When I am in Hong Kong I normally stay at a small hotel in the Mid-Levels. The views over the HK skyline and harbor are fantastic, and the price is about half of what you pay a few hundred meters lower. And the wifi is free of course.

When I am here on a weekend I often end up at Staunton’s for breakfast or brunch, which is just a 10 minute walk from the hotel. To read the SCMP or a book while having Eggs Benedict with a coffee and an orange juice, and to watch the people passing by on the Escalator. An enjoyable start of a Saturday or Sunday!

This weekend I flew to Hong Kong to do some serious running/hiking practice with my Trailwalker team mates. The actual race will be on November 7, so we have about 2 months left to get in shape. In case you are not familiar with the Hong Kong Trailwalker, it is a 100 km race over the MacLehose trail in the mountains in the New Territories. You participate in a team of 4 people that all have to run (or hike) the full 100 km in order to get a race result. Because only a few parts of the race are on flat terrain it is quite a challenge to finish it, especially if you set yourself a goal to finish within 20 hours like we do (the maximum time allowed is 48 hours, but by then I should be back in Shanghai already!).

My team mates are Marcel Ekkel (a Dutch friend living in Hong Kong, former Marine and endurance sports enthousiast) and Dolphin (Her nickname actually, a Hongkong lady very active in outdoor sports, among others the Hash House Harriers :). Until this morning we had a fourth team mate, but for personal reasons he decided not to join. A pity, but because there are many more people who would like to join the race than there are teams that get accepted, we should easily find a replacement.

Today we did a 25 km run/hike over the first two stages of the MacLehose trail. It was my first time on the trail, and I was not disappointed by the route. We took the MTR and then a minibus to get to Sai Kung, and from there a cab to the start of the MacLehose trail. Nature in that part of the New Territories is stunning, I did not realize that Hong Kong is so beautiful. I did some hikes before on Hong Kong Island and on Lantau, but this is much more beautiful. Deserted beaches, steep mountains, some rain forest – a fantastic combination less than 1 hour away from downtown Hong Kong. And hardly anybody on the trails, do people in Hong Kong never go here?I am getting into a decent shape, because I am running almost daily in my gym (I set up a small gym in my house, with among others a professional running machine). And that is a good thing, otherwise I would have had a very hard time today. Not that it was easy now, but at least I managed without too much trouble. It was hot when we left, the sun was burning and there were hardly any clouds. But the temperature dropped below 30 degrees about halfway through the run when it became overcast. We even thought there might be some rain, because we heard thunderstorms in the distance (HK Island had some rain we were told later).

The trail is tough, even though we only did the first two stages today that are easy (stage 1) and fairly difficult (stage 2). But if it would be too easy it would not be a challenge, so I don’t mind. My team mates are in pretty good shape as well, and we all managed to keep up with each other. That’s one of the important things during the Trailwalker, you have to stay with your team – in good times and in bad. Not always easy when you feel you can go faster, but over a 100 km route everybody will have his or her difficult moments, and then the others should be there to support you to get through that stage.

The most difficult parts were the long steep climbs up the mountains, but if you pace yourself it is possible to get to the top in a decent speed without blowing yourself up. Going down is easier at first, but after many kilometers of downhills your muscles start to protest. My new trailrunning shoes also did not help to make it easier: my feet hurt more because of the new shoes than because of the long run!

I look forward to the actual race on November 7, but I am also a bit afraid. Can I really do a full 100 kilometers? I never ran or hiked such a long distance before, and certainly not in a mountainous area. Hopefully it won’t be as hot as today, because that would be a killer as well. At least I have a very good motivation to train hard over the next two months to get in excellent shape. I am going to cut down on alcohol, eat more healthy food, and get more sleep. Together with 5-6 training sessions per week I hope I will be able to finish together with my team. The result will certainly be posted on this blog!

It’s amazing, but our Chinese game portals game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com keep on growing. Last month we had a total of 32.7 million unique visitors on the two sites, 4 million more than in July (28.7 million), even though normally July is the best month of the year and we had the Olympics in August (which caused a lot of people to turn to their TV instead of their computer).

Also our daily unique visitors went up again: on game.com.cn we broke through the 1 million barrier in early August, and last weekend we were just a few thousand visitors short of 1.2 million unique visitors per day. This week the schools and universities started again, so during weekdays our traffic goes down a lot, but I expect that weekends will show similar traffic to that during the past weeks.

Because during the Olympics our IDC’s (Internet Data Centers, the places where we have our servers all over China) were off limits to everybody, we could not add more servers and I was afraid our sites might break down, but thanks to some tricks we just managed to handle the traffic. Last week we immediately added some extra capacity and this week we will add some more as well. We are thinking about using a CDN (content delivery network) in the future to avoid these issues, but because the cost for this in China is outrageous (about 3-4 times the price for what we spend ourselves on bandwidth and servers for the same amount of data) the discussion about this is far from over.

I feel lucky that things are going so well at Spil Games Asia, and that my team managed to keep the sites up despite the huge surge in traffic. It’s a nice feeling that business is booming and I look forward to the next couple of months. We have several important new features coming up (that I will not blog about until we launch them, the competition also reads this blog – hi guys!), that will make our sites even more popular and that will also help to grow revenues faster. Exciting times!

This week Scott turned 8 months old already. Amazing how time flies and how big he has grown over the past months. I am so happy with my little boy, it’s the nicest thing in the world when I come home at night and he smiles at me and stretches his little arms in my direction to show that he wants me to hold him.

Even though he is growing a lot, he is losing some of his baby fat at the same time. The reason is that he is incredibly active and probably walks hundreds of meters every day inside our house. He can walk pretty fast already, but of course we still have to support him otherwise he falls down right away. The strange thing is that he does not crawl yet but went straight to walking.

He is also trying to form his first words, but they are still indecipherable. I think that will change soon, though. He tries to imitate us all the time, he even copies my coughing (I’ve been having a cough for the past 4 weeks that does not want to go away). The last thing he taught himself is how to clap his hands after we were doing that. It’s so nice to see his development.

For his 8-month birthday we bought our happy boy an ice cake and we got him a small computer. He loves computers and each time one of us uses a laptop around him he wants to play with it as well. My screen is covered in his fingerprints and he has drooled all over my keyboard more than once. But now he has his own computer, so hopefully our laptops will become less interesting to him!

I took hundreds of pictures during the Olympics, and I uploaded some of them to my Flickr account. A small selection you can see here already, if you want to see more photos you can go to my Olympic pictures set.

On Saturday the Shanghai World Financial Center will open its doors to the public. The 101-story building took a bit longer than planned to build (see also an earlier blog post of mine here), but now the building seems to be ready for its first visitors. If you want to visit China’s tallest building you can go up to the so-called Sky Pavillion at 472 meters, which is located at the 100th floor. The 101st floor at 492 meters will not be open to the public.

It won’t be cheap though: Shanghaiist wrote yesterday that a trip to the top of the building will set you back RMB 150. The elevator ride will take several minutes, according to the Shanghai Daily. A bit strange, because the same Shanghai Daily article mentions that the building has the fastest elevators in the world, that travel at 10 meters/second. Even taking into account the fact that the elevator will take a couple of seconds to reach its top speed and a few seconds to slow down at the top, this would mean that the trip should not last for much more than one minute. Does the elevator not travel at top speed or did the Shanghai Daily not research its article well enough (again)? Research is certainly not the paper’s strongest point, because a quick check on Wikipedia reveals that the elevator in Taipei 101 reaches a top speed of over 16 meters/second!

The building has some more “Number One”-features according to the same article (I did not counter check them though). Among others it has the world’s highest swimming pool (at the 85th floor, from where you might be able to look down on the Grand Hyatt pool a few floors lower in the building next door) and the world’s highest Chinese restaurant at the 93rd floor. Originally the highest ferris wheel in the world was also part of the design, but because in that case the top of the building would resemble the Japanese flag high above Shanghai, the Japanese developer was forced to change its design.

Picture (creative commons): Bert van Dijk

The Olympics are over and as I mentioned in an earlier post I had a great time. The organization was almost flawless, but there is one thing that China can still improve on: crowd control. Just a few examples that I encountered yesterday.

Early in the morning we went to watch the Olympic Marathon. We chose a spot in the last corner before the stretch to the Olympic Stadium and arrived early to secure a good view. The police already put fences up around the whole area, so we chose the best spot. But two minutes later a police guy came over and told us we could not stand there. I did not really understand why, because we did not hinder anybody. So I asked the guy why we could not be there, and he answered that there was no reason but that we could not stand there. So I told him that if there is no reason we should be able to stay, right? He did not say much and walked away. But two minutes later he was back and told me again to leave. The same discussion as before was held, but to no avail, we had to go. I asked for his boss because I wanted to understand what the problem was of us standing there, but he told me he had not boss (right!). Anyway, we decided to go. Some other Dutch people there did not want to move and just stepped back for a few minutes. They were also told to leave but did not do so. So what did the police do? They just put some military guys right in front of them so they could not see the runners. Well, this is not the way to handle spectators, but it’s typical of how crowd control went during much of the games. An officer gets an order and fulfills it without questioning it or without even trying to understand it.
In the evening I went to McDonalds on the Olympic Green before the Closing Ceremony would start. The McD in the middle of the Olympic Green had huge lines, literally hundreds of customers were waiting in line. I hate to wait and decided to walk to the McD at the north of the Olympic Green (a 10-15 min walk). I guessed that walking back and forth would be faster than waiting in line, and at least I got some exercise at the same time as well. I arrived just before 6:30 PM at the other McDonalds and noticed a small crowd in front of the door. The McDonalds was almost empty, just some people eating inside and no lines in front of the cashiers, so I was wondering why there was a crowd. It turned out that the BOGOC (Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee) had decided in all its wisdom that for safety reasons the McDonalds had to close early (some government officials would be passing by soon).

Well, the crowd did not like this and was literally fighting to get in. How can you close a restaurant at 6:30 PM before the Closing Ceremony? Everybody wants to eat in advance and you cannot bring any outside food into the Olympic Green. Inside the stadiums there is no good food either and it’s usually quickly sold out as well. Eventually BOCOG gave in and within minutes the restaurant was crowded again. After I got my meal I asked the US manager what all the fuss was about. He said that he agreed with BOCOG and that if safety was an issue of course they would close down. I first thought he was joking, but he was serious. He wanted to close his own restaurant down at prime time, just because some VIPs would pass by!

After the Ceremony was over I wanted to walk home, but crowd control had (seemingly randomly) closed several exits and did not want to let me through. I asked how I could get to the western exit, and the volunteers told me to follow the crowd to the north. I asked them if they were sure, because it seemed the wrong direction, but they told me that was the way to go. After walking a few minutes I realized they had given me the wrong information and I would end up either at the metro station or at the eastern exit (which would force me to walk an additional few kilometers around the Olympic Green). So I walked back against the crowds (not easy I can assure you) and managed to get to my exit in that way. It turned out the volunteers had no clue, and lots of people probably ended up at the wrong place…

Anyway, most of the Games were organized flawlessly and these minor things don’t bother me much. It’s actually funny to observe and I am sure the BOCOG will learn from its own mistakes. It’s not an easy thing to organize these Games and overall they did a pretty good job.

I spent the past days in Beijing with my family and had a great time here. Most days I worked a couple of hours during daytime and did some sports, and later in the afternoon I went over to the city center, to the Holland Heineken House or to one of the stadiums to watch Olympic Events. So far the best event I went to was beach volleyball. Not only because of the sport itself, but especially because of the atmosphere around it. Great music and even better bikini-clad cheerleaders, the pictures of them are among my best viewed Flickr pictures over the past days!
I also like athletics a lot, especially because there is so much to see. At any single moment there are always at least two or three different sports going on, and it’s also fun to watch athletes prepare for their races. We were lucky because we saw several Olympic Records during our time in the stadium, and even a World Record (Men 200 meters). I am still amazed at what happens when a Chinese athlete participates in an event, the roof of the stadium would literally blow off because of the noise the audience makes (luckily the Bird’s Nest has no roof). Too bad Liu Xiang did not participate in the 110 meter hurdles anymore, otherwise I would have probably needed earplugs.

Tennis was cool as well, although you never know how long a match will last. We watched the women’s single and double semi-finals, and also had tickets for the men’s double final, but because it was quite late already I had to skip that. Men’s field hockey was a bit disappointing, especially because we watched Holland lose against Germany in the semi-finals. During overtime it even started to rain in the stadium, and we got soaking wet. Not a big deal, we dried up soon as well, but I had expected a better match. I still have tickets to baseball and the athletics finals on Saturday, and of course to the Closing Ceremony on Sunday night. I have never seen a Closing Ceremony before and I look forward to it.

Many of the nights I spent at the Holland Heineken House, THE place to party in Beijing at the moment. It becomes more crowded there every day, and a lot of the party people there are not from Holland anymore (like during the first days). It’s a great atmosphere to meet friends and business relations, and the only place where I can watch sports with Dutch comments. There is even a Dutch newspaper (De Telegraaf) that is printed in Beijing during the Olympics and distributed for free.

One highlight for me was to be invited to the recording of the NOS TV program Sportzomer on the roof of the Holland Heineken House. Very professional with an excellent presenter (Mart Smeets). It was also fun to meet some of Dutch medals winners in person there. Another highlight was to be able visit to the NOS (Dutch public broadcaster) studio in the IBC (International Broadcasting Center) on the Olympic Green. Amazing to see what is happening there, not only at the NOS but also at other broadcasters and at the facilitators. See some pictures here and here.
Two more days and then the Olympics will be over. I for sure had a fantastic time during the Games, meeting friends, going to parties and seeing top sports people live in action. I hope all athletes and tourists had as good a time as I had here, and that they have a bit more nuanced view of China after seeing the country for themselves.

Although the Games are not over yet, so far I feel Beijing did an excellent job organizing these games. Except for the first few days even the weather was good (man-made or by coincidence?), which was the only thing I was a bit concerned about. Traffic was quite smooth, and getting to and from the events was a lot easier than I imagined. I am glad things went well so far, because I personally feel China deserves it. People worked so hard to make it a success and were so proud of it, but in the months before the Games the foreign media only criticized the country. I hope at least the visitors to China (and especially the media people) will now have a less biased view of this country, and understand a little bit more of what is really happening here. If that is the case the Olympics have been a total success for me.