Hey there, it’s Jamie again and this time I want to blog about some exciting news for InternChina. As you will see from the recent blog posts, we are very happy to welcome Jack to our team as the future Qingdao office manager! We have also just welcomed Amber Sun to our Qingdao team as our new accountant. Their profiles will be added to our Team Page soon. These 2 new recruits represent 2 other big changes for our company. Firstly as many of you already know, our CFO and InternChina co-founder Duan Yifan is now almost 9 months pregnant and will be leaving us for a few months to have her baby! We’re all really excited! Good luck Yifan!

The second big change for our company is that our current Qingdao office manager Jenny will be setting off from Qingdao to CHENGDU early next year to set up the 3rd InternChina office. We’re all really looking forward to having a 3rd exciting destination to offer.

The next big news is that InternChina will be opening a marketing office in the UK next year. On my way back to the UK I am taking some time off to see some other parts of China, Nepal and India. Keep up to date with my travels on Facebook and on my blog: www.jamiebettles.com. Yes, I went there, I made a website with my name as the URL, it just felt right…

After visiting Xi’an, the next stop on my travels was the city where we will open our third China office next year: CHENGDU. Chengdu is an awesome city with a unique feel to it. It’s a big city which is developing fast, but has maintained a very relaxed, easy-going feel to it, with a huge Tea House culture and friendly Sichuanese people.

One interesting thing we observed in Chengdu was that parents were posting ‘personals’ ads in the park for their single offspring with the aim of finding a husband or wife for them! This is something that has to be seen to be believed, but in China there is a real culture of working hard and having no time to find a suitable ‘date’. Often if a child is single for too long, the parents try to intervene!

Overall I would say that Chengdu deserves it’s place in China’s Top 10 most ‘liveable’ cities alongside Qingdao and Zhuhai (Chengdu actually finished above Qingdao and Zhuhai last time they conducted a poll in 2010!). The most obvious attractions in Chengdu are the Giant Panda’s, which are incredible, and the famous spicy Sichuan food. The panda centre is way better than I expected. The pandas have a lot of space and great environment to live in and visitors can get almost within touching distance of the pandas. The pandas themselves love to eat and lie around napping, and are very cute! Chengdu also has a unique cultural feel as it’s close to Emei Shan, one of China’s 5 holy mountains and also has a tibetan district, as the city is so close to the border with tibet. Chengdu has plenty to offer and is close to some of China’s most beautiful countryside, so we are looking forward to offering internships, Chinese study and homestay programs there from 2013!