After our welcome dinner the Saturday we arrive in Shanghai, one of the deans of the college of mechanical engineering at the university we're studying at, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, did something we were not expecting. He invited representatives from our Purdue program to join the school of mechanical engineering at SJTU in a new years celebration dinner. On top of that, he told us that it would be a lively event and that he, "hoped we would be able to contribute a performance." Needless to say, we were pretty shocked by this, but for the sake of preserving if not improving the program's relationship with SJTU, how could we refuse? To top things off, we were given approximately 10 days notice and at that point we had only been in the country for just over 24 hours. We soon discovered that we had forgotten to recruit someone with an exceptional, stage worthy skill and that we would have to pull something together. Catriona and I became involved because we are members of the leadership team for our group. As CEO I didn't have an option, and Catriona was nice enough to listen to my pleads for her to join me.
Eventually, we settled on doing a group dance. We came to this decision because we were otherwise talent-less and because it is very common for groups of people to do these kinds of dances at corporate parties and other like occasions in China. Our performance is scheduled for sometime around 7 p.m. China time on Thursday the 18th. There will be video and pictures of the event, so look forward to that when we get out of class on Friday.
For now, you can take a look at the Chinese dance that will make up about half of our performance Catriona and I never would have guessed we would be dancing on stage in China, but let's just hope for the best.
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