In Shanghai I hardly ever run outside, most of my miles I make on the treadmill in my home gym. One reason is that the air is often too polluted to run comfortably, but also the fact that there are no quiet streets to run in my neighborhood plays a role. And during summer it’s just way too hot to run.

Occasionally I drive out to the countryside to run, for example in the area southwest of Sheshan, where it’s still relatively quiet. But within Shanghai I also have one favorite running place: in a riverside park along the Huangpu river in Puxi, at the end of Ruijin Nan Lu (the street where I park is called Ruining Lu). The government built this park quite recently (not sure when, but on the satellite pictures in Google Maps the park is still under construction), and it’s not very crowded yet.

The park stretches just over 3 kilometers, with a pedestrian walkway all along the river. No cars, no bicycles and just some other runners and pedestrians. Because it’s next to the river you can always watch the ships sail by and there is normally a bit of wind. I enjoy the scenery a lot, it’s probably the best place in downtown Shanghai to run. The Bund may have a nice scenery, but it’s just too busy there to enjoy the run.

This morning my dad and I arrived there around 7 AM for a run, it was my first outdoor run in Shanghai since the beginning of summer. The temperature at 7 AM was only 27 degrees Celcius, so quite comfortable for a run. During daytime it’s still way too hot to run, it will take at least another 2-3 weeks before you can run again during daytime. And the good thing is that there is not much traffic early in the morning, so the drive from my house only takes about 15 minutes. If I have to face traffic jams to drive there I would not even consider running here.

We ran just over 12 kilometers (2 times back and forth along the whole waterfront) in just over an hour. This is my favorite speed for an outdoor run because you don’t really get tired and you can still easily talk a bit during the run. There were a few more runners, some pedestrians and some groups of Chinese doing tai chi exercises. But generally it was very quiet, especially towards the southern part of the park (south of the bridge).

After the run we freshened up a bit at the (brand new and very clean) toilet area next to the parking place and then drove back home. We made a stop at the French bakery on Hongmei Lu for some croissants, pain au chocolat and a baguette and then had a nice family breakfast at home before 9 AM. A great start of the weekend!

The riverside park is located just south of the Expo 2010 on the Puxi side of Shanghai. If you come by car there is a paid parking space on Ruining Road (RMB 10) or there are many places where you can park for free. If you come by public transport it is easiest to take Line 7 to Chuanchang Road. The park is also nice for an afternoon or evening stroll, so try it out!

In early June Grace and I were early for a dinner at Bund 18, so we strolled around the luxury shops downstairs and by coincidence Shanghai painter and paper cutter Li Shoubai (李守白) was having an exhibition there. Although he was not there anymore (the exhibition was officially only open during daytime) we spent quite some time looking at his paintings and paper cuttings, and I really liked his art. He has a very distinctive style (contemporary but quite realistic) and focuses on Shanghai scenes, especially things related to life in and around shikumen (traditional Shanghainese houses).

A few days later Grace visited his gallery in Tianzifang (Taikang Lu) and she bought among others one of his books and a 3D paper cutting of a Shanghai scene. We  took the paper cutting to Holland a few weeks later and gave it as a present to my parents . The day after a photographer came to do a photo shoot of me at my parents house and he wanted a Chinese touch to the picture. He then decided to put the paper cutting in the window through which he shot me. This picture eventually ended up in a Dutch newspaper (you can see the picture here) and Grace put it on Weibo. Guess what, Li Shoubai saw the Weibo tweet and she got in touch with him again.

This morning we visited his studio with my parents to look at some of his works. Li Shoubai showed us around and explained everything about the different paintings, cuttings and sculptures that he makes. He also introduced us to his team of artists and to his daughter, who is also an artist. We also met his wife, a very nice lady who, judging from her looks, was probably a model for several of his paintings.

Li Shoubai is getting quite well known, he told us that he just got back from a trip to Germany where he held an exhibition in Hamburg (the show ended yesterday). Also one of his large art pieces is used in Starbucks in Xintiandi, right behind the counter where you order your coffee. And many famous people visited his gallery, among others I saw a picture of the French prime minister and of course pictures of many well-known Chinese.

We both like his work very much, and we therefore bought one of his paintings today (it’s the one that’s above my head in the picture). When his works from Germany are back in Shanghai I plan to come again, because during the exhibition in Bund 18 I had seen some works that intrigued me but that were not in his gallery, but might have been in Hamburg.

If you like contemporary Chinese art you should visit his gallery and studio in Tianzifang, located in Lane 210, right off of Taikang Lu. Also check out his websites at www.shoubaiart.com and www.lishoubai.com.

This morning after taking the kids to school I decided to visit Qibao. This is a small watertown that is now part of suburban Shanghai, located in the same district (Minhang) where I live. It’s only a 15 min drive from our house (30-45 min from downtown), but I had never been here.

My parents who are in town also joined me, they had actually visited the place before and wanted to see it again. When I told my driver we wanted to go to Qibao he told me that he has a house there where his parents are now living!

Qibao is a typical Chinese water town, but it is very small compared to the water towns around Shanghai. It’s basically just one river (or canal?) with a few bridges and a couple of small streets full of small shops and restaurants.

We only spent an hour there, which is enough if you just want to do some sightseeing. But if you want to indulge in the many different foods that are sold here (see this article on CNNGo for example), or visit a museum or temple, you will need more time.

We were quite early (we arrived at 9:30 AM) and it was still relatively quiet in Qibao. But when we left an hour later it became really crowded already. My parents had been here once during the weekend and then it was so busy that you could hardly pass through the small streets. So if you want to check it out make sure to go early.

Qibao can be easily reached by subway, take line 9 and get off at Qibao. Take exit 2 and walk 200 meters south from where you will see the signs to the Qibao Old Street and the canals. More info on the town and its history here on ChinaTravelGuide.com. More of my Qibao pictures here on Flickr.

Tonight we had a family dinner at Haiku by Hatsune, one of my favorite Japanese restaurants in Shanghai. When we left the place a female beggar sitting in front of the restaurant saw us as a good target. She was holding a plastic cup that she tried to put in front of my face to convince me to give her some cash.

Because we were trying to quickly get the kids into the car (our driver parked in the middle of the street, blocking the traffic) I ignored her but she kept on putting her hand and cup into the car. I finally managed to shut the door and we drove off. Then Elaine looked at Grace and said: “Mommy, I think the lady wants to give us her cup.”. So cute how kids see the world!

View over downtown Vancouver from Stanley Park

Last week I spent a few days in Vancouver with Grace, for business meetings with VCs and start-ups, and to look at some potential investments. Because we were only in town for 4 full days we had a busy schedule, but luckily we also managed to find some time for sightseeing.

View over Coal Harbour and Stanley Park

We stayed at the Delta Suites, a nice all-suite hotel in downtown Vancouver. Originally we had planned to book a room at the Wedgewood Hotel, but because they did not have free wifi in the rooms I decided not to stay there (as regular readers may know, if I can avoid staying in a hotel where I need to pay for Internet I will do so. For me Internet is the same as water or electricity, and you also don’t pay for that). Delta Suites turned out to be a great choice, with big suites and in a very central location.

View from terrace of the Delta Suites hotel

I booked the best room I could find online, so we ended up in a suite on the top floor with access to the executive club. This may seem like a small thing, but if you have a huge jet lag (there is a 15 hour time difference between China and Vancouver) it’s great to be able to get some food or coffee at any time of the day. The club also had a balcony overlooking the city where we normally had our breakfast. Nice and quiet, much better than in a crowded breakfast room.

Sea plane departing in Vancouver harbour

Upon arrival we walked over to Canada Place to look at the boats on the harbour and the sea planes taking off. Then we went to buy a local SIM card, but that turned out to be quite hard. Canada is a great country, but it’s not necessarily service oriented. Several shops refused to help us and it took me a while to figure out why (they need to register the number, which takes times, and don’t want to do that for pre-paid numbers that are only used for a short time). Eventually I just changed my story and said that I needed a number for a couple of months and that I wanted to pay per month, and that was possible.

View from White Rock to Vancouver

But then the sales lady at the shop made a mistake and registered a normal SIM instead of a micro SIM (despite her checking my phone in advance to see which one I needed), which I could not use in my 2nd phone (a Galaxy S3). She said she could not change it and then bluntly refused to give me back my money, because “pre paid cards are non-refundable”. The fact that I asked her for a micro SIM instead of a normal one was unimportant to her. When we asked for the manager he immediately said that the computer system was down, so he could not change the SIM card, but of course that was BS. He just did not want to help. Eventually he agreed to cut the SIM card so it would fit and luckily that worked. But this was not a good first impression. All countries have its pros and cons I guess…

After an early dinner we went to bed before 11 PM already because jet lag started to kick in. I slept well and got up around 3:30 AM to catch up on emails. Because I had been interviewed by 2 Dutch publications (Elsevier magazine and the Financieele Dagblad) my email box was pretty full and I answered most of the people that I would get back to them in a week or so. During the trip I would get about 40 emails from companies that wanted to work with me after reading one or both interviews, a new record for me.

Kitsilano Beach with downtown Vancouver in the background

From Monday-Thursday we had a lot of meetings, and generally I have a good impression about business culture and start-ups in Canada. People for sure seem to enjoy life here a lot, very different from Shanghai. The first meeting of the day often did not start until 9:30 or 10 AM, and I don’t think we had any meetings after 4 PM.

Start-ups work hard here as well, but people do more than just work. In most business conversations things like sports or weekend activities came up, something you normally don’t touch upon in Shanghai. Also lawyers don’t work very hard here it seems, we had a bad experience with one of our lawyers who just unexpectedly turned off his phone for a few days. In China that would be impossible to imagine, but in Canada people accept it – or have to accept it.

Granville Island, Vancouver

The British Columbia government gives quite some incentives to angel investors and start-ups. In a way it reminded me of what the Singapore government is doing. Because of that there seems to be a lot of angel investment activity, but not that many follow up VC rounds (yet?).

As a city Vancouver exceeded all my expectations. Its location is superb, in the middle of nature and with clean, fresh air. The city is surrounded by water and mountains, meaning that there are beautiful views almost everywhere. Because of the relatively mild climate it’s one of those places where you can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon (there are 3 ski areas within 20 minutes of downtown Vancouver, and Whistler is just 120 km away).

Horseshoe Bay, Vancouver

We were lucky with the weather, with blue skies and sunshine, and temperatures between 25-30 degrees Celsius during the whole trip. Great weather to go running, which is what I did of course. Among others I ran around Stanley Park, an island (actually now a peninsula) in Vancouver bay. This island has a seawall surrounding it, with a pathway on which you can run or bike. I went very early in the morning and saw the sun rise while running, it was beautiful.

Stanley Park, Vancouver

The Stanley Park run itself is one of the nicest city runs you can imagine: you run all around the island with the water on your right and forests and partly a massive rock formation on your left. Especially the west coast was impressive and I did not really feel tired despite the relatively long run (around the island is about 9 km, but I also ran along the harbour for a total of 14.5 km).

View to Stanley Park from the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club

We had a couple of nice dinners in Vancouver, where I mainly ate local seafood and tried out some of the British Columbia beers and wines. They do have quite good white wines, but they don’t come cheap. I also bought a couple of local bottles that I took home and that I will try here over the next days. At home wines always taste different than while on a trip.

Restaurants on Granville Island

Looking back we should have stayed one or two days longer so we could have seen a bit more of the local sights. And if I had been smarter I should have booked my trip a week later, so I could have participated in the GROW conference as well (everybody was talking about it during the trip). But we had a great time anyway, I learned a lot and have seen a lot of things that I wanted to see. I hope to be back soon!

View from Lions Bay

Some more pictures of the trip to Vancouver are here in a set on Flickr.

Last week I got my new laptop, a retina screen Macbook Pro. It’s the 4th Macbook Pro that I have and I was happy to get finally get it, because my old MBP was almost falling apart. The problem is that I take my laptop with me everywhere, from the desert to mountain tops and from beaches to sailing trips, so my computers wear down quickly. Next to that I hardly ever shut them down and I always have 20-30 tabs open in my browser. Not smart, I know.

A few months ago my computer became slower and slower and the hard disk started to have some problems (the HDD is the weakest point in Apple laptops). But I knew that a new MBP would come out, so I decided to tweak my computer a bit and wait for the new one instead of buying another ‘old’ MBP first. I assumed the new MBP would come out in March, but eventually it was June until it was announced. And even then it was hard to order it from China, especially if you wanted the retina screen. Anyway, I managed to survive, but barely.

My new laptop has a 750 GB flash drive instead of a hard disk, so the problems that I always have with HDDs will be over for good (I hope). I am quite happy that I finally have some more space on my laptop, on my old one I was constantly close to the 500 GB data limit (I could have bought a larger HDD, but decided to wait for a larger flash drive).

So far I am quite happy with this new laptop, it’s super fast (I ordered a top of the line one), battery life is pretty good and the screen is amazing. I now already can’t go back to my old MBP anymore.

But getting the laptop to work was a major hassle. I started by installing my time machine copy on my new computer, but for some reason it did not work. It was so bad that my laptop did not start up again… I went to the local ‘fake’ apple store on Hongmei Lu (Apple Pie), where the guys installed Mountain Lion for me, but after putting my time machine data on it again (which took about 4 hours) it again failed to start up. No idea why, and because time machine is pretty much a black box to me, I couldn’t do much to solve it.

That means that I needed to copy all my data manually, including all the settings. And that was a serious hassle, which took several days. One reason is that I could not connect my old laptop’s Firewire port to the Thunderbolt port on my new laptop, so I could not just copy from one computer to the other. I went to the official Apple store on Huaihai Lu where they sold me a USD 50 cable for this (I explained why I needed it), but even they did not know that the new MBP with a Thunderbolt port can’t copy data in target mode from a Firewire port. Apple is a great company, but if you always buy their latest products things never work smoothly from the start.

So the cable was worthless and I had to use an external HDD to copy. But because my old HDD had some problems certain files were corrupted and they caused the (already very slow) copy process to stop. What to do? Luckily Joop Dorresteijn helped me out by using Terminal to copy the files. In that case the process continues even though one or more files don’t work. Thanks a lot Joop!

Anyway, now my laptop is finally ready to use (after almost a week, just in time for its first international trip tonight) and I am very happy with it. It will be with me almost 24/7 for the next 12-24 months, so I hope it won’t disappoint me.

Since we came back from Holland almost 3 weeks ago Scott started his swimming lessons. He had a few last year already, but at 3 years old it was more fun and play than really swimming. So this summer we decided to hire a private instructor who comes to our house 3 times a week to teach Scott how to swim.

I did not expect too much progress because 4 years old is still quite young to learn to swim, but in 3 weeks he learned to crawl relatively well without using his inflatable armbands. And he loves to be in the water. Partly because it’s much better than to be outside in the Shanghai heat, but also because he likes to be under water. He spends most of the time now diving to the bottom or making underwater summersaults. He is totally unafraid. But we still need to watch him closely: he is now overconfident and doesn’t see the risks involved yet.

This morning Grace took a couple of short videos. A 12-second one I uploaded to YouTube and embedded above in this post, it shows Scott while he swims to me. If you can’t see it, this is the YouTube link. Grace uploaded a longer clip to her Tudou account as well, you can see Scott swimming here.

On Tuesday night we were invited to a winemaker’s dinner at BLOC in Shanghai with Matt Evans, who makes wines in both New Zealand and in California. The interesting thing about Matt is that he started out as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, but changed his career around 2003 to follow his passion and become a winemaker. Because I love wines and am also looking at doing something with wine in the future I was happy that I was invited to join the small dinner with him.

BLOC is a newly opened contemporary Eastern European restaurant on 139 Changle Lu. Chef/owner Mike Solovay told me during the dinner that the place just opened 2 weeks ago (no wonder I had not heard about it before), but there were quite a lot of people already despite the approaching typhoon. Mike is from Chicago, but his parents originally came from Ukraine, and this is the kind of food that he liked to eat when he grew up. And I can tell you, the food is great. The portions were huge, but the food was so good that I finished all 4 courses and could hardly walk down the stairs afterwards.

An investment banker friend of mine had organized the small dinner (as it turned out he had been a colleague of Matt Evans at Morgan Stanley in the 90s) and invited me because he knows my interest in wine. Although Matt lives in New Zealand, the wines during the evening were not New Zealand ones but from California. Specifically, they were from Elke Vineyards in the Anderson Valley (2 different Pinot Noirs), from Baccharis in Mendocino (a Sauvignon Blanc) and from Halcon in the Yorkville Highlands (a Syrah).

The wines had been paired with the food and I felt the combinations were pretty good. We started with a fried goat cheese salad with strawberry balsamic vinaigrette. The chef at BLOC had put some caramelized sugar on top of the salad which gave it a very special taste. We had the Sauvignon Blanc with this, which fit well. I am a huge fan of the dry but fruity New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and this California one was of course very different. To be honest, because I now only drink NZ Sauvignon Blancs I probably would not have guessed that this was a Sauvignon Blanc as well. It was a very nice bottle and it fit well with the dish, but it’s probably not a wine that I would buy myself.

The next course was a salmon baked in bread crumbs and herbs. Normally when I order salmon I tend to go for a white wine, but for this dish it was paired with a light Pinot Noir. It was a great combination, especially because the salmon had a coating of bread crumbs. I liked the Elke Vineyards Pinot Noir a lot, it’s relatively light but has a beautiful flavor (incl. some smoke that you could smell, because of nearby forest fires in the harvest year!).

As a comparison we also tried a one year older Elke Vineyards Pinot Noir, which was very different. I actually liked this one even better because it had a deeper flavor and seemed to have a darker color. I explained to Matt that for red wines I generally am more of a Cabernet Sauvignon fan than of Pinot Noir, which probably explains my preference. At home I hardly ever open a Bourgogne wine or a new world Pinot Noir, I mainly go for a Cab if I drink a red wine. Maybe I should actually try some more Pinot Noirs once the height of summer is over in Shanghai, this wine (and several NZ Pinot Noirs that I tasted during our trip in January) was so good that I would not mind buying a few bottles and drinking them instead of Cabs.

After the salmon we had a cider glazed pork loin on top of a potato pancake. A very nice combination! At first I decided only to eat half of it because I was quite full already, but in the end I realized that without thinking I had eaten the whole pork loin. Maybe the combination with the wine was the culprit, because this was once again a good pairing. Matt had decided to open a 2009 Halcon Syrah with this course, which was an excellent combination. Very different from the Pinot Noirs, and it was nice to see and taste the difference. Also a nice wine to buy a few bottles from.

We ended the night with a dish that the chef titled “Red Hot Chili Chocolate Lava Torte”, a chili infused chocolate cake filled with molten hot chocolate, combined with ice cream. Heavenly! And guess what, the Syrah fit very well with this dish as well. Normally I don’t really order wine with a desert, except for an occasional desert wine, but this red wine paired very well with the hot chocolate. So I decided to have an extra glass of course!

I am not sure what time we left the restaurant, but I know we were the last guests and that outside the first rain and wind of the typhoon had arrived. We had a great evening and I learned a lot about wines and wine making, and especially about some of the differences in wine making between the California and New Zealand. Matt, thanks and we’ll stay in touch! Also thanks to Michael Gaudette of Golden Gate Grapes (site still under construction it seems) for providing the wines for the dinner.

BLOC: 2/F, 139-19 Changle Lu,长乐路139-19号2楼, phone 021-6404 6685, http://blocshanghai.com/

And in case you are wondering, there are no pictures with this blog post because I was so busy talking and tasting wines that I totally forgot to take out my phone and take some photos.