Archive for October, 2007

Fake Chinese aircraft carrier

Have you ever seen a Chinese aircraft carrier? I had not seen one until today, and I was very surprised when I saw one today while driving to Dianshanhu. When we left the highway on our way to the lake, we suddenly saw the huge boat on our right. My first thought was that the Chinese navy has a ship wharf here, and that there might be a connection to the Yangtze river. But it turned out that the boat is fake: it is made out of concrete and a small lake has been dug around it. There are even...
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Shanghai Sailing Club at Dianshanhu

Today I went to Dianshanhu, a lake about 50 km outside Shanghai, to watch a couple of sailing races. I had not been here before, and I was pleasantly surprised. The sailing club is located directly on the lake, close to a golf course and next to the start of the two rowing lanes.A very nice location, where you feel very far away from Shanghai, even though it's less than an hour drive from downtown (assuming no traffic jams). I think it's a great place to spend a day or weekend (there are hotels...
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Job opportunity: Executive Assistant for Spill Group Asia

Last week I wrote a blog post to find a Chinese teacher, and within 2 days I had 5 good candidates. It seems this blog is an efficient way to find good people, and therefore I will give it another try.For Spill Group Asia I am looking for an executive assistant. This is not a secretarial job, although some secretarial functions may be part of it, but a job for an ambitious university graduate with a few years experience. The candidate will assist me in the daily management of our casual gaming...
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Paffpoft and vifa photos

On Guangyuan Lu pposite Jiaotong University there is a small shop where I normally get my passport pictures taken (very cheap and very fast). They now put up an English sign to get more foreigners clients in, but they forgot to do a spell check first. Or they used a keyboard that is missing the letters 's' and 'r'...
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Fuel prices to increase sharply in China

One of the perks of living in China is the low price of car fuel - especially compared to Europe. I pay less than 50 Euro cents for a liter of fuel, a fraction of the prices in my native Holland. But that might soon end. China Car Times reports that prices might go up by 50%, and later say the price might go up to RMB 10 per liter (which is a 100% hike - math is not easy Mr. China Car Times blogger!).Honestly, I would be very happy if the price would go up so much. Not that I like to spend more...
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Additional Gmail storage, finally!

Next to my Spill Group email account, I have been using Gmail for most other messages. Problem is that I send and receive so many mails that my 2.7 GB Gmail account was full within one year already. I solved this by deleting the oldest mails every few weeks, but the problem kept coming back. Google automatically increased capacity by only a few MB per week, and that was not enough for my email behavior.For a long time I hoped that Google would allow me to buy additional storage space, but...
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Transformers

The movie Transformers was a big hit in China a couple of months ago. Some staff at Spill Group Asia even took an afternoon off in the week it was released, to watch the film in the cinema! The blockbuster apparently inspired some people to try to make a transformer themselves. Last week China Car Times reported that Citroen managed to get quite some publicity during the Nanjing Auto Show, when they displayed a Transformer model of one of their cars (a C2). This car was made by 3 men, a nice...
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YouTube blocked in China?

This morning I was informed that YouTube has been blocked in China. I had not noticed it yet, because I access the internet through a proxy most of the time. But when I went onto a Chinese connection YouTube indeed did not load (message: "The server stopped responding").The reason? Probably not directly the ongoing 17th National Congress in Beijing, then they would have blocked the site last week already (unless someone right now uploaded some video's that would upset the government). I suspect...
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'Bad trip' encounter

Next to my food poisoning I had another strange experience last night. After coming back home from the Hunan restaurant dinner, I went for a walk with my wife around our compound. Now that she is more than 7 months pregnant we do this every night before we go to sleep. Quite nice actually, because we get to talk a bit about the day, work and of course her pregnancy. Normally the walking brings the baby to sleep after a few minutes, because he stops kicking my wife's belly.When we almost...
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Food poisoning

Last night I had dinner with Thijs, Peter and Michael at a Hunan restaurant on Dongping Lu. Nice food, a bit spicy, and not too expensive. However, a few hours later while trying to fall asleep I realized something might have been wrong with the food. I felt like I ate way too much, and not long after that I realized that I had food poisoning. I did not sleep a minute during the whole night because of this, and when I tried to go to work this morning I could not even stand on my legs...
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Looking for a private Chinese teacher

After almost 8 years in China, my Chinese is still not at the level that I want it to be. Of course that is totally my own fault, because I have focussed mainly on my businesses over the past years, instead of improving my Chinese. In fact, 5 years ago I spoke the language a lot better than now. I could express myself quite well, and my vocabulary was a lot bigger than it is at the moment. At that time I was even able to write 1000 different characters, right now I already have trouble to write...
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China Eastern flight cancellation

Yesterday I had a flight booked from Shanghai to Guangzhou, for meetings with the management and other investors in 1bib.com. I was a bit late, but just in time to check in for my China Eastern flight at 2:10 PM. I arrived at the gate around 1:55, but they were not boarding yet. So I sat down and listened to a podcast on my new iPod Touch. After about 10 minutes there was still no movement at the gate, so I asked one of the flight attendants. She said there had been a gate change, which they...
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Birthday party @ Spill & Dinner at Casa 13

Yesterday I celebrated my 35th birthday. Normally I don't really celebrate it, and I generally don't even tell people that it's my birthday. But thanks to social networks like Facebook, Plaxo, Hyves and Twitter a lot more people sent me messages and mails congratulating me with my birthday than in years before. I tried to send a personal message to all of them, but because I also had some work to do I might have missed some (sorry for that!).The staff in my office had also organized a small...
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Formula One on the cheap

On Friday Thijs and I decided to watch the free practice session at the Formula One circuit in Shanghai. Problem was, we did not have tickets - not even a ticket to park my car. The one day tickets were sold out online, so we decided to just drive to the F1 circuit and take it from there.Luckily it was not very busy, so I could drive to the circuit without being stopped by police (on race day, tomorrow, that won't be possible). Close to the circuit there were touts selling parking tickets. We...
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Chinglish at the F1 track

You would expect that at the Shanghai Formula One circuit at least one person would check the signs for bad English. But no, in the middle of the Grand Stand - the most expensive seats on the track - I found this...
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Starbucks in The Netherlands

One of the things I miss a bit about China when I am in Holland is having a coffee at Starbucks. Not that their coffee is particularly good, but it's the only coffee that I manage to drink half a liter of, and still think about ordering another one. In summertime it's great to pick up a frappucino, and in winter time I like to go for a Grande Hot Chocolate with whipped cream.What is so special about it? Probably the atmosphere, every store is similar in a way. Wherever you are in the world a...
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Comment moderation

I have turned comment moderation on on my blog. This means that from now on a comment only appears on my blog after I have approved it. The reason is that the spam comments were getting out of hand. On some days I had up to 50 spam comments, and manually deleting them cost me too much time.It does not mean that I will only approve comments that are favorable, as long as it is not spam the comment should appear on my blog as soon as I get a chance to approve it (which is basically whenever I am...
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A new challenge: Trailwalker Hong Kong

I need challenges in my life. A life that is predictable and similar every day is something I cannot handle. My daily work is quite a challenge already, but I set myself a goal three years ago that I also want to have a real physical challenge once a year. The first year I ran the Shanghai marathon, and last year the Macau one (both within 4 hours). This year the Tibet bike trip was a major challenge, and for next year Gary and I are thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest...
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Ho-Ping Tung in Shanghai

On Tuesday night I met the Dutch-Chinese race car driver Ho-Pin Tung while he was checking in for his flight to Shanghai. I knew he would be on the same flight with me, as I had exchanged a few mails with him the days before when I read in a press release that he would be in Shanghai during the F1 weekend. But it actually was a coincidence to meet him in the departure hall already.Ho-Pin, the 2006 Recaro F3 champion and former Team China A1 driver, was traveling with his manager Bert Winkler,...
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Airplane maintenance

Every now and then I wonder how safe planes actually are? I mean, they do not fall out of the sky often, and departing/landing accidents are also quite uncommon, but I often see small problems on board, that I wonder how many bigger problems passengers do not know about.Yesterday evening I flew from Amsterdam to Shanghai with KLM and so I had some time to think about this. KLM should be a relatively reliable airline, with planes that are maintained well. But is that really the case? A summary...
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