It’s well-known that food is one of the most important things for a Chinese. So a holiday like the Spring Festival means eating good food several times a day. A heavy breakfast with filled buns, a big lunch with meat, fish and vegetables, lots of snacks and fruit during day time, and then a big dinner followed by even more snacks. This is supposed to be healthy.

But is it really? The Shanghai Daily wrote today that Shanghai’s Liren Women’s Hospital’s out-patient department treated 30 percent more patients for intestinal problems this week than normal. Doctors said many patients suffered diseases due to an improper diet over the Spring Festival!

Several of my Dutch friends in the China/Hong Kong area have lately started blogs. The first one was Thijs Bosma, who set up heyworldhereiam.com on Dec. 11, 2005. Thijs moved to China early December and is working on several projects, and at the same time looking for a job in Shanghai. He is obsessed with skyscrapers, so Shanghai is the right place for him to be. On his blog Thijs talks about his daily experiences in adjusting to life in Shanghai.

On New Years Day 2006 also Marcel Ekkel set up a blog: MarcelQPO. Marcel is a former Dutch marine, and the title of his blog derives from there (Qua Patet Orbis, the motto of the Royal Dutch Marine Corps). Marcel is now an entrepreneur in Hong Kong who might move to mainland China in the near future. He loves endurance sports, he will for example run the Hong Kong marathon this weekend, and is considering to join Gary and me on our Himalaya mountain biking trip later this year. His blog talks about his observations and experiences of life in Greater China.

Lastly, Floris Fibbe set us a blog on January 6: Fibbe in Shanghai. Floris is a Dutch lawyer who decided that being able to speak Chinese is essential, so he studied Chinese for a full year in Shanghai. Still not satisfied with his proficiency in the language he moved to Harbin (North-China) last week, and just found a local family to live with during the next two months. If you want to follow his hardships there (no shower!) make his blog a daily read.

Today’s Shanghai Daily has an article about the possible end of free taxing booking in Shanghai. Although it is still a discussion point, this could make my life a lot easier. Let me explain.

In 1999 the fee for booking a taxi was abolished to ‘promote business’. Well, that certainly worked. On rainy days or around holidays it is impossible to find a taxi on the street, let alone to reserve one through one of the taxi call centers. There are just not enough taxi’s in this city (the ratio taxi’s per inhabitants is half that of Beijing for example), and more and more people become affluent enough to take a taxi to work or to the supermarket (for readers from outside China: a taxi in China is dirt-cheap, a 10 minute drive will set you back just one Euro). In the morning I always reserve a taxi to get to work, but I have to reserve 3 days in advance to make sure I can get one. If I forget, or if my schedule changes, I am not able to book it anymore, because so many other people also reserve a taxi. And if you are a new customer you cannot even book a taxi during rush hour (only people who regularly book taxi’s have this ‘right’).

Because Shanghainese are extremely price sensitive, adding a reservation fee to the price will likely reduce the amount of reservation calls. People prefer to wait on the street for half an hour in the hope of finding a free taxi instead of spending a few kuai extra. Hopefully it will then be possible to call a taxi 10 minutes ahead, like outside China. I really hope this decision will be made (and implemented) soon.

In China everything can be a fake, even the Great Wall. Chinese media reported that the authorities have built a fake Chinese Wall next the real Wall in Yuyongguan (this is the place where you first pass the Wall when you drive on the Badaling Highway north of Beijing – you literally drive through it here). The reason is that many people tend to write their names on the Wall, and this activity negatively affects the state of the structure. The fake Wall can now be used to write on. In capitalist China, you of course have to pay for this. According to nu.nl tourists will have to pay USD 120 for the honor.

Is this story really true? I seriously doubt it, but maybe one of my readers can confirm it. Who would pay USD 120 to write his/her name on a wall? And not on the Wall, but on just a wall next to the Wall. And thinking about it, even the Great Wall in that location is fake: in Yuyongguan it has been completely rebuilt, and I don’t think there is still one original stone left. They might just as well rebuild the parts that are most affected by graffiti, but that’s probably not as lucrative. So who is fooling who?

I bought a new Samsonite carry-on bag in November, and had only used it on 3 or 4 plane trips when suddenly the top handle broke off. Exactly to avoid that I bought my Samsonite at an official upclass store instead of on some fake market. But it seems that the even the quality of original products is not as good as it was.

So I went back to the store (Isetan in Meilongzhen) last night to get the suitcase repaired. The reply: sorry, you have to go to the repair store to get it repaired. But the official guarantee papers clearly state (even in Chinese) that you can bring your suitcase back to any official store to get it repaired. No she said, that’s not how we do it, you have to bring your suitcase there yourself. In China you always have to fight for your right, so a loud argument started in the store. This was too much for the shop girl, so she went to talk to someone else (her boss I presume). Eventually a compromise was reached, they would send it to the repair center, and I could pick it up there when it would be repaired. That was fine for me, because I found out the repair place is on my way to work.

But I cannot get used to the arrogance of Shanghai shop assistants who simply refuse to help a customer. It happens all the time, even in high-end shopping malls. They are just lazy, and if you don’t make a scene they try to ignore you. There are still a lot of service improvements possible here!

I was wondering if it would ever happen, but China Telecom finally announced a higher internet speed in China. The new infrastructure will be ready by the end of this year. Currently the highest speed available for ADSL is 8 Megabits/second, this will triple to 24 Megabits/second. According to the Shanghai Daily, however, in practice customers likely will have a real maximum speed of 3 Megabits/second (currently 1 Mb/sec). And thanks to the Great Firewall loading speeds of websites located outside China will likely stay far below this level.

It’s good news for high-bandwidth sites with servers inside China, especially sites that use video or large flash files, such as Toodou.com or online gaming sites. Possbibly IPTV could take off because of this. I expect a lot more broadband applications to see the light because of the higher available ADSL speed.

I did not write about it on my blog before, but last month I was appointed as CEO of Spill Group Asia, a European online gaming company. I am setting up an office for Spill Group in Shanghai, and will from here roll out casual gaming and skill gaming websites in several other Asian countries. Because a day only has 24 hours, and I still have several other activities that I am involved in, time management skills are becoming even more important!

Spill Group currently consists of Spill Group Europe (located in The Netherlands), Spill Group Asia (located in China) and Kottabus (our own ad agency focused solely on in-game advertising, located in London). The company has many leading casual gaming websites in Europe, among others Spel.nl, Spelletjes.nl, Game.nl (Netherlands), Jeux.fr, Jeu.fr (France), Gioco.it (Italy), GameToday.co.uk, StartGames.co.uk (UK), Gry.pl (Poland) and Spielen.com (Germany). We are also active in skill gaming, look for example at our site Zigiz.com.

Today an article on Marketingfacts.nl, a well-known Dutch weblog about online media and marketing, writes about online gaming and Spill Group in particular. If you can read Dutch you can find the article here. Our company also has a weblog (http://www.gameminded.com) where I post on China-related online gaming topics. The corporate blog also contains an overview of all our gaming websites and more details on our activities all over the world.

Last week I was interviewed by Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post for an article in today’s paper. I do not have an online subscription, so cannot read it myself (any readers with access who can mail it to me? Article can be found here). What I did not know is that part of the interview was also used for a podcast. I did the interview while I was in bed with flu, and over a bad mobile connection, so the quality is horrible. The interview discussed the ideas and business model behind Toodou, and we talked about the future of podcasting in China.