First Day of Work..

Hello everyone,

As you can see, I have attached a couple of more pictures. Obviously, the bottom 2 are of our hotel. As you can see, we are not hurting when it comes to our accommodations. I mean, when we travel domestically, we don't stay in Motel 6's or anything, but this is probably the nicest place I will ever stay in my life. Maid service comes twice a day - to give new sheets/towels/etc and then to take the decorative pillows off your bed and refill anything you might have taken out of the refrigerator. Everyone is ready and willing to wait on you hand and foot - we have made friends with a waiter in the restaurant and one of the bellhops. The bell hop claps his hands and then a cab comes from the parking lot to take us where we need to go. He has been trying to teach Bruce to clap the same way - as Charna and I expected, he is a diligent clapping student, working hard to perfect his art. He is getting there. :)

The other picture is a picture Bruce took of Charna and I in Chinatown. Bruce and I have deemed Charna our chopstick champion - she is by far the most apt of the three of us with them. Bruce and I are proficient - we are not starving or anything like that, so we must be doing something right. Even our colleague in Singapore commented at lunch today that he was impressed with our chopstick skills! Lunch today was Japanese fare.

Today was our first day of work, and it went very well. We had a kickoff meeting that was very successful and then we got a presentation to help us understand Singapore's role in our organization. It was good to hear, because we knew a lot of what he was saying - shows that the planning time and effort spent was time well spent.

A few interesting things to note. First, this is not like any of the audits we typically do, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we are in a high rise building down town. We have a great conference room, with a huge table and a lot of windows. Sounds like a small thing, I know, but we are typically used to auditing at a plant in whatever space they can make available - usually with white walls and no windows. The office is just like an office in the US, in many respects. A receptionist, offices, cubes - all pretty normal. In Singapore, they conduct most of their business in English, so language is not a problem. This audit is also different from other audits in that the work we do here is one piece of whole group of audits we are doing related to this operation. As you can see, this is a pretty neat project - I can't believe luck would have it that I would get to do this. The team has said several times how lucky we are to have this experience. We will get to see the projected future model of a portion of our business from start to finish in this process - when we go to China in 2 weeks to see 3 of our manufacturing sites.

One other important thing to note. When it comes to adventures in eating, Bruce wins that award. He ate ox tongue the other day at breakfast, and a large portion of what he ate today for lunch was uncooked and of the swimming genre. For those of you that know me well, you know the swimming genre is very low on the list of food choices for me. Thankfully, chicken rice is a local favorite around here, so I am not starving. If you could see the breakfast (which I might add is included in our room rate - otherwise we would be looking for alternative breakfast options!) you would know that we are not starving. They have chocolate croissants to rival those I had in France.

I hope this posting finds everyone well. It did not rain much today, but it looks like it is clouding up. We are meeting in a bit to go find dinner..I am still full from lunch today..ugh. Take care and have a great day! ~Nicole