Our apartment may have been new when we moved in last year, but it still had a lot of problems. I wrote about this once before, and also since then we have had a lot smaller issues. There seems to be something at least every other week! Typical of Chinese-quality apartments, I know that, but it is still a nuisance. Especially when you realize this is a high-end apartment, where you expect that these things would not happen all the time. Last night we once again had a problem.

On Friday night my wife and I decided not to go out, but spend a night at home watching a movie (does not happen often anymore, we are both too busy) and eat and drink some nice food. So my wife went to Carrefour and bought among others french bread, croissants, different cheeses, a tin of caviar, salmon, and a bottle of champagne. I went out to buy a few DVD’s (The Holiday, Click and Blood Diamond), and we sat down in front of the TV around 9 PM.

But suddenly we realized it had become a bit chilly in our apartment. I checked the temperature, and that had dropped to 18 degrees. My wife then went outside to the waterheater and she noticed it was not working. Because we have floor heating that uses hot water, the heating system did not work anymore either. We restarted the system, but that did not help. We pushed different buttons and turned valves, but nothing seemed to make a difference. So finally we called the repair service, but they were fully booked until Saturday afternoon.

Luckily we still have an airconditioning system that can also heat, so we turned that on. We had not tried it before, and were glad at least that worked. Within a few minutes the house was warm again. I was a bit worried about not having hot water (I hate taking a cold shower in winter), but it turned out that we have two water heating systems, so that you can take a shower in different bathrooms at the same time. We found that the one that controls the heating is a different one from the one that regulates the water temperature in our main bathroom, so at least there we have hot water.

We still had a nice – and warm – evening, but it is annoying that these things happen all the time.

It’s lunch time now, but once again my daily newspaper has not arrived. I used to quickly scan the Shanghai Daily every morning when having my first cup of coffee. But lately the paper is arriving later and later, and it sort of has become an afternoon newspaper. We checked what was happening, and were told that they have a distribution problem. It will be at least another week before this will be solved (read: likely next month the paper will still be late). I am not sure if this is only a problem in my area (Xujiahui) or in bigger parts of Shanghai.

The Shanghai Daily is very lucky that there is no competition from other English newspapers (The China Daily is no real competition as they are still stuck in the 1990’s, mainly copying the Party’s press statements and adding posts from weblogs without even giving credit to the author), because in a more competitive environment they would have lost most of their readers a long time ago. But if they continue their delivery like this I might as well consider a subscription to the South China Morning Post. This HK newspaper is maybe not as good as it used to be, but at least it has decent reporting. It arrives around 4 or 5 PM on weekdays, so not much later than the Shanghai Daily right now. I hope the SCMP will be available in an iLiad format soon, so that I can read it in the morning already. Amy Gu, if you are reading this, is this wishful thinking? Maybe you can bring this up with the SCMP management, it can potentially gain your paper a lot of additional readers – and fame by being one of the first papers to offer this format.

Yesterday Chinese race car driver Ho-Pin Tung visited Spill Group Asia‘s office, and of course we took the opportunity to take a picture with the game.com.cn team. Ho-Pin, who won the German Formula 3 series last year, was in town for an interview with Shanghai TV. He is now China’s A1 driver, and had raced in New Zealand over the weekend (where he scored 2 points for China). Next week he will fly to Australia for the A1 race there on the weekend of 3-4 February. Ho-Pin Tung is doing PR work for Spill Group Asia, and we have some interesting cooperation plans. I’ll keep you posted.

Yesterday around 6 PM I was having a MSN chat with my wife when she mentioned that her colleagues in the Tudou office were going to watch the first episode of Tudou TV together. I had totally forgotten that the first program would be on air, and had to run out of the Spill Group office to drive home in order to watch the program (there is no cable connection for our office TV). I made it just in time, and was even able to find the right channel before the program started.

It was cool to see the Tudou name and logo’s all over the TV screen, it’s still a different experience to be on TV – even in this internet age when less and less people watch TV. The whole episode only lasted 5 minutes (it is a daily 5-minute program), and this one featured just one funny (and quite long) clip. The TV presenter explained what Tudou was (he even used the English word couch potato!), and then introduced the clip. Other episodes will normally feature 2-3 clips. If you want to watch it, go to South-East Satellite (a blue logo with a f-like letter in it, and the Chinese name next to it starts with Dong Nan – even Chinese beginners should be able to read that). The program starts at 6:18 PM and can be viewed all over China on cable networks.

By coincidence we ended up at this HK restaurant on Saturday night (all other fancy restaurants that we called were fully booked for a 8:30 PM dinner slot), but it turned out to be a gem. Directly on the harbour, located on Fenwick Pier. It was not very busy, and we managed to get a table right on the water! Great seafood, good wine and reasonable prices, what more do you want? Service was a bit too quick (getting the main course while still enjoying the appetizers), but the owner apologized for her over-eager staff. I actually wonder why it was not so busy, as far as I know there are not many restaurants where you can literally sit on the harbour front. Maybe it’s not very easy to find? I will come back here!

Address: The Quarterdeck Club, 1 Lung King Rd, Fleet Arcade Fenwick Pier, Wanchai, Hong Kong

This weekend my wife and I went to Hong Kong, I had some business to take care of and it was a good opportunity to meet with friends and do some shopping (for Qi) and sports (for me). On Saturday I had planned to go for an off-road mountain bike ride with Marcel Ekkel on Lantau Island. But because I first had an appointment in Central in the morning there was not sufficient time to catch the 9:30 fast ferry, and the next one would be a slow one at 10:30. Therefore Marcel proposed to go for a run / hike in the mountains on Hong Kong Island around lunch time. A great idea, because also on Hong Kong Island nature is beautiful and there are some spectacular trails. Most people don’t realize how beautiful Hong Kong is, and it amazes me that you only meet a few people on the trails close to the city.

So I took the MTR to North Point where we met up. North Point is a good starting point for many trails, and it’s very easy to reach from the city. We decided to take a taxi to Parkview first, and then start with a trail that is shared by the Hong Kong Trail (stage 5) and the Wilson Trail (section 2). According to HK’s country and marine parks authority this section is ‘very difficult’, but it was not too bad. A bit steep at times, but even though parts of the trail were a bit slippery it would not call it difficult. We started off slowly, but after Jardine’s lookout I decided to try to run up the next hill. I underestimated the height though, and halfway I had to get back into an easier pace in order to catch my breath.
The trail here was great, even though it was quite windy and we were hiking in the clouds most of the time. Without the clouds the views are fantastic (for some pictures of this section on a sunny day, see here). At the top of Mount Butler we had a drink and then continued down to a picnic area. This was the end of stage 5, but we had only hiked for 45-50 minutes or so, so we decided to hike another trail. This one had some great views over Hong Kong and Victoria Harbour (despite the foggy weather). After about 2 hours we decided that it was time for a coffee and we jogged down the mountain back to North Point. A great work-out, thanks Marcel! I actually have quite some muscle ache now, but ex-marine Marcel is in much better shape because he did not feel a thing the next morning…

While writing this down, I realize once again that this is something I really miss in Shanghai. There is just no way to get out of this city without first driving for hours. I love outdoor sports, but in this urban jungle the only thing that comes close is running up the Sheshan hill – where you need to pay RMB 50 just to run up for a couple of minutes. So there is probably only one solution (next to moving, which I do not intend to do), and that is flying to Hong Kong more often on the weekend. It’s only a 2 hour flight, but including the rides to and from the airport and the waiting for the plane to leave it is a 6-hour trip door-to-door. That makes 12-hours of travelling in one weekend, actually a bit too much to justify for just a good hike…

Yesterday we bought a Nintendo Wii. Since working with Spill Group I could already argue that I need to play games as part of work, but now I can even say that I do it to loose weight!

On November 25, a farmer in Jiangxi province was carrying RMB 10,000 (a huge sum of money for a farmer in this remote area) with him while waiting for a train in Guixi. Suddenly he noticed that several men were following him, and he thought they might be planning to rob him. So he ran away to avoid them. While running a police car drove by and stopped it to ask the police men for help. They took him to the police station, where the farmer was still so afraid that he did not want to let go of one of the three officers.

So what do you do then? Simple, you send the farmer to a mental institution, and leave him there without an address or contact number. His money was put into the a patient account to pay for the cost of treating the ‘patient’. Likely because he was upset of being put in an asylum, the farmer refused to take any medicine or food during the first days. But after 10 days he gave up and he started to receive treatment. But the farmer got angry often, because he knew he did not belong here. The staff did not listen to him, however, and gave him an injection each time he complained, so he would fall asleep. Finally last week the farmer managed to bribe a nurse to call his relatives, who came to free him right away. The paper version of the Shanghai Daily that reported this story does not mention anything about the patient getting his money back, or the police being reprimanded. Likely this happens more often, and the farmer was actually lucky to get out.