Orientation Day!!

Today we had our first day meeting together as a team.  Before I share what we did let me introduce you to the team

In the top left hand corner is Kaldeep.  Kaldeep is from India and he and I will be working together on our project to create a Marketing Strategy for the Ural IT Cluster.

The rest of the team are - from left to right

• Zoe - China
• Rafael - Brazil
• Stuart - USA
• Divya - India
• Thamrong (Fite) - Thailand
• Abhinav - USA
• Vilma - Lithuania
• Michael - India

After breakfast we met in the Conference Room and Tanya and Katya from CDC took us through a briefing on security, working with clients, etc.  

After the logistics part of the meeting we all had an opportunity introduce ourselves and how we came to be part of this CSC team.  To do this we were given a large flip chart on which to draw our journey. I found it a bit emotional talking about why I was on this team  .... here because I had to return to NZ half way through my initial assignment for family reasons and had been given another chance to do this.

 
Katya also spent an hour with on Russian language - which I am absolutely hopeless at - to the point that that I spent US$5 to buy a Russian language app for my i-phone that will do the talking for me if I get stuck :-)

After the briefing we met and Katya took us on a short guided tour of the city to make sure we all knew where banks, supermarkets, etc were.

We then went to a really nice restaurant for late lunch/early dinner - seems to be becoming a pattern.  Tanya and Katya had arranged for a birthday cake for both Fite and Divya who had celebrated their birthdays on route to Ekaterinburg.

My observations about Ekaterinburg having now spent a weekend here

• It feels like a very laid back and relaxed city
• Ifeel very safe
• The weather is not a lot different from summer at home
• The people are friendly and helpful
• It is a very easy city to walk around - very compact
• The red line walking tour is such a great idea and such an easy way to find your way around
• It is a city full of statues (will blog on these later)
• There is heaps of interesting street art (will blog on this later also)
• The clouds are amazing - different from clouds I have seen other places - maybe because it is so flat the sky seems bigger!
• There are some nice restaurants
• The cost of living is about the same as at home 
• The sun does not go down until around 11.00 p.m. .... and it never gets really dark