Shauna Taylor just joined us last Thursday and has been on the job since Friday. She will manage the shark protection project and will have the Shanghai Fish Flyer ready by May 15th. The fishmenu.marinedream.org website front end is finished and will be up on the 5th of May. Our volunteers from SISU just finished calling restaurants advertised in City weekend what type of fish they are selling. Shauna met up with the professor from the fisheries university to get the list of fish that are sold and consumed in Shanghai. We are on track!

Meetings this week with Professor Jing of the China East University and who is also a member of CERN, to see whether we can work together.

Shawn just finished freetrees.marinedream.org - testing will be done on Wednesday when we receive 8,000 questions. Annie did a great job to do the voiceover with her friend of 8,000 characters.

Talked last week as well with professor Dajun from Texas University and who has made the database with the frequency of chinese characters in the chinese language and the english translation. He is very happy to join us and share this database for this project.

Final sponsors for May 17th we will know on Monday. Talks with ICS as well and Brendan, chef of Sasha has already agreed to make a dish made of sustainable fish especially for marinedream

Exciting time - 24/7 work but we are getting somewhere and we get more and more people coming to us to join and help out!

when sharks die, the oceans die
“First ever gathering of animal lovers at Speakers’ Corner!”
This event is planned to start at 2:00 pm on Apr 18, 2009 at Hong Lim Park (Speakers’ Corner).

Just heard from a friend about this event in Singa! All sharklovers should go there and get more information! The more knowledge you have the easier it will be to persuade your friends to start protecting these beautiful creatures!

Second Workshop students is postponed till May 10th.
Projects are on schedule - till May 16th we are working on the scheduled events/projects.

Great things this week that are confirmed:
Raffle prizes May 17th 2009
NIKE donates 2 pairs Nike ID shoes and t-shirts
CROCS donates 4 pairs of CROCS
PRIME DINNER VOUCHER
LITTLE FACE BAR DINNER VOUCHER

51Learning.net is our first sponsor on freetrees.marinedream.org

IWC HOLLAND donates 15% of their AQUATIMER sales in May 2009 to our Foundation

I am keep calling to get Giovanni van Bronckhorst as our guardian for the foundation! I let you know when we get this catch

Hi,this is Bella from English College of Shanghai International Studies University(SISU). This is my first blog here but I’m not new to Marine Dream. I joined the beach clean-up group organized by Marine Dream last September. It was on that day that I felt the environment pollution so real. People usually won’t take it serious until they see it by themselves. Believe me, it’s really terrible and there’s lot we can do and help. That’s why I have been keeping touch with Julie and introduced Marine Dream to our university. We held a signing ceremony on 17th, March to officially start our cooperation to make the world greener. And last Sunday we had our first workshop.

The workshop was from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m..Such a day!
The first project is Shark Protection. In this project we focus on protection our biodiversity and prevent that our oceans are getting empty. We are doing this by focusing on restaurants and hotels. The challenge here for us is the 1,000 questionnaire together with the call to restaurants from city weekend list. We have done this before but it was different. But anyway, we brainstormed together to work out the framework of the questionnaire.

The Pingyin Game project started after our lunch( noodle, yummy~). Julie showed us how this game worked. We even played it. There are 10 grades of the game considering the difficulty of the character. The higher the grade is, the more difficult it is. It’s easy for us at first but when it came to grade 8,wee found we just knew a few of them and had to guess its pronunciation. In a word, it’s interesting and we hope you’ll like it as well~

The last programme was Aqualife Xplore. It’s really challenging, I have to say, especially the green weekend–May 16th and 17th. On 16th, there will be an Opening Ceremony in our university, Songjiang. Then about 400 volunteers will go to Nanhui Zhui beach by bus to do the beach clean-up.The next day, that will be 19:00 of May 17th, there is a charity event at Sasha’s. Sounds cool~ We all looking forward to it.

Well, I think we’ve gotten a lot of work to do. Fighting!~ Next time, I’d better take some pictures and upload them here~

Fifteen of the nineteen schools that signed up for the Aqualife program in Singapore have started up the students to compete for the greenest student competition. The deadline for the schools is May 15th and the greenest student of each school is invited to join the Aqualife team, LeyKun from the NakedHermitCrabs, Bala our yogamaster and naturalist and our special guest Cassandra See, mediacorps artist on a reefwalk on Sentosa island on Friday May 29th.

The program is as follow:
8:00 Get together @ Sentosa Express in Vivocity
8:30 Arrival Siloso Beach - start with the reefwalk Leykun from NakedHermitCrabs
10:00 Vegetarian Bihoon Brunch while listening to story teller and yoga master Bala
11:00 Handout of Awards by Cassandra See
11:30 Back to Vivocity

This program is proudly supported by Singapore Environment Council and Siemens Industrial Solutions.

Last Sunday was the first workshop with the students from the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU).
In total 30 people signed up.

Our first workshop is about shark protection part 2
In 2008 we focused on programs for primary schools and we succesfully exhibited our 1,000 sharks. But we came to the conclusion that we might get a bigger effect with our efforts if we focus on restaurants. In this project we will try to convince 30 restaurants to change their fishmenu into a more sustainable one. We won’t only focus on sharks but also other fish species dat are disappearing at a fast pace in the ocean.

Why 30 restaurants? We talked to Lee Mack from City weekend last week and they will become a partner of this program and promote and design together with us a sustainable fishmenu logo if we reach that number of restaurants. Tough target but not impossible!

What is good or bad fish we decide on a fishflyer designed by WWF Hong Kong.

The coming 2 weeks our students will focus on:
1. 1,000 questionnaires among fellow students if they want to have sharkfinsoup on their wedding banquet
2. create a database of restaurants that are listed in the cityweekend and check what type of fish they have on the menu
3. make a list of fish suppliers where restaurants can buy good fish

Our next workshop: The Freetrees game
We found a database with almost 10,000 characters including pinying, frequency, english translation on the website. We selected 4,000 characters. Annie our young intern is making the voiceover in the next 2 weeks of the characters and our student volunteers will create the 3 wrong answers per question. Shawn our loyal programmer will start next week with the backend of the game.

The game will start: April 30th 2009

Our third workshop: Aqualife Xplore
During this workshop we focus on how to research the shipping industry if boats contribute to the islands of plastic waste in the ocean. In Shanghai we realized during the beach cleanup in Nanzhui beach that a lot of the waste must be coming from boats.

Students will focus the next 2 weeks on:
1. Preparing questionnaire for workers on the big cargo shipping lines
2. Preparing questionnaire for local fishermen
3. Locating where the harbor is in Shanghai
4. Finding contacts within the Port of Shanghai

They will also recruit 500 students to join us for the beach cleanup on the 16th of May 2009.

Last week we decided to organize this super event. We talked to Brandan the chef in Sasha and called Slovenia and talked to Borut Strell, son of the Big River Man and they both were very enthousiastic to support our foundation.

In the weekend of May 16th/17th we call for a green weekend.
On May 16th 400 -500 students of the Shanghai Univerity town will hop on a bus and go to Nanhui zhui beach, which is a wetland close to Shanghai, and start cleaning it. Further schools and universities are invited to start playing our pinying game and start earning trees. This game that we are developing with the students from Shanghai International Studies University can be found on freetrees.marinedream.org. The website will be live from the 1st of May. Official launch of the website is May 16th 2009.

On May 17th we keep our event at one of the most beautiful establishments in Shanghai. In the garden of this old villa we will create an open air cinema where we screen the documentary “What is going on with the Yangtze River?. Martin Strel is a marathon swimmer who has swam the Yangtze River in 2004. In 2007 he swam the Amazon River. This accomplishment has been made into the documentary “Big River Man” that won an award for best documentary at the Sundance Festival in 2009. On our event on the 17th of May, we will broadcast his journey along the Yangtze River and show the rivers beauty and dark side.

Martin Strel wants to draw, through his astonishing accomplishments, the attention of people to our waterways and calls out to protect it. After the show Martin Strel will talk live via the internet about his ideas how to protect the river.

Agenda May 17th
19:00 start event
19:15 presentation Marinedream
19:30 documentary
20:00 live interview with Martin Strell
20:15 raffle
20:30 End

Address Sashas: 11 Dongping Lu Shanghai

Tickets can be reserved via the marinedream website or milica@zapatas-shanghai.com.
Price: RMB 150 (this is including 2 FREE drinks and popcorn)