Snowy weather

Has the weather here made the news much over there? Currently we have over 2 million stranded passengers who were on their way home for spring festival, and thats just in Guangzhou. A couple days ago there were 400 thousand in Shanghai. They are mostly migrant workers who have no where to stay here while their job sites are closed for the holiday. The government has opened schools as shelters and is providing basic food and health care. Everyone is being encouraged to just get a refund for their train tickets, but a lot of people refuse to give up on going home for the holiday. For people like the migrant workers, this is the only time they are able to see their families all year. Here in Shanghai we got about 1-2 inces of slush. It didn't cause too much trouble in Shanghai. The biggest problems were further south where they had ice storms that destroyed power grids that supported the train systems. I haven't heard many details, but there are a lot of people in some southern provinces that have been without electricity for days, and will continue to be without it for at least a few more. It has been over 50 years since Southern China had a snow storm that was anything like this. The numbers they report are so huge its hard to keep track of. So many peoples houses have collapsed due to the weight of the snow and ice, and the damage estimate just keeps climbing.

In spite of all this we are going to be traveling to Sherry's home. We are flying out Wednesday the 6th at 10am. We're headed north into the sunshine. The weather is supposed to calm down a couple of days before we leave and its supposed to be sunny the day we fly out.

In other news, Sherry is working hard teaching classes during the busy season of the winter holiday. We didn't know enough about the situation and didn't talk to the right people soon enough to be able to arrange for me to have classes for winter break. I have been once again reminded that no matter were you are business men are business men, and no matter what they would like you to think they are taking care of themselves...so we have do to the same.

I uploaded a few pictures from our first month here. http://picasaweb.google.com/HobblyJig/FirstMonthInChina