Week 3 already

So here I am sitting in my hotel.  It is 6:30 AM and I should be outside walking/jogging but it is raining so I thought I would do a quick blog entry.

To catch up on the weekend we did a little Qingdao sightseeing on Sunday.  We went to an area of town call Badaguan -  It translates to 8 passes and is a series of 8 streets with many European influenced buildings which were built during the German Occupation the beginning of the last century.  The day was HOT and HUMID so we were grateful for the many beautiful trees in the area. Originally we had planned to walk down to another famous Qingdao landmark called the Zhan Pier but because of the heat we tried another adventure -  the bus.  Since we can't really read anything and we can't speak much of the language our approach is to load up the location on google maps and show it to the bus driver -  if he nods we get on.  Then we follow the blue dot on the map app to make sure we know where to get off.  Perfect worked great and the best part was that it cost 1 yuan. Maybe 15 cents US.  Uber will also work but you have to put the address in in Chinese which is problematic for us.  Plus two of the team have had their Uber accounts hacked so I prefer not to use it.

The Pier was crowded but a ton of fun.  So here is something random.  We get stopped alot to get our picture taken with random people.  So we are doing a bunch of selfies with people we do not know.  On this day we were approached by a group of students who saw us and all the cameras came out.  We do a lot of smiling.  On the pier we tried to take a group picture and as Bharat was taking the picture, about 8 other people also got their camera out.

This week at work has been busy.  Week 1 we did interviews and got the overall understanding of the business.  Week 2 we used some Design Thinking Principe and created an Empathy Map, we outlines the objectives or the to be scenarios. We did both a market and financial analysis to make sure our objectives were feasible. We also created a SWOT analysis to identify what we really need to focus on to create the biggest impact.  This week we did a Fishbone analysis of the problem areas and this allowed us to use  another Design thinking artifact called Ideation  It was the first time for me to do many of these things and I am so grateful for the opportunity to do this.  I am truly learning so much.  We are now able to make our recommendations and begin creating our final presentation.  Next week will be mostly workshops and presentations!!!

Another fun thing we did this week was participate in Emergency training hosted by the of the Clients Angels Emergency Assistance Center.  They taught us how to escape a smoke filled building, how to use a fire extinguisher, how to tie knots that you night need to escape a fire and also CPR.  As my teammate Maria said "It was brilliant".   I thought they did a great job and this is something that isn't really done here in Qingdao and is really needed.