Last night we had once again a very good dinner, this time at the quite famous Khyber restaurant, that serves North Indian food. After dinner we decided to walk back, because the weather was very pleasant (27 degrees and dry). It was an “interesting” walk!

It started with the beggars outside the restaurant that tried to follow us. They did not understand why we did not take a cab, because everybody who dines at Khyber seems to do that. We crossed the road, where lots of people were just making their beds in the open air (making a bed = putting some cartons on the ground to sleep on). We walked around them into a dark street that leads to the Oval Maidan grassland.

I had planned to walk through that park in the direction of our hotel, but the gates were locked. So we continued along the dark road covered by trees that made it even darker. Suddenly four guys crossed the road in our direction. It looked like they were not there to just say hello to us, and we sped up a bit walked on the road itself where there was some light. Then they noticed that Bennie was quite tall (1.96 m) and they decided to leave us alone. A bit scary. This never happened to me in Shanghai, although in Jakarta I had a similar experience once during daytime.

We continued past the university and the High Court, and suddenly noted some well-dressed young women standing in the shade of the trees. At first we were wondering what they were doing, but when we saw some other men walking by very slowing while looking at the women, it became clear to us that we had come across some street prostitutes. Maybe the guys who seemed to try to rob us had assumed that we were heading for these women, so that we must have cash on us. The girls were wearing traditional dresses, and were very different from what you would see in a Dutch red light area. We decided not to linger here, but move away as soon as possible.

Walking on the street at night in Shanghai has never caused me any trouble, but in Mumbai things seem to be a bit more dangerous. Maybe this was just a coincidence, I am not sure, but I will just take a taxi from now on. I like an after dinner walk, the only quiet time in this city, but I don’t want to end up in trouble.

This afternoon I had a few hours left to explore Mumbai a bit on foot. I made a walk from the hotel on the west side of the peninsula through the old English town to the waterfront at Colaba on the east side. It was way too hot to walk, because finally the sun came out, but it was a fantastic walk anyway. This is literally London in the tropics, but a bit greener. Some of the building are absolutely stunning, especially Bombay University and the High Court. I walked for about 2 hours, and only saw European architecture. I probably could have know this, had I prepared a bit for this trip in advance (I did prepare, but only the business part, not the tourist part), but I was very surprised.

Mumbai (or Bombay, the original name that many people still use) is a great city to spend a few days, there is so much to see and do. And a lot looks so familiar if you know England a bit. My impression of India gets better and better. But the CEO of the company that we talked to this morning warned us: Mumbai is not representative of the whole of India, and the part of Mumbai that we are staying in is not representative of the whole of Mumbai. So we start with the best of the best so to speak. No power cuts, good internet, relatively clean and not too poor (relatively speaking to what I was expecting). Wednesday and Thursday we will travel a bit farther out of town, let’s see if we still like it then.

For some of the pictures that I took of the street scenes and the European architecture, see my pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs (or if you read this later, click on the photo set Mumbai/Bombay on the right side of the screen).

Yesterday we walked through Churchgate station in Mumbai, and noticed the railways have some interesting classes of trains. Of course there is the first class section, but this compartment was in worse shape than any train in Holland (or even China) would ever be.

But they also have a compartments only for women, so they won’t be crushed between the men on the often totally overloaded trains.

The front part of the train was for luggage, this part had no seats – just a dirty floor without any windows. To my surprise this part was not only for luggage, however, but also specially reserved for handicapped and cancer patients…

Namaste! Late last night I arrived in Mumbai (India) after spending most of last week in the Netherlands. This is my first time in India. It does not happen often anymore that I am in a country for the first time, and I am always excited when I get to see a new culture. India has not disappointed me so far. Yes, it is dirty, it is poor, it is busy everywhere and it’s warm and humid (it’s monsoon here), but I was prepared for that and overall I like the atmosphere. People smile and (a big difference with China) most people speak English.

This country has a big potential, but a lot of things will first have to be changed, especially the infrastructure. As an example, we (I am here with one of the founders of Spill Group) walked into a train station this afternoon, and it was just plain dirty. Trains were totally worn-out, and looked like they would fall apart. I could not find any signs where trains would be going, and they seemed to leave without any announcement. In the Sunday Times I read just now that some of the train stations in Mumbai were flooded because of the monsoon, not only the tracks but even the platforms!

We are staying at a nice 5-star boutique hotel, the Marine Plaza. Our rooms overlook the Arabian sea, which was a big surprise when I opened my curtains this morning (we arrived after midnight last night when it was pitch dark outside). Rooms are big, with a separate dressing room and a luxurious bath room. Their is a nice rooftop swimming pool, with a good view over the bay and part of the city. One of our business partners in India recommended it to us, and it was a good choice.

Not sure how busy the coming week will be, but I will try to post updates here every now and then. Twitter will likely even have more regular updates (I plan to blog about Twitter soon, for people who don’t know it yet). You can follow me there at http://twitter.com/marcvanderchijs

I am in Hilversum now, in the house that Spill arranged for all its personnel worldwide that visits headquarters. Quite convenient, because I am not a big fan of staying in hotels all the time. Especially not the rather mediocre hotels in Hilversum (especially Gooiland and to a lesser extent Lapershoek), or maybe I am just a bit spoilt by Asian hospitality standards. The Spill Residence, as I decided to call it, is a 3-story house (probably from the 1930s?) with 4 bedrooms and a nice small garden. I have a big room with a large desk to work from, downstairs there is a living room with cable TV and big kitchen. The company sends in housekeepers to keep it clean, and the fridge was well-stocked when I came in last night.

This morning I first went for a run in the woods (in order wake up after just four hours of sleep – thanks to my jetlag), and then made myself a “healthy” breakfast of bread with fried eggs, ham and cheese, while watching the Dutch news on TV. Nicer than in a hotel, where I tend to over-indulge on the buffet breakfasts. The other good thing about this, is that some other Spill people might also stay here, which gives me a chance to get to know them better. Today for example, Jonathan (who is running working for Spill Group in Paris) is visiting and we had a beer last night before I went to bed. Spill is growing so fast (not only in China, also in the rest of the world) that it gets more and more difficult to know all the people in the company, and the Spill Residence certainly helps to partially solve that problem.

I am sitting in the front row of the upper deck of a KLM B-747 from Shanghai to Amsterdam, while listening to an 80’s playlist on my iPod with a new pair of Sennheiser NoiseGard headphones (great for intercontinental flights, because the noise the plane makes is filtered out). As regular readers may know I stopped flying business class after I turned entrepreneur, but every now and then KLM still upgrades me (thanks to the Elite status that I still have). Normally this happens while checking in or when you enter the plane, but today they came to me right after take-off with the question if I would mind to change into a better seat for the remainder of the flight. I did not mind.

I assume they normally upgrade when the economy class is overbooked and there are still a few spaces left in business. But maybe it is also some kind of marketing trick to lure you back into sleeper seats on your next trip. If that is the case the airline certainly had a small success today. The flight is almost over (we are above Sweden while I write this) and I feel fitter than ever after a long flight. Not only did I have a good rest, but I also worked a lot, caught up on all my RSS feeds (good that Google Reader also works offline), watched a movie and read two thick Dutch Saturday newspapers.

Business class is still way too overpriced I feel, because the price difference on an intercontinental flight covers the monthly salary of one or two additional employees. Those are things that count when you run a business instead of when you are a small part of a big multinational. On the other hand, I now always take day flights when flying to Europe. That means it costs me a full working day (even though I normally try to use the weekend to fly), but if I would fly business class again I would probably opt for a night flight. It would be possible to leave the office in Shanghai at 9:30 PM, drive to the airport, take the Air France midnight flight to Paris, change planes there early in the morning and arrive fresh in our office in Hilversum at 9:30 AM. Putting a value on me being in the office instead of being in a plane is a bit arbitrary, but likely the balance would be for me to keep flying economy. So I probably won’t do it in the near future, but at least KLM made me think about it. So, if this is a marketing action: smart move KLM. Feel free to upgrade me again!

In April/May this year Gary, my dad and myself rode mountain bikes from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu in Nepal. Two camera men (Wang Peng and Zeng Jie) shot the whole expedition, and are now making a one-hour documentary about it. They put a 5-minute trailer on Tudou.com, that has been watched by almost 30,000 people already in the past 2 days. Comments range from people saying that we have too much time and money, to others expressing their disbelief that an old foreigner (sorry dad!) can do this. Most are very positive though, and respect or even admire what we have done. Glad the extremely exhausting trip is over, but it’s nice to watch part of it again while sitting in the sun with a cool drink.

Note: the video is hosted on our servers in China, therefore watching it outside China may be a bit difficult sometimes due to the Great Firewall. Pushing the pause button and waiting for the video to load in the background is normally a good solution.

Last week Tuesday my wife and I went to see the musical Mama Mia! in the Shanghai Grand Theater. A few years ago you had to fly to Hong Kong or even Europe to see a decent stage performance, but things are changing. In the past 2 years we have seen among others the Phantom of the Opera and the Lion King in Shanghai, both performed by the similar casts that also do the West End or Broadway shows.

It turned out that we were lucky, because the next day’s show was cancelled due to an illness of one of the leading actresses and both of her substitutes. They even had to fly in somebody from London in order to ensure the performance of the show on Thursday. According to the Shanghai Daily this was the first time ever that they had to cancel a show!

Mama Mia! tells the story of a young woman who is getting married on a Greek island, where her British mother runs a small hotel. She does not know who her father is, and finds out through her mother’s diary that there are 3 possible fathers. She decides to invite them all to the wedding, hoping to find out which one is the real one. I won’t tell you the result, but the story has an interesting twist.

The musical is based only on ABBA hits, and they have been used in the story in interesting ways. Only occasionally part of the song texts were changed, but most of the time the writers were able to fit the songs in quite well with the story line. Because of the music and the love stories, it is a typical ‘feel good’ musical. I really enjoyed it, which has the side effect that I always start to get new business ideas (but I cannot write them down during the show). This always happens to me when I watch a good concert or show (or when I run on the treadmill for a long period of time), and it’s a good measure of whether I enjoyed the performance it or not.

I had the idea that the Chinese audience did not know most of the songs, but they still seemed to like it. As usual there were Chinese ‘subtitles’ on both sides of the stage, so non-English speakers were able to comprehend the story as well. Only during the 3 extra songs after the show was over, people started to clap along. A few foreigners even started dancing on their seats, but nobody else dared to follow.

The show will run daily until August 2. Tickets are available online and range from RMB 200 to RMB 2000. Most of the cheaper tickets are sold out long ago already, however. After Shanghai the show will move to Beijing, where they will play at the Poly Theatre.