It’s probably getting boring, 3 days in a row posts about the snow in Shanghai. But last night and most of today it snowed so hard that I felt that I should put some pictures up, it hardly ever happens that this city sees so much snow. It’s beautiful outside, but I am afraid it won’t last long. I promise this will be my last post about snow in Shanghai – at least for this month.

The kids play area in our backyard
Scott at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten this morning

Elaine in the backyard

Yesterday I blogged about the low temperatures in Shanghai and that it had started snowing again. The snow kept on falling for most of the day, and overnight even stayed on the ground. This morning most of Shanghai was covered in a very thin layer of snow. Of course Scott loved it, and when we arrived at his kindergarten he immediately started running through the snow. Today’s temperatures will be a few degrees above zero Celsius, so likely the snow won’t be here for long.

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Normally winters in Shanghai are not that cold, the temperature generally hovers around 5 or 10 degrees Celsius but it hardly ever drops below zero. It feels much colder though, because the Shanghai air is quite humid and most buildings don’t have central heating. Personally I prefer real winters like in Beijing, with very dry air (too dry actually, I always had humidifiers in every room) and temperatures far below zero Celcius.

But it looks Shanghai is trying to catch up with Beijing: today for the third time this winter it is snowing in the city. Very unusual, you normally only see snow once every few years. It’s been snowing for several hours already, but the snow does not stay on the ground yet (at least not in downtown Shanghai) like a few weeks ago.

This weekend we had a problem with our shower, for some reason the water did not flow out anymore. We tried to unclog the pipes but nothing worked. Eventually we got some work men to help, but even they didn’t understand what the problem was and they wanted to come back with other tools on Monday. But Sunday night the water was suddenly gone. I turned on the shower and the water disappeared as usual.

So Monday morning we planned to take a shower there again and guess what: the water again did not flow out. This was quite strange, and we told the work men the story when they arrived. They couldn’t figure it out either, and checked out the whole pipe. Then they found what happened: the water in the pipe was frozen! This never happened before to us in Shanghai, so we did not even think about this as a potential cause. Our house is clearly not built for sub-zero temperatures, because it was only -4 or -5 at night.

As ‘proof’ of how unusual these temperatures are, the Shanghai Daily had a picture yesterday of a boy playing next to a creek with a big chunk of ice. The fact that there was some ice on the water was news in Shanghai! The weather will not change much over the next couple of days so we might see more of these pictures. I feel sorry for all the people without heating in the city…

Tonight I was doing emails on the back seat of my car while driving home, when I realized that I could not keep my eyes open. I didn’t get enough sleep over the past days and had a pretty intensive day today and tiredness suddenly hit me. When I got home my kids wanted to play with me, but the only thing I wanted to do was sleep on the couch for a while. But if I would do that my Friday night would be virtually over, so I decided to push myself to change into my running clothes and do a short run on the treadmill.

It was not easy, especially because the heating in my gym was off so it was very cold in there. But with some loud 70s disco music on the sound system and a sitcom (muted with subtitles) in my DVD player I tried to change my mood from tired and lazy to a more positive state of mind. I decided to do a really slow run (8.5 km/h without incline) and that felt good right from the start. After a couple of minutes I started to feel more relaxed and less tired, and even increased the speed a bit. After 20 minutes I had run about 3.2 km, and I felt so good that I could have easily continued. But because the cook had finished preparing dinner, I decided to take a quick shower (hot, then ice cold for 10 seconds, and then hot again) and don’t let the others wait for me.

I felt like reborn after the run and shower, full of energy and in an excellent mood. I’m not tired at all anymore and I am ready to do a bit more work (or at least ready to writing some blog posts, like I am doing right now). Running is the best medicine for me to get me out of a lazy mood. It’s hard to explain to people that don’t do sports, but if you feel tired or down just give it a try, it just works!

I decided to reward myself with a top to toe massage at Dragonfly later tonight. As Dragonfly describes it on its site:
Our signature therapy, a combination of Oriental Foot Massage with head, shoulder and arm massage by two therapists at the same time guarantees you will leave our retreat feeling as light as a dragonfly.

A good end of the working week and the best start of the weekend!

I don’t think I had to give any presentations until I was about 8 or 9 years old, but things are a bit different now – at least at Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten. Today Scott gave his first ‘presentation’ for his classmates! He talked about his Christmas vacation with the help of a couple of pictures that my wife had printed for him. He had to do the talk in English, quite a feat for a boy who just turned 3 and only learned to speak English about 4 months ago.

Of course I don’t know how the presentation went, because parents can’t attend. And when I asked him to tell me his story tonight he was happy to comply, but he did it in Dutch for me (he always speaks Dutch to me). So I had no idea what exactly he told his classmates in English. But I am proud of him of course.

This was his first presentation, but I am sure there will be many more to come in his later life. At this age it’s the most normal thing for kids to give a talk, so they are not nervous at all. Great that they learn this skill so early already, the earlier you start speaking in front of an audience the better.

On Saturday Scott gave a party for his classmates from Soong Ching Ling and for a few from last year’s nursery class in our compound. He was very excited about it days in advance already, the fact that he could play with his friends with all his toys and that they would have cake together was a very big thing for him.

To make it even more special Grace had decorated the house with happy birthday signs and balloons. For the kids we had also organized a clown who made balloon animals, they loved his performance. He arrived a bit earlier and both Scott and Elaine got a lot of balloon animals made before the young guests and their parents arrived at 11 AM.

We also hired a face painter, who was really good. Problem was that at first the kids were so excited about the toys and the clown that nobody wanted to sit down to get a painting done. Only during the last 30 minutes or so the first child ‘dared’ to get a painting. On her hand, not on ther face, but that was fine as well. Then the others of course also wanted but there was not enough time anymore for all of them.

For food we arranged a catering service from the Green Apple, they did a great job. Among others they had 3 kinds of pasta, 3 kinds of pizza, several salads, small quiches, chicken wings, sausages, cold cuts and a lot of french fries. They even sent 2 people to man the catering station, but because we had our 3 ayis in the kitchen already that was not necessary.

Because the kids are so young most of their parents came to the party as well, so it was good to catch up with most of them. Many of them I see every day at Scott’s school (I bring Scott to school every day) and others I know from the pool or playground in our compound. Before Scott and Elaine I didn’t realize how many people you get to know well once you have kids. I put myself in charge of the coffee (our staff is still not able to make a decent espresso), don’t think I ever made so many coffees in one morning:)

The highlight for Scott was the Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake. Thomas is by far his favorite TV series right now (next to the movie Cars that he watched at least 15 times over the past couple of months), and he has all kind of Thomas toys as well. So when he saw the cake he was super happy.

After the cake most kids were getting tired from playing, running and screaming (and the copious amounts of food!), and all went home for their afternoon nap. Scott kept on talking about his party for the rest of the day, we are really happy that he liked it so much.

As some of you may know I use Google Latitude to record exactly where I am at any given moment (whenever my phone is on). And of course I also share it with a couple of people, so if you want to stalk me you can do that from your couch on a laptop. At least if I add you as a friend on Latitude, I am a bit more conservative there than with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Why do I do this? Not sure actually, I just turned on the feature when it became available to try it out and never really turned it off anymore. I don’t use Latitude a lot, but it’s sometimes fun to look at the places that you visited over the past couple of days. You can calculate exactly how long your daily commute was for example. My phone calculates my location 1-2 times per minute and Google Latitude stores that data in its history.

Generally Latitude’s data are quite accurate, but for some reason the data from Monday night are not: according to Google I was at Schiphol Airport at 4:32 PM and the next morning at 12:11 PM in Shanghai, but in between I made a stop in Mexico for just one minute! At that time I was probably somewhere above Siberia or Mongolia but certainly not in Mexico. My last trip to Mexico was an afternoon in Tijuana last March!

I can’t explain this. I once accidentally left my phone on during a flight and received a welcome message from a Russian mobile provider while flying over Russia, meaning it’s sometimes possible to connect to a base station when you are flying. But my phone was off this time and we were nowhere close to Latin America, so a Mexico location in Latitude is something I don’t understand.