Two interesting related news items in the Shanghai Daily today, about responsibility for an accident. The first one was against a travel agent: a tourist had drowned while swimming in the sea in Thailand. The family of the deceased decided to file a lawsuit, because the travel agent should have warned the tourist that it is dangerous to swim in the sea. In my opinion totally ridiculous, but the court did not see it that way and awarded the family damages.

The second news item was about the family of an old man, who had died in a bath house in Shanghai. According to the family he slipped and fell down, but the bath house said that he fainted and then fell. I think both are not enough reason to sue the bath house, because everybody can fall there (there is always the danger of water on the floor, you cannot avoid that). But also here the court saw it different and said that bath houses should pay special attention to older people.

Well, I am glad I am not in this service industry in China, because this is just ridiculous. How can a company be held liable for mistakes (swimmer) or accidents potentially related to being old (bath house)? If I were the bath house I would not let elderly people in anymore. And for the travel agent? Ask for a certificate that shows that you can swim, otherwise you will not be allowed on the beach or near the water. Is that really what people want, or are the courts just treating the average citizens as little kids?

Yesterday I flew back from Beijing to Shanghai. As usual the flight was delayed, this seems to be standard when flying this stretch. We had to wait for one hour on the runway before we were allowed to take off, due to ‘traffic control’. What this means was not mentioned, I suppose too many planes were on this route.

Another thing which has become standard is the long line for taxi’s at Hongqiao airport. The picture shows how long it was. For people who don’t know Hongqiao, behind the taxi starts the normal waiting line (3*50 meters of queing between low iron fences). I had to wait for about 45 minutes this time, which gave me enough time to wonder why the management of the airport does not come up with a solution for this. It is so simple, even Beijing airport has implemented it already: put the taxi’s not behind each other,but next to each other, and things move much quicker. Now the slowest boarding passenger holds up all other taxi’s as well.

I am a heavy Skype user, even though the quality is not always 100% in China (due to the internet firewall?). One of the many nice things of Skype is that you can also call regular phones, for a very small amount of money (I tried to look up the rates just now, but the Skype.com site seems to be down in China). However, I now found a Skype competitor that offers calls to regular phones in most of Europe, the US, Australia and even China for free! The company is called VoipBuster.com. I tried it for a few days before posting here, and it is quite stable. The only thing you have to do is put a deposit of EUR 1 in their account. This is not used up, although I don’t think you can get it back either. Without the deposit you can only make calls up to 90 seconds, then the call is automatically disconnected. I don’t know how they do it, but it works. One bad thing, at least for Apple users like me, for now the software only works in a Windows environment. I did not try to run it on Virtual Windows for Mac yet.

This time I am not going to Beijing for business, but to prepare for my wedding. In less than one month (on September 10) I will tie the knot there. And still so much to prepare… Qi is now a full-time wedding planner, she quit her job at Bertelsmann last week, and will not start to work in her new position at Roland Berger until right after our honeymoon.

We made a wedding site for all our guests (especially for the ones from overseas), it can be found at www.chijs.com. Also lots of wedding pictures on there, as you might now in China these are normally taken several weeks or even months before the wedding. I wrote a post about it a couple of weeks ago, but due to problems with my former weblog I don’t think it was ever published. I might post it again in a few days.

The weather in Beijing today is not too good. Hot (33 degrees) and very smoggy.

Right now I am on the plane from Shanghai to Beijing. The plane is overloaded, because another flight got cancelled and all passengers were rebooked on this flight. I suspect Air China is doing this on purpose, it is not the first time I have seen this. If one plane does not have enough passengers they just cancel it and put two flights together.

Terminal 2 at Hongqiao Airport, this morning before take-off.

I thought Hongqiao airport would not get any major renovations anymore, and would be closed down after the second terminal at Pudong would be ready. But this morning I was surprised to see the the new Air China terminal at Hongqiao airport (not sure how long it’s been open, but I have not flown out of Hongqiao for at least two months). Suddenly the check-in area looks like a new airport. Of course that’s all that changed, the rest of the airport is still as crappy as it used to be. I also noted that Hitachi seems to have sponsored the renovation, its name is in huge letters next to the arrival/departure screens when you enter the check-in area, and every single monitor has the Hitachi name in big letters on it. Smart move, because whether you are waiting to check in or waiting for customs you will always have the name Hitachi right in front of you. But I am surprised that a Japanese company and not a Chinese company was chosen for this. Money was probably more important than patriotic feelings.