In China tonight is New Year’s Eve and I just finished a huge dinner with the family. Because all our domestic staff went home to their families we hired a cook to make us a nice (and very big!) dinner. Among others codfish, shrimps, soup with crab meat and shell fish, beef soup, fried beef, deep fried spicy pork, and many, many kinds of vegetables. Excellent – we should hire this cook full time!

Outside there are a lot of fireworks already, even though it’s not even 9 pm. Scott is not sure whether he likes it or not. He likes the sound but only when we are around. He will go to bed very late and sleep in our bed tonight, otherwise we’ll probably have to run to his room every 15 minutes to calm him down. Elaine doesn’t really care too much about fireworks yet, once she falls asleep she will probably sleep through most of the noise. But at 12 I am quite sure she’ll wake up, from my experience China then turns into a war zone with everybody setting off all the heavy fireworks at once.

We will now visit some friends with Scott so he can play with his Chinese-Italian girlfriend, after that we’ll watch the CCTV New Year Show with my wife’s parents while having Chinese snacks and drinking wine (not Chinese wine – at least not for me). Not sure whether we’ll be making jiaozi (=dumpling) tonight, which is a tradition. For sure I won’t stay up the whole night, that’s a tradition others can follow.

A Happy Year of the Rabbit to all readers!

If you did your MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau or plan to study there in the future, you will surely enjoy this Tudou video. It’s making fun of life in Fonty (INSEAD speak for Fontainebleau) and all things happening there to students working hard and partying harder. It’s a great clip that gives a glimpse of student life on and off campus (make sure to listen to the song text!). Bonus: if you watch the clip until the end there a couple of bloopers next to the credits. Enjoy!

Update: The clip is also available on YouTube in case you’re outside China at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwlQJ41Ano0

About 10 years ago I spent a week in North-Korea as a tourist, it was one of the strangest vacations I ever had (see for more on this trip here on Quora). But it’s also one of the few holidays that I will probably never forget, being inside the Hermit Kingdom left a deep impression on me – and not necessarily a positive one. It’s not a place I would immediately think of for a relaxed holiday, but it seems a tour operator is trying to do that by organizing a trip to the DPRK Amateur Golf Open in Pyongyang.

The trip consists of a 3-day sightseeing tour of the standard tourist locations in North-Korea followed by the golf tournament itself. I remember our North-Korean tour guide talking about the golf course back in 2001 but I never imagined that the government would organize an international tournament there. But that’s exactly what will be happening from April 26 to April 30 this year.

I just hope for the competitors that “The Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il won’t participate, because legend has it that when he opened the course in 1991 he shot a 38 under par with 11

What can I say… Not that the average Fox News viewer would notice.

Source: http://twitpic.com/3uxyjr/full

Early this morning (at 4:40 AM) I landed in Amsterdam for a short business trip. After a shower and an early breakfast I decided to go for a walk along the Amsterdam canals, and of course I took a couple of pictures there. The sky was clear and it was just getting light, the most beautiful moment of the day. I like Amsterdam’s city center. It’s always so quiet there, especially when you’re used to Shanghai’s noise and chaotic traffic. Going for a walk there was a great start of the trip.

Yesterday I bought a Xbox360 with Kinect to play with at home. In case you are not familiar yet with the product or technology, it’s basically a game console that let’s you play games without a controller, using your body to play the game. A bit similar to the Wii, but this time without even holding a controller in your hand. For example, you move to the right and the game character moves to the right, or you kick like you would kick a ball and on screen you see the ball going in the direction you are kicking it in. It’s very intuitive, you just set it up, calibrate the system and get going. Within minutes I was playing my first games.

Of course Scott and Elaine were curious as well to see what I had bought, and they wanted to join right away. Elaine is still a bit too young to use it (she runs away from the sensor so the connection is lost), but Scott picked up it quickly. It’s the most natural thing for him that when he jumps the person on the screen also jumps. He was able to play a level of River Rush in Kinect Adventures (see image below) with a decent score. With a controller he can’t do this yet (he just turned 3 years old), so this is the perfect game console for young kids.

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Kinect_Adventures_cover.jpg

I am sure I’ll be spending quite some time with the Kinect over the next couple of months. This is the future of console games, and maybe in the future for casual online games as well. The experience to play games together is amazing. Too bad I am flying to Holland tonight for a short business trip, I would have loved to play a bit more today.

A couple of weeks ago the Joy City Mall opened, conveniently located just a few hundred meters from my office. Even though not all restaurants have opened yet I now regularly go there for lunch. While walking to my favorite (Japanese) restaurant I noticed a lot of strange (or at least interesting) things in the mall and I took a couple of pictures them.

First of all this ad. As the saying goes “Sex sells”, but I am not sure if the Chinese copywriter really understood what he was writing in English. Combining your ‘soft opening’ with a ‘sex roll’ in an ad certainly gave me a good laugh. But whether I want to try the sushi once the store opens I don’t know yet.

Not all the elevators are working yet and when I walked by one I noticed an engineer sitting on top of the elevator reading a magazine! Not the most logical place to sit, but at least nobody can disturb him there.

The ad for the ‘Ministry of Waxing’ store is also quite nice. Coming up with a decent ad for a waxing salon is not an easy feat (esp. not in conservative China), so I like the creativity of combining a hairy ape with two girls just wearing a bikini.

And when going up the escalator I suddenly realized that the ‘Ministry of Waxing’ has a glass front where you can literally see the women laying in the waxing chairs. I am not sure if that’s really what I want to see when going for lunch. And even though the word privacy is virtually unknown in China, I still don’t think that clients like to be watched while they get a waxing treatment.

Wages for waiters and waitresses are still quite low in China, but increasing fast. This restaurant found a good way to reduce the number of staff required and also made the ordering process a lot easier. They use terminals outside the restaurant where you order your food before you go in and get seated. Smart idea.

The last picture that I felt worth taking is of the ferris wheel that was built next to the mall in order to attract customers. The idea itself is a good one, free entertainment always attracts crowds, but the only thing is that the views from the mall itself are much better than from the ferris wheel. This picture was taken from a middle floor in the mall, and you already look down on it. And as I wrote in an earlier blog post about this ferris wheel, they advertise with looking at the Suzhou Creek from the wheel but as you can see in this picture there is no way that you can see the actual river from up there. Nice try though.

It’s probably getting boring, 3 days in a row posts about the snow in Shanghai. But last night and most of today it snowed so hard that I felt that I should put some pictures up, it hardly ever happens that this city sees so much snow. It’s beautiful outside, but I am afraid it won’t last long. I promise this will be my last post about snow in Shanghai – at least for this month.

The kids play area in our backyard
Scott at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten this morning

Elaine in the backyard