The Magic of China

Iris Iris will always be, my best 'Chinese friend', always. Her background, infectious, larger-than-life personality, with her maturity and wisdom made her 'someone special' to me, and a positive influence. We initially met 'in passing' at work in EF, because we were based at different centres, she was in Binjiang Centre, while I was in Yingtai, but she was someone who was talked about in the office always positively. Since Yingtai centre was closing down and I was being transferred to Binjiang centre, we were going to be getting to know each other better, and the colleague-dynamics at this centre would be different from my current one. At Yingtai centre, it was me and all male colleagues, with Dan, Vincent, Chris Yu and Andy, at Binjiang it would be me and all girls, or mostly girls. My future colleagues would be Chinese Janet, who studied in Ireland, Cheryl from Wuhan, Suki, who had studied in Australia, Kat from Manchester, and Lewis, from York, who had two k...

 Since this was my first 'real' job, I had no idea what an annual 'team building' activity was. I assumed it had something to do with being in teams, perhaps a type of sports. The company, EF, decided to host the first team building event I attended in Suzhou, around the time of Halloween, with each 'centre' having its own 'theme'. Since Andy Oliboni was the manager of two centres we decided to have a combined theme of 'the Mario Brothers', though, I really have no idea as to how the theme came to fruition, and all I knew was that it was a Nintendo game involving two, if I may say, Italian-looking men with thick black hair and moustaches, overcoming obstacles to get to a beautiful girl with long blonde hair in a pink dress, with a similar look as Aurora in sleeping beauty. It was decided that there would be only one Princess Peach from each centre, with everyone else dressing as a Mario Brother. I really didn't care who I was, but I was told ...