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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 fighter jets parked on the runway! I have seen a lot of strange things in China over the years, but this certainly ranks in the top 10.

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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 and villa’s for rent) in summer next year.

Membership of the sailing club is not very expensive, prices start at RMB 2500/year, about USD 350 at current rates. You can rent boats per hour, or you can put your own boat there. Among others the club has 470’s and Lasers, but also kayaks and speed boats. Check out the club’s website: http://www.saimengclub.com/english.htm

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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 websites and of our game development teams.

Responsibilities:
– Support the CEO in daily operations
– Perform administrative, analytical, reporting, and translation tasks per the CEO’s instruction
– Facilitate communication between foreign and local shareholders, as well as among business partners and associates
– Coordinate cross-department cooperation and projects

Requirements:
– University degree with at least 3 years full-time working experience
– Fluent reading, written, and spoken Chinese and English
– Good understanding of the internet, both in China and outside China
– Pleasant, mature, and capable of multi-tasking
– Previous experience as assistant or executive secretary to western executives will be a plus
– No 9 to 5 mentality

Occasional travel may be required for this position. We offer a competitive salary package based on work experience. Location: Spill Group Asia office in Shanghai (Xujiahui, next to Jiaotong University). Interested or want more info? Send an email to hr (at) spillgroupasia (dot) com.

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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 money, but hopefully a lot of frugal Shanghainese would think twice before using their cars. It would likely be a good way to reduce traffic jams, which cost me a lot more in the form of wasted time. But it might be an additional burden on the already overloaded public transportation system (try to take the metro in Xujiahui at 8:30 AM, not fun).

Likely taxi fares will also increase, otherwise the cabbies have no way to survive. The good news is that it will make finding a cab easier (at times it has become virtually impossible to find an empty taxi), because people might substitute cab rides for public transport.

I don’t think the prices will increase by a big percentage right away. I am sure the government realizes that increasing fuel prices can easily trigger demonstrations (think Birma a few weeks ago), so they will likely use a series of small increases to make it seem less painful. We will find out soon.

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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 because this did not happen I finally decided to delete thousands of mails in July. And what happened? Right after that Google announces that you can buy additional storage (USD 20/year for 10 GB). Great…

My idea was to buy more space the moment the problem would reoccur, but when I checked my Gmail account last week I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google increased storage to over 3 GB. Over the weekend I was at 3.9 GB and today the total storage capacity is at 4.2 GB! Not sure where this will end, but it makes me very happy. It hopefully means that I would never have to delete a message anymore in the future (like Google promised when I opened a Gmail account), and that I can find it online on whatever computer or phone I use.

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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 example of offline user-generated content.

But although the car has not been on display yet in Shanghai, this city now has its own transformer cars. Not one, but two cars are currently on display outside the Shanghai Sculpture Museum (in Red Town, on Huaihai Lu, close to Hongqiao Lu). Quite impressive. It looks like the artist was sponsored by Cici Club, one of the clubs in the area. If you go there be sure to also check out the nice restaurants and galleries that have opened here over the past few months. The place is not well-known yet, but Red Town definitively has the potential to become a new entertainment hot spot.

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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 the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users. Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google’s China offices rang an alarm bell about this before the launch. A typical example of the mistakes foreign companies make while trying to do business in China.

I hope for YouTube it is just a problem with their content delivery system or something similar, and not a real block. I don’t like sites to be blocked, even not those of our competitors. But it will be an interesting discussion point for our Tudou board meeting tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Update: While going through my RSS feeds I noticed that Jeremy from Danwei already noted the problem a couple of hours before me.

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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 finished our round a young, foreign guy called out to us in English. He shouted that he needed help, and if we could help him. He looked quite innocent, so we walked up to him. He said he was very sick and needed to see a doctor, but did not know how to get there. He did not speak much Chinese, or at least in his state he was not able to speak Chinese anymore. He also said that he was flying to Paris the next day, and that he was very afraid to miss the plane. I asked him what he had, but he was not able to tell me clearly.

He seemed to be panicking, was sweating and said he saw things. He was restless, and could not stand still. He said that if we gave him ten minutes of our lives, we could save his life. I thought this was kind of creepy, and my wife wanted to go away from him. But suddenly I realized that he might not be sick, but having a bad trip. I have seen that once or twice before (interestingly never in Holland, where this should occur more often), and it is quite scary. In case you have not heard of a bad trip, it basically means that you take drugs but the effect is the opposite of what you expect. You can get paranoid, you are scared to death of simple things and you cannot think clearly anymore.

I asked the guy directly whether he had taken drugs, and he told me he had smoked a joint earlier that evening. Bingo. I am not a doctor, but I decided to calm him down a bit. I took him to the 24-hour supermarket below our building where he bought a water (he was hardly able to pay, because his hands were shaking). Then we walked outside, where it was quiet and I assured him that things would be OK, and he should not worry about it. I told him to go home and just stay awake for a few hours until the drugs would wear off.

This made him feel much better, and he started to talk. He said he was French and worked for a foreign game studio in Shanghai on a project (I won’t mention the companies nor his name of course). He was flying back home the day after. I once again said that he should not worry, after which he seemed to relax a bit. He said thanks and walked back slowly in the direction of his apartment, I assume. I hope I did the right thing, I have no clue how to handle a person like this actually, but my actions seemed to calm him down and he did not want to see a doctor anymore. A weird experience around midnight…