This week

I've been accused of being somewhat lax in updating my posts, but really there's not been anything happening that I thought might be of great interest to anyone. So, to make amends I thought that maybe I should take stock of the week and see what I've achieved. Not such a bad list now that I look at it.

On Monday Benjamin came home from school with a letter to advise that he's been chosen to practice for the inter-school soccer competition run by the Brazil Football Club. After the first practice another letter came home to say that he'd been chosen for the primary 3 team. So now he's representing his school at primary 3 level on 8th December at the Macau Stadium. Unfortunately this happens to be at the same time as my seminar on cross-cultural adjustment in Macau. More about that later.

On Tuesday I'd arranged to meet with the Recruitment Project Director for the Australian casino. The poor man has to find 10,000 people to staff the next development. This is going to be extremely difficult (note the article I've written for Macau Business in an earlier November post on this blog). We're both on an HR Committee in Hong Kong. Up until now I have been the only member from Macau so I had wanted to catch up with him to chat about a couple of initiatives that I'd been thinking about. The outcome of this meeting was that we're thinking of working towards an HR group in Macau to facilitiate the networking and information exchange of HR professionals here. There are so many difficulties here and each and every HR person I've met complains about the same problems but nothing seems to be happening to lobby changes. I hope that bringing these professionals together might make a difference. So Liviano and I will commence work on this next year. I've already obtained interest from people within The Venetian and the British Business Association of Macau. Liviano also wanted to hear about my research and questionnaire and asked for a brief on it. He might be interested to use it within his work environment. I've written that up and will need to deliver it to him some time this coming week.

Wednesday was spent trying to get my head around how I am going to deal with the missing data from my questionnaires. A little too technical to go over here but suffice to say I struggled to stay awake most of the afternoon.

I finally caught up with Soo May for afternoon tea over in Old Taipa Village on Thursday afternoon. She's been busy with new projects at her institute and a conference in Korea so we've not seen much of each other recently.

I'd been invited to go to see a local Macanese Patuá production with an English lady who's been in the region for decades. Jill has long experience setting up businesses in Hong Kong in HR recruitment and Real Estate but has been relaxing a bit since selling her last business in 2003. She's now raring to go again and is an amazing source of information on the happenings in the government. The comedy that we went to was delivered in Patua so we missed many of the linguistic jokes that the rest of the audience appreciated. The content was eye opening. It was a satire on the public hospital system here and very very damning of the way things are run. Fascinating to see it from the viewpoint of the real insiders. This was my first theatre going event with another adult. We had a light dinner beforehand and it was all very civilised. 15 minutes to get there, one lift up from the carpark to the cafe and then just up the stairs into the theatre. This Macau can be quite convenient to get around.

The kids and I chilled out on Friday after school. Their Chinese tutor, Jennifer, turned up to say that they doctor had taken 450mls of blood by mistake the day before when she'd been to donated and that she wasn't able to make it to teach the kids: fair enough. The medical services here can be down right scary. So, the 3 of us just had dinner and watched the new Tom and Jerry CDs that Ben had brought back from Vietnam (he gets around) the last time he came home.

Benjamin's now sitting next to me on the other computer. He's doing research on the internet about dinosaurs. He's presently exclaiming that the tyrannosaurus rex was taller than a giraffe. Bridget's off to a friends house down on Coloane but will be back in time for wushu practice this afternoon.

So that's been this week. And between all of this I've been writing up my thesis and analysing my data.