Shanghai day 3

I am yet to find out exactly why some Chinese men tend to grow their finger nails exceptionally long on their left hand. My initial thought was that is could be related to playing the guitar, but our driver this morning had exceedingly long nails on his pinky and his thumb… I am not sure as to how beneficial this would be when playing a musical instrument.

We arrived at Spring Airlines at 8:30 a.m. in time to get some shots of the company offices and the senior manager’s weekly English lesson. The class seemed motivated in learning new vocabulary together despite their being at various levels and abilities. Filming the class gave us a real insight as to how the Chinese were learning English and as to what areas of the language seemed to cause the most problems for learners.

Once the class had finished, we were given the opportunity to meet with some of the cabin crew and several pilots. Every member of staff at the company needs to have a relatively good level of English due to the fact that Spring Airlines recently went international. The company have also very kindly offered to fly Joel and me to Xiamin on Friday to film the cabin crew in action!

The rest of our day was spent filming in and around the Spring Airlines base. I was also particularly keen on finding out about Expo 2010, Shanghai China. The event is expected to attract record numbers of people to Shanghai when it opens in May next year. We will be heading to the construction site on Wednesday next week in order to capture some of the construction process on film. I also met Haibao, the event mascot.

Our trip to Shanghai is going really well so far. It is a real challenge in making sure that we get all the footage we need for the film, especially as we only have one chance to film for the project while we are here. I am thoroughly enjoying my time in China so far; the people that we have met are so hospitable and Shanghai is a phenomenal city.  I hope to be able to continue at this level of progress next week and that I will have enough time to write every day!

All the best!

Daniel