Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching, and people start preparing for the trip back home. Yesterday morning I saw a huge line for a travel agent close to my office, at least 40 people were waiting to get in. Especially train tickets are hard to get, but plane tickets are still widely available. You can even get discounts on some of the major routes like Shanghai-Beijing, also for the days right before Chinese New Year. Flights to smaller cities are full-price, however, according to my colleagues. The holiday season affects business quite a bit, and most offices, including Spill Group Asia, will close for a week. Also most domestic helpers will leave the cities to visit their families in the countryside. Our ayi told us yesterday that she had waited in line from 3 AM to 8 AM to get tickets, but just when she was at the ticket counter they were sold out. She will now need to find overpriced tickets on the black market.

It is quite amazing to which length urban Chinese families go in order to cope with the temporary absence of their ayi during Chinese New Year. For us it is a nuisance that our ayi will go back to her hometown, but it just means doing a bit more cooking and housework ourselves. Some families, however, seem to rely a bit too much on their ayis and cannot live without them anymore.

My wife was reading a story to me from a Chinese newspaper that had some good examples of this. One family did not want their ayi to queue for train tickets to her hometown, because then she would not be able to do housework during that time. Therefore the husband of the family decided to do this for her. He waited in line for four days in order to buy her tickets! I like my ayi a lot, but I would never imagine waiting in line for her so she could do our dishes.

Another family will go even further this Chinese New Year, literally further: their ayi will go back to her village and they have rented a room in a hotel close to her home so she can still take care of their baby. If I would be the ayi I would not be too pleased with that, having just one holiday per year, and then still having your employer around all the time. Or maybe it actually gives her a lot of face, because it shows her fellow villagers they cannot live without her.

Sitting in the lounge at Pudong airport now, with free wifi. Just find the tp-link wifi connection and enter password tp-link. Always a good feeling when you can check an reply all your mails before boarding.

I am going to Amsterdam for a short business trip, so it will be a long day again today. When I drove out of the city the weather was sunny, but close to the airport it suddenly got very foggy. You cannot even see the runway from here (which is less than 200 meter away), and I hope this won’t cause the flight to delay.

I noted that it was very quiet at the airport as well, at least in the international area (domestic flights had long lines). At the KLM check-in desk there was nobody waiting in line in front of me, this has never happened to me before in Shanghai. The passport check just took 5 minutes, instead of the usual 30-40. I had expected it to be quite crowded because of the upcoming Chinese New Year, but it is the other way around. I guess most people who fly international only leave China next week?

The Caribean island state of Grenada used to have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but gave these up in 2005 in favor of China. As a ‘thank you’ for this, China then financed a new 40 million USD cricket stadium on the island. This weekend the Queen’s Park Stadium was officially opened, with the prime minister and the Chinese ambassador present. All went well until the Royal Grenada Police Band started to play the Chinese national anthem. At least, they thought they were. But someone had made a mistake and they were performing the Taiwanese national anthem instead. The Chinese ambassador was not amused, and the prime minister immediately ordered an investigation. It seems the Chinese censors also did not see the humor in this blunder, because I could not find any news article in the Chinese press so far about the incident.

Since mid-2005 I have been using www.marc.cn/blog for my blog (my old blog was at http://radio.weblogs.com/0141040/, but most entries have have been lost in cyberspace). I planned to set up good website on the main page, www.marc.cn, but never put it high enough on my priority list. With hindsight I probably should have hired someone to do it. For that reason www.marc.cn has been displaying an error message for the past 18 months. I now decided to forget about a nicely designed site at marc.cn for a while and forwarded the main page to my blog. So if you type in the name of this blog, you can from now on just enter www.marc.cn. Your browser will do the rest.

This morning Gary and I did an interview with Dutch magazine Elsevier, and because of the nice weather decided to do it outside in the sunshine. It was really warm on Tudou.com’s roof terrace, at 11 AM I even had to take off my jacket because of the heat.

I just checked the official temperature in Shanghai, at 4 PM it was still 24 degrees Celcius – and it’s only February 6… It’s amazing how quickly cold weather can change into warm weather, and the other way around, in Shanghai. This warm front likely won’t last long either, and will be replaced by much cooler weather soon. But it’s nice to enjoy a short early spring!

Half a year ago, Chinabounder made headlines with his weblog about how he, an anonymous foreign teacher in Shanghai, seduces Chinese women (some of them former students of his). A professor from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences wrote about this on his blog, with the result that the whole Chinese internet community turned against him and started a witchhunt to find him. If they had found him he might have been in serious trouble, but nobody ever managed to figure out who he was. Whether it was a hoax or not nobody knows, but right after the mob tried to find him his weblog was suddenly closed to the public.

But now he is back. His blog is open again and comments are flooding in. Let’s see what will happen this time. His first (and possibly only) post is about two schoolgirls that were killed by their teacher. One because of making a remark to the teacher, the other because of cheating on an exam. The press hardly wrote about it, and the internet community that was disgusted about Chinabounder did not say a thing. Therefore he asks:

Where were you brave citizens of China then? Where was the anger? Where was the press, so like dogs baying for Chinabounder? The outcry? The mass of internet idiots so concerned about China’s honor and dignity? They offered silence and remain silent. Not a word, not a sigh, not a shrug of the shoulder, not even a raised eyebrow.

(via Danwei)

Ho-Pin Tung, China’s A1 driver, delivered a spectacular result this weekend in Sydney, Australia. In only his 3rd race for China he managed to finish 3rd in today’s feature race. Ho-Pin, congratulations from the whole Spill Group team for this fantastic result!

Ho-Pin’s podium finish was also the first ever for China, so this is really a big achievement and I am sure this will make Ho-Pin even more popular here. Nice to know is also that the Dutch-Chinese driver managed to overtake the car of The Netherlands on the 22nd lap, taking away a Dutch podium finish. The next A1 race will be on February 25 in Durban, South Africa.

It is suddenly getting spring in Shanghai. We were having sunny days for over a week already, but it was still quite cold. Yesterday the thermometer suddenly shot up. Officially it would only be 12 degrees Celcius, however my wife told me the car showed 18 degrees around lunchtime. At that time I was riding my bike with Gary, and it indeed felt quite warm. The gloves I was wearing were totally unneccesary, and I took off my shawl almost right away.

Gary and I drove to Sheshan, to have lunch with his girlfriend and my wife at Le Meridien. The ride took us a bit longer than planned (we arrived at 1:30 PM instead of 12:30 PM), but luckily lunch was served until 2:30 PM. While enjoying a beer I realized my face was hurting a bit, and it turned out I was sunburned from the ride. I guess I should be outside more often, I am not used to being exposed to a bit of sunshine anymore.

The warm weather will continue until the middle of the week, after that the temperature will drop again. But by then I’ll be in Amsterdam where it is colder anyway.