Archive for June, 2009

Causes of the apartment building collapse

On Saturday I wrote about the apartment building that collapsed (or better: fell over) in Shanghai. Over the past days more details about what may have caused this have become available. As many people suggested substandard construction materials may have been a reason, but that was not the only cause. Initial investigations point at the fact that the developer was excavating an area for a garage under the building (Did they forget to build one? It does not seem logical to first build an...
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Apartment building collapses in Shanghai

This morning I saw some tweets about an apartment building in Shanghai that had collapsed, but only tonight I saw some pictures of what had happened. The building on Lianhua Road, just a few kilometers south of where I live (I go bike riding there sometimes), apparently just fell over!It makes you wonder how safe other buildings in Shanghai are. Luckily there was only one casualty because the building was still under construction. If I would have bought an apartment in one of the other...
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Opening Academic Year 2009 at Maastricht University

On August 31 I will give the keynote speech during the Opening of the Academic Year at Maastricht University, the university where I received my masters degree in Business Economics. I am very honored that I was asked by the board of the university to give this speech. I still remember that when I first became a student in 1991 the Dutch prime minister Mr. Ruud Lubbers opened the Academic Year, and at that time I would have never imagined that I would ever get this honor. The theme of the day...
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My tweet makes it into a newspaper

A couple of weeks ago I was quite frustrated when an online booking for a KLM flight turned out to be impossible to do from China. While doing the booking I tweeted about it and I later also wrote a blog post about the experience. It happened several times before that my blog was quoted in newspaper articles (sometimes even completely wrong, like in March this year), but now it also happened to a tweet, or actually a string of several tweets, that I wrote.The tweets were picked up by a Dutch...
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Scott and Elaine

Right after Elaine was born Scott was not too happy with her: she took all his mother's attention and of course he was a bit jealous of her. But after three weeks he changed and suddenly started to play the role of big brother. It is so cute to see the two of them spending time together. Scott loves to hold her and wants to kiss her all the time. We're very happy with our two kids, and we look forward to seeing them both grow up...
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Toys R Us?

Not only Chinese are good at copying. I came across this Indonesian copycat of Toys R Us in a shopping mall in Jakarta last week. I found the name quite creative...
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Singapore airport has everything – even toilets with a view!

Last Saturday I flew from Singapore to Shanghai and I had a few hours to kill at Singapore Changi airport. Even though the airport is not the best in the world anymore (this year it was voted number 3, after Seoul and Hong Kong), it is still one of the few airports where I actually enjoy the waiting time for a flight. The restaurants and shops are excellent, the terminals are clean and make you feel relaxed. No constant announcements for flights that are boarding or departing and most important...
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Jakarta

I am writing this on Saturday morning from Jakarta airport, where I am waiting to board a Garuda flight to Singapore, followed by a several hour stop-over at Changi airport before flying on to Shanghai. I will be arriving home around midnight tonight, not the nicest way to spend a Saturday. The reason I mention this is because many people seem to think that business trips are more like vacations than work. Sometimes they are, but more often a trip is very intensive and leads to double the...
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Nachos logic

I had a beer in the bar of the Shangri-La hotel in Jakarta with a colleague and we wanted to order something small before dinner. So I asked for the snack menu, which they promptly gave me. I ordered some nachos but a minute later they told me that they did not have nachos. Can happen, so I wanted to order something else from the snack menu. I looked at it again but then the waiter informed me that nothing on the snack menu was available, because you could only order snacks later at night....
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H1N1 flu check at Shanghai airport

Everybody who arrives at Shanghai airport has to do a fever screening. During SARS they already had this procedure in place, most of the time with one scanner just before immigration. I traveled a lot during and right after SARS, and many times nobody was even looking at the screens when passengers passed below the thermometers.But with H1N1 the government takes things a bit more serious, and it certainly all looks a bit more scary, with staff coming into the airplane in green and white medical...
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M1NT this week: False rumors & Club of the Year!

On the Chinese Internet there are always a few people who are negative about M1NT. I guess that's normal for a successful private club, people tend to get jealous if they cannot be part of it and the Internet is a good way to show that. Some go a bit too far though, such as a Shanghai expat named Simon Tung. This 31-year old tried to spread false rumors on Twitter (@simontung) this week about M1NT being a scam and about some of the founders being arrested. He claimed to have 'multiple sources'...
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Thanks KLM!

After two not particularly positive blog posts in a row about KLM, now a more favorable one.First of all, KLM started following me on Twitter after I wrote about some of my negative experiences with their website. The fact that they have a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/klm) shows they are using Social Media, which is a good thing for any company. And that they follow me, means that they also check what people write about them on Twitter. I did not follow them yet, so it's not just a follow...
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Cheap(er) KLM flight tickets

While writing this I am somewhere above Russia on a flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam. After writing my last post about the problems I had to book a ticket on the KLM site my assistant finally managed to get me a seat on today's flight. The economy class is still reasonably full (probably 60-70%), but the business class is almost deserted. There you really see the impact of the financial crisis, these planes used to be packed - both economy and business class.My original plan had been to only...
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