Chinese feasts !

Well, after the first Chinese feast on Monday, when I was invited to a dinner offered by the Chinese Bridge Federation, I had a marvellous evening last night - I was invited by the President of Zone 6 to a private dinner at a restaurant in "downtown" Shanghai. It all started with a bus trip to the restaurant - an adventure in itself as it is a Chinese Holiday this week and the streets were thronged with people, wandering all over the road, with street vendors selling everything from clothes and souvenirs to food and drink.

We made it safely to the restaurant which was in one of the old buildings and is used for private parties. And the food started coming - I have never seen so many courses ! There was something for most tastes, and it was a real challenge to try them all. I found that I really don't particularly like jellyfish ... it had been (I think) fried, and was kind of like a solid crunchy but nevertheless jelly-like texture - I can't describe it better than that. I bottled out on the sea-cucumber, but tried most of the other dishes. Some I liked better than others, but there were some really fabulous ones among them. The slow cooked pork was memorable and the braised beef nothing short of magnificent. I was surprised to find foie gras and caviar (not togther - as separate dishes!) on the menu and I have no idea what variety of mushrooms we ate but they were excellent. There were some amazing vegetable dishes including one of the smallest peas (or maybe a variety of bean) that I have ever seen and were quite stunning! I discovered that I can live without ever eating Lotus again, and the shrimps with ginko aren't very interesting unless you dip them in the vinegar/soy dipping sauce. The company was fun and it was a great evening.

This morning started with reading the bulletin as normal, but it was full of bridge hands so I didn't linger over long with it !! Then there were some reports to type up and get ready for the WBF Women's Committee Meeting which is on Friday, then a report to write for the Executive Committee about the World Wide Bridge Contest (by the way, don't forget to come and play in that next year will you !!)

Then I went on a search through the building for the on-site organiser which gave me some exercise (it's a BIG building!). I didn't actually find her but I did find a good view out of the windows next to the lifts, so that is what the pictures are - the big tower is the very famous Shanghai Telecoms tower, and the view is just up the street - as you can see, even mid-afternoon it is very busy.

Having failed in my mission to find the person I was searching for, I returned like a good girl to my desk and sorted out the lists of transnational teams

The bridge progresses successfully I gather - the playing conditions seem excellent and the teams are happy which is the really important thing at these events!

Now, as it is 7.15 pm, I am going to upload this and go to find some food !

Getting into the swing of things ...

We have spent the day "moving in" to the convention centre - getting our computers set up adding new printer drivers (why is the one you want never there ?!), and getting onto the internal network that has been set up. The hospitality desk is up and running and distributing the bags, players are arriving almost by the minute and all the staff are here. The Vu-Graph studio is in place as you can see, though the background wiring is still being done. We have photocopiers set up (5 big ones …) notices are on the display boards outside the offices to tell people where to find places like the Press Room. There is a small army of helpers building the tables with screens ready for play, moving the computers to their final stations, checking the network connections between the floors.

Tomorrow things get going in earnest, with the Captains' Meeting and then the Opening Ceremony in the evening ... then an early night for everyone ready for the start of play on Sunday morning.

On a personal note, we discovered a great Korean restaurant last night and enjoyed beef with noodles and some fantastic chicken soup with ginseng! It was a fun evening – a massive building, the first four floors filled with shops then the next six (yes six) floors just of restaurants ! I have never seen so many restaurants in one place – something for every taste, and it was really hard to choose between them.

This is a photograph of the Huang Po River taken from my bedroom window at dawn … just to show you a bit of Shanghai !

I will find some more pictures later to give you even more of a flavour of the event ... so watch this space as they say !

Empty rooms !

This morning was the time to check through the venue and make final decisions about which room should be allocated for which purpose - obviously the playing rooms are the main halls and are unchanging, but the offices have to be carefully looked at and decisions made about the layout - both for which room will be which office, and for the layout within the rooms as well. It is surprising to some people how much infrastructure there has to be and the different aspects that have to be taken into account. For example, the duplication room is very noisy, so can't be next to a meeting room. The vu-graph studio needs a lot of space, plenty of air conditioning (it gets very hot under those lights) and must be in a quiet area. The WBF meeting room requires a board room layout, the WBF office (mine, shared with Carol who is WBF Secretary and Christine who is Assistant Treasurer) needs space enough for all the paperwork, somewhere for people to hold quiet one-to-one meetings, and things like that.

The only room that isn't empty at the moment is this one, where a lot of the equipment is stashed awaiting distribution to the various departments as you can see in this photograph. This is all shipped in from Europe and the boxes you can see contain hundreds of boards for duplication, all the WBF laptops - about 80 of them - printers, leads, hubs and sundry other items. Two container-loads of material in total is shipped out to a Championship ... more if we need to ship tables and screens, but in this instance those are being provided by the local organisation.

The playing room is having the partition built to separate the Open and Closed Rooms, and once that is done the tables will be built and it will be transformed from an enormous open space to a very busy area - I will post more pictures of that later !

Many of the players are now starting to arrive and have a look round and of course lots of the staff members too - it is great to see them and renew old friendships ... for most of them we only meet once a year at the World Championships, so there is lots of news (and gossip) to catch up on !

Watch this space for more ... hopefully tomorrow !