Week in review

It was a busy week again this week, both at Toodou and China Bay. At Toodou we had several visitors, among other Christine de Baan (see post from Monday), Moody Glasgow and Dennis Tse. Moody flew in for the second time in two weeks, and we had good meetings with him. Afterwards we had dinner at Paulaner Brauhaus (Moody had never had German food before!) and then drinks at Zapata’s and Bourbon Street. Moody used to be a commercial producer, so we had lots of common topics. I mentioned that I started to watch Lost, and that I think it is one of the best series I have ever seen. Moody had not watched the series himself, but he told me that his brother is co-producer of the series (I noticed last night that he is the first name that appears on the credit list after each episode).

Dennis we met this morning in our office. He works for the private equity and venture capital arm of HSBC. Gary knew him from INSEAD and it is great to hear his ideas on what we are doing (or not doing). We told him about our Lhasa – Kathmandu bike trip of course. He does not want to join, but it turns out that he is on the board of an orphanage in Lhasa. That got me thinking, maybe we can also do something charity-related with our bike ride.

Tonight I will meet Sierk from SVP Film for dinner. We plan to go for sushi, sashimi and teppanyaki at a RMB 150 (=EUR 15) Japanese all-you-can-eat-and-drink place at Dongping Lu. I haven’t seen Sierk in a while, so it will be nice to catch up and hear his stories. He was in Beijing in November for the shooting of several episodes of BabyCare with CCTV, and then he spent some time in Holland working on a huge project. He came back to China two days ago, and because he will probably go back to Holland for Christmas next week this is a good time to meet.