, the USAP staff was so busy with quickly constructing the pavilion building that they lost certain documents showing exact records of receipts, so recording proper values for the donated VIK goods was impossible. That's when I started my internship.

The VIK goods are holding us together, cleaning our things, transporting our people, lighting our paths, computing our numbers, operating our systems, heating our coffee, and so on. I must track these items with supporting documentation to show: receipt of the goods, market value of the goods, and information about its current usage. The reason for assembling all of the data and processing it according to the contracts is to properly record and report the value of our pavilion, and in the even of an audit, questions about these items could be easily answered.

Whom I met today: Oppressed Pakistani Slaves

Don't take the title lightly: the Pakistan pavilion has become a prison/deathbed for many of their people. I won't mention the name of my informant (because I fear for his safety) but what follows has been proven to me with pictures and the feeling in his voice and eyes. Every one of my coworkers and friends should pay heed to how lucky we all are.

My new friend from Pakistan is a slave in Shanghai, with no hope of redemption or freedom. He and his countrymen are resigned to work from before the Expo opens until after it closes, every single day. There are no labor laws in his country, so there is no such thing as violating them. If this were the worst part of it, it would be only slightly worse than the plight of their neighbors in the India pavilion; unfortunately, it is far from the end.

They are the only staff members I have heard about who do not get paid; that is, until they return to Pakistan in November. Upon their return, they will hopefully be paid 800 RMB for every month that they worked, which will add up to my monthly salary which I am paid one fourth of every week. But wait, it gets worse.

Imagine you had such terrible conditions, and were unable to escape! Their passports were taken from them by their boss so that, even if they had the money to leave, they would be unable to. They cannot call their friends or family, because their phones were taken from them by the same supervisor. So the obvious answer is: complain to the police. The non-caring police redirected them to the Pakistan embassy which, after they were also paid a special visit by their supervisor himself, decided that there was no problem and that the staff should behave themselves.

So let's recap: no money, no communication, no phone, no empathy, and no escape. Is that all? Alas, it is not.

What happens when 6 men are assigned to sleep in a room with no beds? Back pain and illnesses develop. When there is no sympathetic ear to complain to, illnesses go untreated and become worse. One man has developed a heart condition, which was unheeded until the supervisor prescribed some random medicine that has no effect except to worsen the problem. When at last the repeated entreaties for help broke down his resistance to allowing a hospital visit, they discovered that the man was not expected to survive, given his extreme heart degradation and abnormal condition.

Perhaps one of the lesser crimes against them, though still extremely unpleasant, is that they must share two bathrooms with 20 People!

So before you complain about having to work 40 hours per week, think about how you have the freedom to quit your job and escape oppression. Think about how there are people to complain to, laws to protect us, and at the very least, sympathetic ears to listen to their plight.

The Expo Passport

Back in 1967, the Expo passport was created for the World Fair that year. The details are: designed like a regular passport, space to be stamped for each of the represented countries. It has been somewhat popular in the past, yet at far less crowded World's Fairs, they have been fairly easy to fill and acquire. Not so at the Shanghai World Expo 2010.
In the beginning, maybe 50,000 were sold per day because the demand was vastly underestimated. If you have 350,000-500,000 people in one place with a 30 RMB passport that can become a pretty souvenir with intricate stamps from many of over 200 pavilions (handed out for free) would you imagine that 50,000 would be enough? Exactly, it wasn't.
The next item to consider is the wait line for some pavilions:
Saudi Arabia pavilion (largest IMAX screen in the world showing a 10 minute movie): >4 hours on average day, close to 8 on busy day;

Japan pavilion (violin-playing robot, Japanese-Chinese cross cultural opera, new technological advances in touchscreen technology and big screen tv, etc): >6 hours every day, always full line;

China pavilion (movie about Chinese history, display of changing nature of Chinese home through the decades, gigantic computer-animated Chinese scroll with intricate scenes that change as you walk, etc.): reservations for one of 50,000 entries disappear within 45 minutes of park opening

USA pavilion (3 movies about our country): 1.5-2.5 hours

Several other countries have very long wait times, such as Germany, Italy, etc.
The point of this is that you must wait in line several hours to get stamps for your passport, and many of them limit stamps to 2-5 per person.
What need would they have to limit the number of stamps, you ask? Several reasons:
Everyone has a friend, relative, classmate, etc. who could not afford the time or money to come to the Expo, it takes a lot of effort and persistence to wait in line/fight your way through it to achieve the stamps, and they can be sold for money.
That's right, a complete passport can be sold for tons of money: most recently, I heard they go for 6,000 RMB ($880.75)!
Here's the problem: the stamp is a big hassle for no reward. The expo bureau makes 30 RMB per passport, but they do not reimburse pavilions for their ink expenditures; people rarely care for their exhibits and go straight to the stamp line; it is so coveted that fights can break out between people who don't want to wait so lines to the stamping stations must sometimes be guided and roped off. Some staff members from countries like Mexico and Slovenia have personally expressed desires to return home rather than stamp passports every day for hours. I can't say I blame them.

Expense reports

One of my tasks here is to compile receipts from various sources and produce expense reports that might result in reimbursement. This makes me a very popular finance intern, because I often tell people that they should file expense reports and everyone likes to receive money back.
The first expense report I filed was for a man who performed consultant work for our pavilion with the aim of recruiting sponsors. I was nervous and confused, because I had never filed an expense report before; . I've delivered pizzas to guys who were doing expense reports, but never firsthand. Anyway, he bought a plane ticket for the trip, stayed in a hotel, ate at restaurants, drank coffee, saw something entertaining, and took numerous taxi rides. I arranged the receipts by date and category, then I glued them to sheets of paper for easier viewing. After that, I filled out the expense report spreadsheet that summarizes, itemizes, and describes each of the charges. The rightmost columns contain the totals cells, the first in RMB (Chinese currency, stands for RenMinBi, "People's Currency") and USD. After all of the amounts in his expense report were entered, converted, and totaled, one of my colleagues (Jing or Carol) reviewed and double-checked the work, signed the printed copy, and then placed it into the "To Be Approved" expense folder. Upon the approval signature of our Chief Operating Officer, the money was refunded in RMB notes.
I had an interesting expense report situation last month: a woman was fired for various reasons, and the pavilion staff wanted me to complete her expense report as soon as possible. Although I had been advising her for several weeks to begin collecting and arranging her receipts, she waited until 2 days after being fired to begin work. It was a painful situation, especially considering I could not contact her to ask any questions (was this latte business related?). So I was taken off of my ongoing Value in Kind goods assignment to complete her expense report. In the end, it was such a large amount that my supervisor decided to verify some of the charges himself.

We have an IT department, for which several miscellaneous cords, connectors, routers, and other hardware must be purchased, so when receipts for those items come to my desk (assuming they were not prepaid), I must process those as well as the cost of transporting the pieces.
Our sponsorship department deals with the state, city, and corporate entities that made donations to support our pavilion. They often have to wake up very early to attend special meetings or conferences, pick up people from the airport/hotel, etc., at which point the metro stations have not yet begun to transport. It is for this reason that they must ride taxis that can get to be quite expensive depending on where they live. The reverse is also true: sometimes they have to attend late meetings or dinners, take care of sponsors, drop them off at the hotel, and return home. Metro stations usually close at 23:00, and taxis are more expensive at night, so staff members are especially eager to be reimbursed for those.
Next in the list of expenses the sponsorship department staff incurs is phone bills. Many of them have long been using their own personal phones to talk to sponsors, which can get very expensive given the frequency of sponsor calls and visits. They give me their phone card receipts and I note the purpose, time, and amount in their expense reports.
Last in the types of expense reports I have processed is the hospital bill reimbursement. Until recently, when we straightened out the communication with insurance company process, I had to process these reimbursements for students who had unexpected, emergency visits to the hospital. One of these was for a student ambassador who was bitten on the arm by a disgruntled Chinese woman who was tired from waiting in line for 2 hours to visit our pavilion!

So once again, I'm pretty popular for two reasons: I hand out student stipends and I reimburse people for their out of pocket expenses.

Progress Report

Description
My responsibilities as a member of the Finance department team include paying students their weekly stipends, calculating and verifying expense reports, researching and recording the value of goods donated to the USA pavilion by corporations, and conducting inventory searches to locate the donated goods. Staff members and their tasks involved in stipend distribution include: examining and verifying totals on payroll sheets given by Peter, receiving a signed and stamped withdrawal slip completed by Emily, riding a taxi with Jing to the bank, returning with the money, counting and distributing stipends to students, and recording the changes and amounts in the ledger to account for the money. Expense reports have multiple steps: collecting, organizing, and examining each receipt to be expensed, pasting each receipt to a sheet of paper, and then filling out the expense report, which I usually do in Excel. I enter the date, category of expense, amount, and then calculate the total in both RMB and USD; I simplify these processes by using various formulas like SUM and IF/THEN statements. Researching and recording amounts donated requires collecting and translating receipts for items purchased for use in the pavilion/by student ambassadors, contacting sponsor companies to retrieve their records of items donated, and searching for market values for each item. I enter all of these into Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, after which I add the totals to a separate spreadsheet. The donated goods must also be tracked to ensure they are being used by intended people, so I have to go to various departments and individuals to ask whether they are using their items and if not, who has the items now. This has been a problem with some donated items which no longer function. My team members Carol and Jing are integral and necessary parts of the finance department; without them, we would fall apart.

Progress/Changes
Some difficulties I have encountered in the completion of my tasks are: reaching contacts within donor companies, translating complex, uncommon characters into inventory data, finding market values for certain donated items which are obsolete or not listed at lowest price on every web site, and locating documentation showing receipt of donated goods. Steps to solve these problems include: asking people from different departments for contact information and searching the internet for specific company contacts, using my Chinese dictionary or passing the translation task onto a native speaker, conducting extensive searches for price savings and bulk discounts to ensure sponsors are ethically recording the correct values in calculating the amount given to us, and repeatedly asking coworkers for documents, respectively. I find that using my communication skills in both English and Chinese to be very interesting, because it can result in a smoother completion of my task and assurance of future assistance in these projects.

Communication with Supervisors
I communicate openly with my direct supervisor, Emily. She and I often talk of the progress of my VIK and other projects, and I can count on her assistance with tasks like talking to employees at banks or mobile phone offices, understanding instructions, making corrections to certain mistakes, and so forth. I feel I am free to talk to her anytime.

Environment of Company and City
The USA pavilion is a vibrant and exciting workplace, full of many different kinds of employees. Inside the administrative office, we have people from many different departments, each with a different set of responsibilities and varying work schedules. We have an open, airy office with plenty of windows, light, and decorations like pictures, plants, and paintings. Shanghai is also very vibrant and bustling, with many different venues, restaurants, activities, museums, and of course the people. This is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, so many varieties of shops and restaurants are required to fill their needs; often there will be street performers or groups of citizens gathering to play drums or perform tai qi boxing together; the public transportation is extremely cheap and very often convenient, though the high demand can make it a challenge to enter or exit.

Adjusting to the Business Environment, Major Problems, and Interesting Stories
I worked in the food service industry from the age of 15 until January of this year, so almost 14 years. The differences between the two workplaces are stark and sometimes hard to adapt to; these include the speed and excitement of the work, demands on physical vs. mental abilities, and payback for time spent. In the worlds of delivering pizzas, waiting tables, and cooking in classy restaurants, most of the day is spent cutting, mixing, carrying glasses, hot food, etc., and when there is no work to be had, it is time to go home. When a deliverer or waiter works hard, he makes more money in tips. This is misleading in that more money is to be made in the short term, but the experience gained from moving into the office and business world is far more valuable given that I want to change my path in life.

Meeting Secretary Clinton

Wow, it's already been over 2 weeks since I got to meet Secretary Clinton! Time is passing very quickly, unfortunately. I have less than 2 months left here :(.

Anyway, it was an honor meeting Secretary Clinton! She went to our pavilion to take the tour, give a special award donation to some kids, meet some staff, and speak to our sponsors at a special dinner.

When it came time for the student ambassadors (ahem) to meet her, we stood in one of our movie theaters and listened to her congratulatory speech. This included "You are the stars of the pavilion! Chinese people love that you speak Mandarin (some speak Shanghainese too!) to them and we are bridging cultural gaps to strengthen Sino-U.S. relations." She asked to briefly say our names and where we were from, asked who came from Chinese backgrounds and who started from scratch, and then we took a group picture with her. I felt very honored and proud.

The real reason I'm here

USA Pavilion at Shanghai Expo Internship

The University of Memphis's International MBA program requires an internship and a study abroad experience in the country you're specializing in. Thanks to Hans and Mark, two of my supervisors, I was given enough documentation to motivate the head of my IMBA program to let me work at the Shanghai World Expo. They gave me a letter to pass on to Dr. Kedia which detailed my duties and said I would be very valuable asset to the USA Pavilion, and that I would get to work for the CFO of Deloitte and Touche Shanghai!

I'm going to begin blogging about my internship now, because Dr. Brain Janz is the advisor for my internship project and has made that my assignment. Here is the introductory page with a summary thus far. Enjoy!

My internship during the summer of 2010 was in Shanghai, China at the Shanghai World Expo; while there, I worked in the finance department of the USA Pavilion (USAP) under CFO Ma Jun and his assistant Emily Huang. The USAP is a unique pavilion at the Expo, in that it is solely sponsored by private corporations (such as FedEx) and a handful of states (such as Tennessee) and cities, whereas many of the other pavilions, many of which represent individual countries, are partially if not totally government sponsored. Representatives from each of these American cities, states, and companies signed contracts detailing their contribution details, and each of these contributions needed to be recorded in financial statements with backup documentation. Some of the pavilion sponsors donated in VIK contributions, which also required documentation proving receipt and showing where primary usage was to take place. My major task during this internship was to locate, translate, organize and record these documents for financial purposes. This also required research and bilingual communication with Mandarin Chinese speaking customer service representatives, supervisors, and other contacts within the various sponsor companies and governments.

Several recurring tasks required work on my part and that of my fellow SAs who worked in finance: calculating and disbursing weekly SA stipends, calculating, organizing, and verifying expense reports submitted by staff members who traveled in search of sponsors and stayed in hotels; used taxis and purchased food items, all documented on receipts in Chinese characters; reviewing contract information in order to verify contribution amounts; itemizing and paying recurring bills such as company phones. All of these assignments required extensive spreadsheet calculations and documentation of receipts, mostly in Chinese characters.

Parties!

The Shanghai World Expo is populated by 2 kinds of people: the customers (mostly Chinese) and the staff (a mixture). The parties that go on after the expo closes are great, and include people from many different countries and regions. The one I have attended most often is that of the Malta pavilion, which is kind of chill and has mostly people who just want to sit and talk with each other. I have met many different people at Malta parties, such as: UN Pavilion staff from Sweden and Colombia who left tours in Africa to work here, Mexican intellectuals who have degrees in philosophy, Lithuanian people who speak Mandarin in addition to their native Lithuanian, formerly mandatory Russian, and optional English, Israelis, Australians, Nigerians, etc.

Then there's Russia's parties, which I have thus far missed, but I will be there this coming Wednesday.

Thursdays are Angola's amazing parties: amateur and professional artists painting pictures, powerful drinks, people from all over, dance music, and other forms of greatness.

I've been to special parties like the Chilean open house which I accidentally showed up at (we heard that Chile pavilion had cheap glasses of wine, so we went after Secretary Clinton left). They asked us at the door "Were you invited to the open house?" (yes, of course!) So we were treated to free wine and great company from intelligent, high class people from many different regions and ethnicities. When the party was dead, many people left for the Colombia pavilion, where there was more free wine and plenty of hot Latin dance music! We danced for hours, drank, and ate free pizza!

Whom I met today: The Govn'r!

Another person I had the honor of meeting was the governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen! He is a democrat, as am I, so it was a special honor. The reason why he visited the USA Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo is that Tennessee was one of the official state sponsors of the USA Pavilion! The number of state sponsors, in case you were wondering, is just 3: Tennessee, Texas, and Hawaii. It was especially significant for me, considering I am the only student born and raised in Tennessee.

As a continuance to a discussion I had had with our Commissioner General Jose Villareal, we discussed Memphis's BBQ scene with Governor Bredesen: "Mark claims that Memphis has really good BBQ!" Governor Bredesen replied "It's not just a claim, it fact!" To which CG Villareal was put off and brought up the idea of a BBQ challenge to defend the honor of his home city San Antonio. (Hasn't happened yet)

I Met Someone New Again Today

I mentioned in the last edition of “I Met Someone New Today” that there was the occasional person about whom it was controversial to talk. One day I met an Iranian painter, and he is one of the many random people I have met who looked like he was from an Arab country. His wife, who wore a burka that did not cover her face, stood next to him when I said hello one night. That night, he told me that he is one of the artists to decorate the Iranian pavilion (which is beautiful!). Over the past few weeks we have seen each other several times, which is strange because there are so many people here and I leave my apartment at such random times of the day. I offered to help him skip the line at my pavilion, and he reciprocated by inviting me to his and giving me a folder full of his beautiful prints! I have seen him a few times since then, and one day he broke it to me that his wife was going to leave soon and not long after, he would too.

The reason that blogging about this is controversial is that the US government does not have diplomatic ties to that of Iran (which this painter does not like, by the way), so either I am forbidden to become his friend or at the very least blog about it. I would hereby like to encourage all of my peers to make friends with people from these types of countries! One of the points of this whole thing is to develop relations with other countries, and working solely with countries we already get along with seems rather pointless. This is the time when we can rise above disagreements and say to the people who don’t like the bickering that separates our governments, “This is the time! This is the place! This is the opportunity to join hands and set aside our quarrels for 6 months.” When I meet people who agree, it lightens my heart.

Update: I saw this man on the way back home today and he told me that his government does not want us to be friends either! I asked him “Why do our governments believe we cannot be friends when we obviously can? If we can tell that someone is worth our time, make use of our judgment.

As a side note, this is the 5^th time I have randomly seen this man around our village, which is extremely odd because we live with so many different people! It is statistically impossible for us to see each other at such a high frequency, and yet it is so. It takes a greater intellect than I possess to explain why we have met so many times. I don’t see my own roommates that often!

I Met Someone New Today

I Met Someone New Today

This is a new column that I think is very important for international relations between countries. Some say it’s controversial and that I shouldn’t talk about it because officially we might not be the best of friends with every single country here at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. I think that’s bureaucratic bs, and this whole event should be looked at as an opportunity to make friends and strengthen relations while we have the chance. Thus my column entitled “I Met Someone New Today” will not be censored on this blog, whereas it may be censored on others.

My first night in Shanghai, I met a man named Bubba who had opened his own BBQ restaurant/sports bar. He opened it inside our secluded “Expo Village” apartment community, expecting the thousands of international volunteers and employees to support him. After my telling him where I was from, he said “Memphis sure does have some famous BBQ!” Then he asked me to create an account on some Shanghai restaurant voting site, and in return gave me a free draft beer. Incidentally, one of his servers is a blond woman from Sweden.

My second day in Shanghai, I was on the way back from our village cafeteria when I met 2 Israeli men who had just opened a café nearby. I could tell that they were Israeli by listening to their accents, and when I spoke a little Hebrew to them, they asked me if I were Jewish, I replied “Ken, ani Yehudi!” They invited me to their café, and it was nice.

The most significant Jewish event I've been a part of

Here goes, and it's long.

Yesterday, I went to the grand opening ceremony of the Ohel Rachel synagogue on Shaanxi Bei Lu. After numerous years of being a museum dedicated to the memory of the kind Shanghai mayor who, all those years ago, issued 30,000+ passports and visas to Eastern European Jews who would have otherwise died at the hands of the Nazis. I read about it on the Chabad Jewish web site, and asked Rabbi Alevsky about it when he returned my email. I invited some people, most of them work in the admin office with me; although I told Trevor a few days beforehand, I waited until the day of to send out a mass email to everyone in my program, which said “Anyone who is Jewish, you should go with me to this opening.” I also told Max Parasol, a Jew who works in the Australia pavilion, and in the end he was the only one to accompany me to the ceremony.

The ceremony was lovely: attended by Jews of all shapes, sizes, levels of religiosity, and nationalities, it was truly an amazing time and place to be a Jew in Shanghai. There Chinese women holding their babies, and though I assumed they had converted to Judaism, I did not ask; there were many French Jews of both genders and multiple age groups, and in fact the copies of the Chumash in the foyer were translated into French: Le Pentateuch. There were many Israelis, all speaking Hebrew, some with large families and others were mid-twenties, and some of them work in the Israel pavilion at the Expo. There were also Australian Jews, some of whom Max already knew, some he hadn’t ever met but because Australia has a small population and a small number of large cities they had visited several of the same places. Out of the American guests, there were New Yorkers, a guy from Atlanta, two from Mississippi, one from Boston and one from Los Angeles. Some of them had been to Memphis and some had been to other parts of Tennessee, in fact even some of the foreigners (we were all foreigners last night! That is, except for the Chinese staff, Chinese wives and children, Chinese reporters, and Chinese photographers. There might even have been some Chinese politicians in attendance) had visited Memphis. One of the New Yorkers sang parts of Johnny Rivers’ “Long distance information, give me Memphis, TN,” and wanted me to sing along with him.

During the opening ceremony, several rabbis and prominent Jews in Shanghai talked about the fact that we were all there at an amazing period in time. Indeed, when one thinks about how the last time the synagogue was used for prayer it was for refugees from the Holocaust, and this time it is for people who had the right to leave wherever they were to come here, it is quite significant. Three groups of prominent men, including rabbis and the president of Ohel Rachel, were invited to cut ribbons and say prayers before posting the mezuzot to the door frames. Next, we located prayer books and entered the large chapel to say Shabbat prayers Orthodox/Chabad style. We prayed, sang songs like Lecha Dodi, danced around the room, clapped our hands and so forth. When it came time for the Mourner’s Kaddish, it was especially significant for me: I said the Mourner’s Kaddish for my mother, for the first time since her funeral last year. A tear came to my eye and I kept thinking about her the rest of the night. I stood next to an old man who said it too, and he looked at me as if to say, “Why are you saying this?” I explained to him and asked him how long I should say it during prayers, and he said “For 11 months following her death, according to the Hebrew (lunar) calendar.” Following prayers and announcements, there was Shabbat dinner!

It was my first Shabbat dinner, Orthodox-style, in a long time, so I was happy. Bottles of wine and challot were placed on the tables and, sorry to say, we grouped together by native language spoken. I met some interesting Jews there, including a teacher from NYU who has been teaching Chinese students about the business world in China. He wants me to lecture his class about what it’s like to work in business in China, especially about delivering progress reports, which I will actually have to do for the first time before I speak to them. I met a man who owns and rents out apartments in China, a student from Atlanta who studies Chinese and business like I do, an Israeli who works at their pavilion, a French woman, a French family (so not totally by first language), and a couple other Americans whom I didn’t talk to that much. The menu for the evening included vegetable salads, noodle salads, salmon, meat, potatoes, soup, couscous, cookies, brownies, and more, so it was traditional and wonderful. Towards the end of the meal, we were treated to a couple of sermons.

The second and more memorable one, was about a couple of Chabad rabbis who traveled around to various synagogues and Jewish communities to investigate. One man they visited, who lived in Chicago, tried to offer money as a donation to the rabbis, which they turned down. He was surprised, and asked “Why then did you come? Who am I that you should come see me?” The rabbis responded “Every Jew is significant and as important as a letter in the Torah,” referencing the fact that if a Torah scroll is missing even a single letter, it is invalid. This implies that all Jews are a part of Judaism and, in turn, significant and holy. They relayed this story to the rabbi who told them to go and he turned ashen white before saying “We are more important even than that: a letter on a Torah scroll can be erased or cut out, while a Jew is as indestructible and important as an engraving of a letter in the original tablets of the Ten Commandments; once the Jew has been created, there is no way to totally erase him/her.” Sermons (Dvar Torah) that talk about the importance of Jews and how we should all feel significant and valuable, like the world was created for me, to be a light unto the nations, etc., always make me feel good and worthwhile. This is the perfect lecture to hear when one is depressed or just having a bad day, if one takes it to heart and actually listens to the rabbi during his speech.

After the meal, we said the Birchat Hamazon (after meal prayer), and some of us hailed taxis, others walked to their hotels, and still others remained behind to sing/pray/talk about Torah lessons. Considering my religious interest, desire to be part of something great, and senior project which I intend to turn into a longer paper, it was the perfect place for me to be last night. Baruch Hashem for helping me find out about the opportunity and actually attend it. The world is a beautiful place, “and worth fighting for.”

Language

The next point I want to make is about strangers and foreigners. Imagine first that you are someone from any other country in which you were taught very little English, if any. Your first day in the USA, you enter several convenience stores to buy some food and you are not presented with any food you are accustomed to eating. You flag down a taxi, but since you cannot speak English you are unable to get where you need to go. In fact, you are expected to speak English, and discriminated against if you cannot. Let’s say you do know how to say “Hello, nice to meet you, thank you,” or any other common phrases heard in every language. Are you complimented on your pronunciation? Are you told in any way that you have done a good job in learning English, or asked where you studied it? I’m sure you realize

Now take a look at China. Do you know a single Chinese phrase? If you are not afraid to say “Ni Hao” (hello) to a Chinese person, he or she will love you for it! They say it back, ask you “Where did you study,” and compliment your speaking ability. They are pleased, to say the least, which is more than I have said to anyone learning English, I’m sorry to say. Why do you think that is?

Character

A 22 year old Chinese friend of mine told me that Confucian values aren’t prevalent in China anymore, that it’s a myth. The implications of this are that the importance of the masses and community are no longer as important as those of the individual, and with the rise of capitalism it is easy to believe that. For instance, how can every shop that sells identical goods possibly survive if they are willing to pass a sale along to his neighbor? Why would someone buy the same good from multiple vendors if that person only needs one of them? The answer might surprise you: not only do they find a way to survive, but they lead customers to others shops “Miracle on 34^th Street” style. Here’s an example: I needed an adapter to insert my old camera’s memory card into my computer, and I went around several booths in one of many gigantic electronics malls. One of the shopkeepers finally understood and led me to the person who sold them. He expected no payment from the second shopkeeper or me, and returned to his shop to await his next customer. The first point is that they look out for each other. They may not be following all of the rituals that Kong zi (Confucius) taught, but the community’s good is ingrained in them. The same value is reflected when one has forgotten or dropped something: they rush to return it. I have heard people running up to me to return a few Chinese RMB that I dropped, and there is a story about when one of my coworkers left a bag in a restaurant he frequented, and one of the owners delivered it to his apartment. Do you think “Finders keepers, losers weepers” translates into their language or philosophy?

The way things work around here

你好！

As some of you may know, most Expo pavilions were supported mostly by the governments of their respective countries. For instance, oil-rich governments like those of Angola and Saudi Arabia had plenty to spend; in fact one Saudi Arabian official was quoted as saying "Money is no object," thus their large "Moon Boat" pavilion, complete with the largest movie theater in the world, trees supposedly from native Saudi Arabia (some sources say they repeatedly died, so look-alikes were brought in from somewhere in southeast China). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the U.S. government was restricted by law from contributing federal funds to pay for pavilions, so all of the money had to be raised privately. That was incredibly tough, especially given the state of the economy, until Secretary Clinton got involved. She made it her job to find the money, and with less than a year before the Expo was to begin, they found the money and built the pavilion. ("they found the money and built the pavilion" summarizes the hard work of very many politicians, businessmen, architects, coordinators, etc., but to tell the whole story would take more than just one blog post!)

Through the generous contributions of many U.S.-based corporations, the U.S. has an "eagle-shaped" pavilion (hardware), made up of our exhibits, informative movies, and a gigantic Astro-Vision screen outside (not Jumbo-Tron, get it right). Its wings consist of the gift shop below the VIP area, and the quick serve restaurant (not fast food, get it right) below the Administration offices. Also on the top floor is the garden meant to resemble First Lady Michelle Obama's garden.

We also have a very diverse staff (software) including: accountants, marketers, PR, operations, chefs, waiters, security, shopkeepers, sound technicians, so many more, and of course the Student Ambassadors, the "best part, the part that people will remember long after they've forgotten all our exhibits" who have been integrated into almost every department from VIP services to Accounting (ahem!) to Operations and Queue Management, etc. We all hail from different parts of the world: some students were born in China but lived significant parts of their lives in the U.S., almost all of our maintenance and security staff is Chinese, the manager of the uniform room is from Australia, and one of the supervisors of the Hospitality department is Italian!

Incidentally, several of our patrons have shared comments such as "she was so impressed by the student ambassadors and how they are greeting the audience and shepherded them through the experience safely, efficiently, and warmly, and all with only a couple days rehearsal!" and "A number of guests commented that the USA Pavilion was one of the most welcoming pavilions visited because of the friendly demeanor of you, our staff. They were extremely impressed by your Chinese and indicated we were one of the best trained staffs they had encountered on the Expo Grounds." Let's hear it for training classes!

Check out my youtube channel or facebook profile (Search for Mark Wlodawski) for supplementary photos and videos of my experiences here.

Food in and near the Village

One very important part of life is eating (more important to some!), and is no less important here. Shanghai is a very large and densely populated city, and the phrase "Chinese food" covers such a huge gamut that saying "I had Chinese food for dinner" means nothing specific. For example, did you dine in a large, popular, very visible restaurant? If so, you may have overpaid for your pan of fried dumplings, bowl of dumpling soup, pot of tea, or plate of spring rolls. Tea is typically served free of charge here. Maybe you visited a street vendor who was pushing a steaming cart selling ears of corn, steamed buns stuffed with vegetables or meatballs, or craw fish (they're in season!), in which case you probably spent $0.50 for a very satisfying meal (questionable sanitation, however). Next up there's the small, out of the way restaurant that may or may not have a sign on the door. I ate in a place like that a couple of nights ago: only 4 tables but there wasn't a wait, comparatively clean, and they offered free napkins(unusual) and tea (usual). These are the places where you fill up with 4-5 distinct ethnic dishes, brought steaming and delicious to the table, for only $1.50 per person!

What if you prefer to eat prepackaged food from the grocery store or convenience store? Some have pots with hot liquid that store meatballs or ears of corn, or there's a hot case filled with dumpling-type objects near the register, or there's some individual-sized containers of scrambled eggs next to rice, long rolls of sushi, and the list goes on and on.

Last but not least, there's adaptations of foreign restaurants, especially those originating in the U.S. Pizza Hut, Papa John's, McDonald's, Burger King, and don't forget KFC!

You'll find it all here in Shanghai.

The first few days

Ni Hao! Today was the final day of classroom training, and it's both sad and relieving. Over the past few days, we have learned about everything from how to greet certain dignitaries to layouts of the Expo and our pavilion to first aid and how to save people. We were given very quick introductions to Chinese culture, history, values, etc., hospitality techniques and their importance, and many other valuable lessons. The reason I typed "both sad and relieving" is because we had a lot of fun interacting with each other in those classes. We found out who has a sense of humor, who is timid in front of others, who unabashedly speaks his/her mind, and who has artistic talent. Quite a lot for 4 days, I agree!

Anyway, here's a little bit about the area I live in. It's a brand spanking new area of Shanghai called the Expo Village. We live in apartments that have never been occupied, use appliances that were taken off the shelves of Wal-Mart and delivered to us, and go through checkpoints for everything! I swear, this place is so locked down and secure that I would never dream of being afraid. Seriously, security is everywhere and you need special passes to get into the Village.

I'm starting to learn my way around here, which is a feat let me assure you! Everyday I walk for hours and jog in the morning, there is only some yogurt in my refrigerator, and the food I eat is very light, so I'm already losing weight! I feel like it's been such a short time since my last time here, but some things here remind me the length of time, like the fact that there was an old sim card in the back of my previous Chinese phone, and that and the metro travel card were both inactive and obsolete.

The Expo site is huge and there are so many amazing pavilions so far. Most of them are colorful and very creative, some of them aren't, and some are not yet complete, but the opening day is quickly approaching so the urgency is becoming apparent.

The rough estimate of visitors to the USA Pavilion is 35,000 people/day, though that's an estimate for something that has never happened before.

More to come!