Breakfast with the Mayor

On June 12th, we had the great honor of dining at breakfast with Mayor Wu at the Meililua Hotel. We ate in the impressive dining room at the hotel, the one with the elaborate turntable. After greeting us warmly, she told us that she would have to say farewell after breakfast. She originally planned to spend the morning with us touring a cultural museum, but had a big project that needed her attention.

Over breakfast, Mayor Wu asked for our impressions of Dezhou, the economic development area and everything we'd seen. We told her that we enjoyed the chance to visit her city and were favorably impressed with the development zones and everything we'd be told about the new city initiatives. We invited the Mayor to visit us in New York so we could reciprocate the wonderful hospitality she and her staff had shown us. She told us that a delegation from Dezhou was preparing for a visit to New York in the fall. In the picture on the left, Jinshui is presenting a message sent by a SUNY campus president to Mayor Wu.

After we finished breakfast, we posed for an official picture with the mayor, along with some informal pictures with some of our new friends. In the picture below, I am posing with Ms Song and Ms Lin from the Foreign Affairs Office of Dezhou Municipal People's Government (Shandong Province).