The Team Arrives in Beijing!

It’s been an exciting 24 hours in Beijing! The team traveled from all over the globe to our accommodation to kickoff CHINA42 IBM Corporate Service Corps. (“42” means we are the 42nd IBM team to be deployed to China.) All of us, jet-lagged and tired, met up in the lobby for some greetings, hugs, and lots of cheers! Then, we headed to dinner where we had some yummy dumplings. Even better than the dumplings, was the company. It was so great meeting the faces I have seen on weekly video calls leading up to this experience. We chatted about our journeys to Beijing, family at home and what we were most excited about.

I surprisingly slept pretty well and woke up the next day ready to explore the city!

While in Beijing, each of our sub-teams will have Project Assistants which are typically students from around China. Not only will they be our Project Assistants, they will also be our translators, navigators, and WeChat experts aka our lifelines. All of the teams Project Assistants met us in the morning for a day of sightseeing. We were led by our fearless leaders, Tian and Yuying Li, from Pyxera Global, the organization facilitating our assignments over the next month. We boarded the bus and drove to our first location: Beijing Olympic Park.

The park is where the 2008 Olympics were held. We walked around and got tons of pictures of the “Bird’s Nest” and National Aquatics Center. We even spotted the IBM Beijing HQ — check out the selfie, see the strange looking building behind us — that’s it! And if you’re wondering…yes we did use a bright pink selfie stick to capture this shot…

Next up we stopped for lunch or you could call it a feast. We got fish, pork, beef, rice, noodles, salad, veggies…and so much more. I love how most of the restaurants here are family style , so you get to try a little bit of everything. We had time to roam around a bit and a couple of us stumbled upon the cutest photo-booth machine, see evidence below…

Next stop was Jinshan Park, which was beautiful and, I imagine, peaceful, when there are less tourist around. With rather high amounts of pollution in the air, the view from the top of the park was hazy, but still beautiful.

By this time almost everyone needed a nap, so we drove back to the hotel. With just over 17,000 steps for the day, I needed to put my feet up! Tomorrow is our offical orientation to learn more about what‘s to come in the next month and prepare us for the kickoff with our clients on Monday. I am so excited to get to work!!