Some people are impressive from the moment you meet them. One of them is Irving Fields, the 96-year old pianist at Nino’s on W58th. Last night my sister, Grace and I had dinner there (a big seafood platter followed by all kinds of steaks, with New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and Californian Cabernet Sauvignon), and when we walked in we were immediately welcomed by the pianist with a little tune.

After our starter he walked over to our table to ask if we had any special requests (Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind and Frank Sinatra’s My Way were our choices) and then we started talking. Until then I did not realize that he was 96 years old. He looked much younger and he behaved like somebody many years his junior. He told some of the stories of his life: although he was born and raised in New York he spent much of his live abroad playing on cruise ships all over the world and in some of the most exclusive hotels (The Taj in Bombay, The Peninsula in Hong Kong and the Imperial Hotel in Japan). In the 1950s he was quite famous with his Irving Fields Trio with which he topped the charts and he recorded almost 100 albums in his life! He actually even composed a theme song for YouTube, that has been watched almost 850,000 times already.

Of course I bought his latest CD, that he signed for me. When he realized that Grace is Chinese he gave her a copy of his composition “Hong Kong Serenade”, so she can ask any pianist worldwide to play it for her. It was great meeting a friendly, truly nice and very gifted person like Irving Fields, he made our excellent dinner into an even more special evening. When we left he gave us a list of  his secrets to longevity, which contained among others “When in an argument, change the subject”, “Be happy about the success of others, not just yours”, “Travel is important, memorable, fun and educational”, and “Enjoy every day to the fullest”. I don’t think he will ever read this, but I would like to thank him for the great atmosphere he created last night and I hope he will keep on playing for many years to come.

Irving Fields plays 6 nights at week at Nino’s on 117 W 58th, check him out there if you in the neighborhood and looking for a great dinner with live piano music. Irving Fields Wikipedia entry is here. 

Sometimes hotel rooms have good views and sometimes they have great views. The hotel I booked in New York this time, The Helmsley Park Lane Hotel, fits into the latter category. Our suite has by far the best views I ever had over Central Park!

When I arrived last night it was almost dark, so I could not really see it. This morning it was foggy, so I still could not really enjoy the views over the park, but this afternoon when I came back from my meetings it is quite sunny and the views are just amazing.

I stayed in many hotels in NYC over the years, but this is likely one that I will come back to regularly from now on. For me a location close to Central Park is important because I normally always run there in the morning. Next to that the service should be good (that’s the case here, even though we had some issues at check-in) and rooms should be quiet (hard in a city like this, but because of the location next to the park and the high floor I did not wake up once because of noise). Highly recommended!

This morning I was walking to a meeting in Times Square (New York), when by coincidence I passed by the cars participating in this year’s Gumball 3000. The last time I saw the Gumball was in 2008 when they finished the race in Beijing during the Olympics, but now I had the chance to take a closer look at some of the super sports cars.

There were some real gems among them, among others a Bugatti Veyron, a McLaren F1 and several pimped Bentleys.

And even Lightning McQueen participated in the form of a Mercedes-Benz SLS, so of course I took a picture for Scott, who is a big fan of Disney’s Cars. Super cool to see all these cars together at one place!

The Gumball 3000 started today at 12 PM in Times Square right in front of the NASDAQ. This afternoon’s stage is from New York to Toronto. The race lasts 8 days and the cars will arrive in Los Angeles next Saturday. I wouldn’t mind participating in this race myself one day!

I just came across this English language page on Sina.com: Beijing Welcomes You – Decent Foreigners. If this had been a page on the communist party mouthpiece People’s Daily I would have laughed about it. But a page like this on publicly listed sina.com is just plain scary. I hope the page is fake, but I have no reason to believe it is.

On the site people are encouraged to report on foreigners that they suspect of working or living here illegally (there is even a hotline phone number). Then there is propaganda that should convince readers that most Chinese want to control foreigners more (“Ninety-four percent of participants in a recent online survey agreed that the financial conditions, real estate assets and job status of foreigners living in China should be more closely scrutinized.”). The negative stories about foreigners that came up over the past 2 weeks are listed of course (The Russian Cellist, the 2 Koreans that beat up girls and the English ‘rapist’). And there is even a poll where you can vote for the crackdown on foreigners, but you can only vote that you agree with it or that you don’t know (70% voted ‘yes’ so far).

Like I said in my post from last Saturday, too many things are happening at the same time. Whatever the purpose behind the campaign, this kind of things makes all non-Chinese look suspicious and may even trigger negative (re)actions against all foreigners.

Just now I had lunch with a friend who is backpacking in China and who is staying at a hostel dormitory. He told me that his room mate was beaten up by some Chinese last night while he was having a beer on the street. He had no idea why they suddenly beat him up, but the police put him in jail overnight! This is probably an unrelated incident (just like the one in the comments below my last post about this topic), but to be honest, this kind of stories I hardly ever heard over the past years. I hope this does not get out of hand.

Thanks to Christine Lu for the link on Facebook

Today my little girl Elaine turned 3 years old and yesterday we organized a party for her at home. 17 of her little friends came to visit, most with their parents and/or nannies, so it was pretty busy in our house.

Luckily the rain stopped on time, so the kids could play in the garden as well. The trampoline we bought for the kids was a huge success, some of them did not want to get off it anymore after they started bouncing up and down.

Because it was not so warm we decided to leave the kids pool empty. That was probably a good idea, the kids still loved to play in it. At a certain point I realized Scott had found the water hose and had even managed to turn it on, but I stopped him in time before he could start filling up the kids pool (full of kids at that time of course).

Inside the kids could play in the living room or in Scott and Elaine’s play room, and within minutes the house was a huge mess. But that didn’t matter, the kids had fun and that’s what counts.

Grace had arranged a clown who doubled as magician and who performed a magic show for the kids. He managed to keep their attention for the full 15 minutes of his show (not an easy feat with 3-year olds), so I guess he did a good job. He also made all kinds of things (animals, swords etc.) out of balloons for Elaine and her friends, so they all loved him.

We also hired an artist that made birds and other small animals out of brightly colored clay, he was really talented and I enjoyed watching him.

We had ordered a catering service for food, and they prepared among others french fries, shrimp pop corn, chicken nuggets, nachos and garlic bread. Of course the kids liked it, but the parents seemed to eat even more of it (including myself of course).

And then there were the birthday cakes of course – 2 cakes, because with so many people 1 cake is not enough. Elaine had chosen them herself, so of course both of them were pink. I had too many snack already so I did not eat a lot of cake anymore.

After the cake it was time for the Hello Kitty piñata, filled with tons of candy. It took the kids quite a while to break if, but with a bit of help of the clown eventually the piñata opened and all the candy fell onto the floor. Scott managed to get a lot of candy: being one year older than most of the others he put all the candy he collected immediately into his pockets instead of just trying to keep it in his hands.

After about 2 hours most of the kids were quite tired and the party was over. We took pictures of Elaine with all her guests and then it was time for a huge clean up at home. Elaine and Scott had a great time, and I also enjoyed talking to many of the kids fathers. Interesting is that one of them asked me what my background was, and when I told him he suddenly realized he had chosen the school (Soong Ching Ling) after among others reading about it on my blog (but he had no idea I was the one writing this blog). Always nice to meet people that read my blog, especially if I meet them for the first time.

More pictures of Elaine’s 3rd birthday party here in a set on Flickr.

China is never a boring country in terms of news. But I have the feeling that right now a lot more things are happening concurrently than ever before during the past 12+ years that I have lived here. It’s a bit scary to observe this trend, especially because some of it may also affect me and my family.

Maybe this trend is due to social media, so that a lot more news comes out that the government could still keep under cover a few years ago. For example, most of the recent food scandals would have never reached the general public in pre-Internet times. Things have gotten so bad that we hardly buy any Chinese food products anymore, and we now even started making our own yoghurt…

Politically times are very turbulent as well, not only internally (with the arrest of Bo Xilai and the party trying to keep the army loyal) but also externally (tensions between China and The Philippines). And last week, for the first time in 13 years, a foreign journalist was kicked out of China.

On top of that the anti-foreigner sentiment is on the rise once again. Over the years I have seen a few instances in which it was safer to avoid certain places for foreigners (the Hainan spy plane incident, anti-French tensions, the attacks on Japanese people and property (twice!)). But what’s happening now seems to target a much broader range of foreigners. Likely the government is just using it to direct attention away from the internal political problems and to make people more patriotic, but it’s scary to see what’s happening and how quickly social media can spread the moods of people.

Even big Chinese Internet companies like Baidu and Sina joined the party to crack down on ‘misbehaving foreigners’, according to an article in yesterday’s People’s Daily. And a well-known English speaking CCTV anchor put a tirade against foreigners on his Weibo, stirring up things even further.

A New York Times blog post gives a good overview of how the xenophobia started and about everything that happened over the past 10 days, give it a read if you want to understand what’s going on: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/sentiment-against-foreigners-flares-in-china/ Personally I am not too worried yet, but it’s important to keep an eye on what’s happening.

A couple of months ago I wrote an article on air pollution in Shanghai, and afterward I received quite some mails from people planning to move here who got worried about the air quality in Shanghai. At least one person told me he decided not to move to China, but I am sure that because of the air quality a lot more people already made that decision. And I personally know several people that left Shanghai because of the air quality – and like I said in the article, I will probably also not stay here for years anymore, especially because of the pollution.

When I wrote the post there were no official 2.5PM measurements available yet, but not the US Consulate started broadcasting them on Twitter (just like they already do this in Beijing). After last night’s rain and seemingly pretty clean air today (it even rains a bit right now), I was shocked to see that even on a day like this the air quality is unhealthy. The pictures with this post were taken just now on the roof of unitedstyles, often the view is much less clear.

The air quality measurement device is located on Huaihai Lu in downtown Shanghai, so the air there is likely more polluted than in the suburbs, but it’s scary anyway. Of course I immediately started following the pollution levels on Twitter, you can follow them here as well.

After our trip to Hong Kong Disneyland a few weeks ago, the kids keep on singing It’s A Small World. They have a video on their iPads that we shot inside the It’s A Small World ride, and they watch that video often while singing along to the tunes of the song. When they sing it I regularly muse about this world being really small – or that my network is really big? – because everywhere I go I meet people that I already know. Last night was a good example.

I organized a small bbq party and had among others invited Nicky Koopman to join. Nicky works for Dutch media company Talpa and is in town for the pre-production of TV program The Voice. I had not met her in person yet, but we had been in touch over email over the past weeks because of my experiences in the Chinese media industry. So we had a few glasses of good wine – among others an 18-year old Beringer Cabernet Sauvignon (thanks to serial fashion entrepreneur Jeff Clark!). and then we talked a bit about mutual friends. It turned out we indeed had a couple of them, not unusual if you are both Dutch and work in media.

She then asked me if I knew a certain person, and I told her yes, this person had even been to my wedding 7 years ago. She then looked at me and said: “But then I’ve likely been to your wedding as well!”. I had to think for a second and then I realized who she was. Friends of mine who were flying to my wedding had met her on the plane from Amsterdam to Beijing and told her they had a dinner party that night (for my wedding, which was to take place the next day) and had asked her to come along. So she sort of “wedding crashed” the party without really knowing who I was – and without me knowing anymore who she was. I only vaguely remembered that she was presenting a Dutch TV program at that time, and because there were probably about 150 other guests at the dinner I sort of forgot about it.

It’s quite a coincidence that you meet a person almost 7 years later, when you are both in very different roles and without realizing that you met before. If she had not asked me about the mutual acquaintance we may have never found out. Often serendipities occur because of the social media, but this time it was totally unrelated. It’s a small world!