AT DUBAI AIRPORT 1981

This photo was taken when the American ISI skating team arrived in Dubai to appear in my show. I am on the front row, second from the right kneeling down. To my left is Kassim Nassir a Dubai police officer. The two Arab men in white dishdash shows Col. Khamis of Dubai police on extreme right. Third from right standing is Pete Streng wearing black jacket. He was in charge of Pan Am in Dubai and was one of our biggest ice show sponsors. Very generous with airline tickets to bring people in and in allowing me to fly all over the world for nothing. Great guy.

WARM WEATHER AT LAST

Not to sure how long this will last but the warm weather finally set in on Saturday and continues today. So nice, hate to be indoors. I think my little Kita must be having a lot of fun running around in the grass at our apartment complex.

My good friend for many years, William Cheng (Photo here), who coaches at Festival Walk, will fly up on Thursday to take a look at Hangzhou. He has Easter holidays in HK and wanted to see our fair city and take a rest.

We're also working toward our Grand Opening events and will either do a large professional ice show or a skating competition and possibly both. We're moving toward this cautiously because of the world financial crisis, but also because our most senior manager of the company has to give his approval, which he hasn't done as yet.

I've just returned from Nanning, China, which is located 300km from Hanoi in Vietnam. Beautiful city and not as advanced as Shenzhen or Hangzhou, but a nice place with friendly people. We are building a large complex there with Grand Hyatt, MIXc shopping mall and of course, World Ice Arena Nanning...a full Olympic size rink. The first ever in that city.

My next trip will be to Shenzhen and Hong Kong and possibly Beijing after that.

COLD DAYS IN HANGZHOU

Hangzhou has had an unusually cold winter which seems to be going on forever. We've touched on summer a few times, but it went away as rapidly as it arrived. I bought 3 electric scooters. Two for me and one for the boy who looks after my home and dog so that he can do the shopping. Love to ride to work on this thing. Makes me feel like I am one of the people. Quite a change from my car and driver in Shenzhen, but a lot faster as cars are always stuck in traffic here and scooters just keep on going. I must say, however, that the way people drive cars and scooters here is a bit insane. They pay no attention to on-coming cars (neither do the pedestrians), run redlights, make illegal turns and everyone is in a hurry no matter who gets hurt along the way. Reminds me of the plane I took yesterday. People were pushing and shoving to be first on the plane. Once on and as the plane had just touched down, they stood up, got overhead bags, and raced down the aisle to be first off...even though we were still rolling along at 300kph. When flight attendants tell them to sit down, they ignore them completely. You would get arrested in North America if you did this. Oh well, life in China is a great adventure. Photo is of Michelle Kwan because I didn't have another to put here so why not.........