Annual events

On Thursday we had an IBM China meeting and all of the different offices within China attended via teleconference. At the beginning of the meeting each office had 60 seconds to say Happy New Year to the rest of IBM China in their own way. Since we have a lot of foreigners in the Dalian office we had people from most of the countries here give New Years' wishes in their native languages and dressed in their native clothing. I'm the American on the left (below) in jeans, cowboy boots and Redskins hat, followed by Bangladesh, India, Philippines, Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc... there were a bunch of us. I think we took more than 60 seconds.



On Sunday night we had our company annual holiday party at the Shangri-La Hotel here in Dalian. We had about 900 people from our office attend. All of the entertainment was performed by our employees. We have a lot of talented people here and we were able to put together about four hours of all different types of entertainment. I joined some others in singing Rodgers & Hammerstein's You'll never walk alone. We had people sing, dance, tell jokes, do skits, a magic act, etc...



Some of the lovely hostesses for the party...



Some ladies do an Indian dance...



Some singers...



More singers...



A Spanish dance routine...



Ok, I had to pose with the ladies who did the Spanish dance routine. :)



Even though I did not understand most of it (a lot of it was in Chinese and Japanese) it was a lot fun. After the party was over and I was heading home I got a call from work and they needed help with something, so I ended up having to work until 4:30am. Ugh.