From Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore...

The office building in Ho Chi Minh City in which the Canadian Consulate has  its offices.  We met with the Consul General and one of the Trade Commissioners to get some more information on the developments in Vietnam and to update them on our activities.

Across the street is the central post office. When I traveled with my little backpack in 1982 and 1983 I would find these post offices happy places because in the "poste restante" section there might be some letters waiting for me from Holland. Nowadays with the internet and smart phones that romantic concept is certainly history. This post office is still a bust place though....

And the long distance phone booths are also still there, but obviously not much used anymore.

From Ho Chi Minh City we flew two hours further south to Singapore today for meetings on Monday.  A bustling city and for me hard to recognize since  I was here in 1982...... Just a few photos from my hotel room for now.

Motorcycles and statues

Motorcycles....there are millions of them in the cities in Vietnam. They are everywhere at any time of the day. Carrying sometimes 3, 4 or more people. Carrying kids picked up from school. Carrying the most amazing packages (and in rural areas also animals). An amazing sight for us foreigners...

After arriving in Ho Chi Minh City this afternoon, we invited a number of our agencies for a dinner. It was very nice to meet some of our partners in active student recruitment in this city. The company was good and the food was delicious.

During the walk back to our hotel we enjoyed the lively scenes of the many people out on the streets (of course in the pleasantly warm evening temperatures here). The statue of Ho Chi Minh keeps an eye on these new generations of his country (Vietnam has a very young population). The center of the city has some beautifully restored old buildings from the colonial periods.

Beijing to Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City....

Today we had a busy day in Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. We reviewed possibilities with the VACC with whom Seneca signed a MOU two years ago. The college system in Vietnam is rapidly growing to respond to the changing labor markets needs of this fast moving economy.

Only at the end of the meeting did we notice that one of our Vietnamese colleagues had been sitting barefoot on the meeting table. That is how I want to be in my office!!!

Afterwards we were at a national TV news show (photos later) and then we visited an IT university in an economic development zone where the government hopes to create the Vietnamese version of a Silicon Valley. We had dinner with a few students from Brunei and Nigeria, studying here in Vietnam but also interested to come for post-graduate studies to Seneca. Fast changing world it is!

Tomorrow we fly to Ho Chi Minh City (as the Saigon of the past is now named.....).

Back in Beijing (and a few other cities...)

Back in Beijing (3rd time within 12 months). Snow in the city + a few of the coldest days on record; just our luck coming from cold Canada. We were with a team from Seneca presenting on work we have started in China with a partner organization on developing curriculum and training teachers on courses from our practical nursing program (the country is waking up to the hugely increasing need for health care workers for the fast growing aging population)....

Lori and Sharon, two of the Practical Nursing program coordinators at Seneca, presented with translator Nick, our Director Asia Pacific. After a few presentations Lori and Sharon started their 2nd training session this year, and Nick and I visited a few of our Beijing partner institutions.

A former Minister of Education welcomed us at one of the presentations and then hosted us for a wonderful lunch.

Always nice to be warmly welcomed. And one of those interesting translation examples...

One of our partners took us to an amazing "Peking Duck" restaurant where the menu was bigger than I have ever seen.

Stylish restaurant where the ducks are grilled on wood-fires.....

Also in Beijing now the rental bikes on the streets. One more meeting in which we joined a trade mission of the City of Markham, and then off to Vietnam....

Packed up and ready to go + unpack in another hotel; the life out of the suitcase for a couple of weeks on the road: from Beijing to Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore to Shanghai and to Manila + then back to Toronto via Tokyo. Just another day in the office...

Visitors from Chile

This week I hosted two colleagues from a Polytechnic Institute in Chile. Here we are with the Dean of Seneca's Faculty of Communications, Arts & Design (on the far left) and this year's President of the Seneca Student Federation (on the far right) - she is the first elected student in that position who is with us as an international student (she is from Ukraine).

I took Carmen and Francisco to a variety of  our "learning enterprises" as well as some of our mixed classrooms (which are classroom and training laboratory at the same time). Here they take a break from all the running around in the tourism flight services training lab. This lab has a fully simulated environment to train for in-flight services.

One of the other labs we visited is one of the integrated classrooms for programs in the Center for the Built Environment (part of the civil engineering programs). Students are trained here to maintain older electric systems in buildings (which probably still can be found in 80 % of the current industrial and commercial buildings) to the most modern "smart building" systems.

We gave our two visitors a good idea of our program and teaching approach and how we build our infrastructure to facilitate the new learning methods. And I got to speak Spanish for two days again!

Apples, Stroopwafels and Aruba going green

It is the season to pick the apples in Niagara. I brought a bunch to Toronto to bring some health and freshness to the teams of the English Language Institute, the international student services and the business development & projects. Within two days each basket was empty....

Then we had this week visitors from six colleges in Holland (HBO and MBO) and they brought some of those delicious Dutch "stroopwafels".....

Finishing off the week with hosting the Minister of Education from Aruba to sign an MOU with Seneca for scholarships for students from that island State, as well as exploring the possibilities to assist them with technician training for the retro-fitted plants and buildings once Aruba reaches its "carbon-neutral" status in cooperation with Richard Branson's "Carbon War Room" project.

It was a good week with also visitors from the University of Central Asia (working with Seneca' instructional designers team), two new proposals out the door for Tanzania and Dubai, and progress made in another few proposals for work in Egypt and Vietnam....