Off to Beijing early this morning for my wedding. The ceremonies (Chinese & European), dinner and party will take place this Saturday. Many of my friends have arrived already, so I am looking forward to meeting them later today. Likely there will be light blogging in the next couple of days.

(for non-Chinese readers: the Chinese character next to this post is the ‘double happiness’ character that is used for weddings in China. There is even a cigarette brand using it as their name and logo, so most Chinese use that brand during weddings. Smart marketing!)

A few days ago I wrote about the new regulation that would become effective on September 1 that says that you have to identify yourself when buying a mobile number (either pre-paid or subscription). Yesterday my sister arrived in China for my wedding, and I bought her a pre-paid SIM card at one of the roadside stalls. And guess what? We just paid the fee and got the number. No questions asked about identity. I asked the sales person, but he did not seem to understand what I was talking about. Maybe because of my Chinese, or possibly because he was not aware of any changes in the law. Was it just an announcement that was not implemented?

(from the Shanghai Daily)
China announced plans Friday to lift a seven-year-old ban on door-to-door sales and issued new regulations for the direct sales market in an effort to meet commitments made during its bid to join the World Trade Organization.

China had promised to open the direct sales market by the end or last year prior to joining the WTO. The ban will end on December 1.

Direct sales were banned in 1998 amid reports of rampant fraud and pyramid sales schemes. The ban came as a major blow to some of the world’s largest direct sales companies, such as Avon and Amway, which had only started to build up sales networks in the country.

However, the new law does not allow pyramid schemes in which sellers earn a small commission from all the people behind them. Also sales commission cannot exceed 30% of total income. Furthermore, foreigners like myself cannot be involved. This might hamper growth inititially, but because Chinese like to work hard to earn money I think it will take off very quickly after that. It is a good business model for huge countries like China where it is difficult to sell your goods everywhere.

My father arrived in Shanghai last Friday and we had dinner together at Sens and Bund. An exceptionally good restaurant: great location, beautiful interior, fantastic service, and the best Western food in Shanghai – but also one of the highest prices in Shanghai (3 courses plus wine cost us over 1500 RMB/person). As he stayed in the Grand Hyatt we decided to first have a drink at the river front in Pudong before heading to the Bund. To get from Pudong to Puxi you can either get a taxi (impossible on Friday night at 8 PM), take a ferry or go through the Bund pedestrian tourist tunnel. We opted for the last one.

I had taken this tunnel a few years ago when it just opened, and remembered it was different from any tunnel I had ever taken. You go through the tunnel in a small cabin-like train. The tunnel itself is lighted in different moving colors, there are sounds and even two inflatable dolls that are in the middle of the tracks and that are hit by the train. This combined with a dark cabin and some smoke creates a very strange experience. A bit like Walt Disney, but then with a purpose to go from A to B. Tacky? Yes, but it somehow fits to the fast-growing modern Shanghai. I actually like it, it’ s a nice and fast way to go from the new Pudong to the old Puxi.

Last Frday Qi woke up with a severe pain in her upper back. Because she has broken her back last year we were a bit concerned, but she decided to go to work anyway. This was not a very good idea, and after a few hours she went to a hospital to get checked by an expert doctor. It turned out that she had dislocated a bone in her upper back (I did not even know you could do that). After the doctor treated her, she hoped the pain would go away, but it didn’t. Friday night she could hardly lay down, so on Saturday we went to another hospital for a second opinion. Chinese hospitals are still super inefficient, but going there is an interesting (but time consuming) event.

How does it work? First you go to a counter to ask where you can get a number. At the number counter you have to make sure that other people don’t jump the queue, and once you have a number you can go to yet another queue to pay for the consult that you will get. Luckily in China that is never very expensive. The total price was EUR 1,60, of which we only had to pay 60 Euro cents ourselves, the rest was picked up by the insurance company. Then to the floor where the doctors sit. You have to pass corridors full of patients laying on stretchers, some looked more dead than alive. Terrible sight. At the floor where the doctors sit you get another number, at least if a nurse is available. Our nurse was not there, but preparing medicine, so we had to wait for her. When she finally came back we got a new number and then had to wait until a doctor became available. At the same time we could look at some very encouraging pictures from broken bones and how they fix them. Very bloody. When we finally were admitted to the doctor it only took a few minutes. The main thing he said is that he did not know what was wrong until we would make X-rays.

So off we went to the X-ray room. First you have to get a number, then you pay, and then you can go to the X-ray room. In order to get there we had to walk through the corridor next to the chemotherapy room. This was almost completely blocked by patients for whom there was no room in regular rooms. Image a dirty, noisy corridor without airco when it is over 30 degrees outside. Not a nice way to be dying I thought. At the X-ray room there was nobody, but luckily when a doctor arrived he helped Qi right away. Normally you can get the pictures within about 90 minutes, but because it was quite late already we had to come back the next day.

So Sunday we went back again. Again first going to a counter to pick up the pictures, and then to the room to see the doctor. We were lucky, it was almost lunchtime, but he helped us just before going out for lunch. Nothing was broken luckily, and everything seemed fine. But Qi still had lots of pain… He said she had to stay out of airoconditioned environnments (great wit the hot summer weather…), stay really calm during the next days and don’t lift anything heavy. Also she got some medicine prescribed. So first you find out where you pay (stand in line etc.), the pay (stand in line again), then go to the pharmacy (stand in line), find out that this is the western medicine pharmacy and we have to be at the Chinese medicine pharmacy… Anyway, we made it, but I was very glad I could leave this place. Hospitals still have a lot to improve!

(note: this happened about 6 weeks ago, at that time my weblog had problems so this was never posted. Qi is doing fine again.)

Just noticed that my favourite proxy Anonymouse is suddenly working again. Great, so I can read the blogspot and other China-blocked weblogs again without going to Bloglines. In case you are not familiar with anonymouse, you can read most website that are blocked in China by typing: http://anonymouse.ws/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http:// followed by the address of the site that you want to see. The service was down (or blocked?) for the past two weeks or so, and during the past couple of hours it came back again.

I subscribe to the online version of the Shanghai Daily, an English language newspaper that is a lot more interesting to read than the China Daily. I used to read the China Daily in Beijing because there was nothing better available, but since I moved to Shanghai I have not touched it again, except when I get one on an Air China plane. I actually did not read the online Shanghai Daily that often, because the format was hard to read on a computer screen. I hoped they would change to a different way of presenting the paper, and this morning my wish was fulfilled! The Shanghai Daily now has a decent website, that is free to browse and a searchable archive that goes back at least until early 2003.

The site even has RSS feeds for all kinds of news (metro, national, headlines etc.), and explains to the readers what RSS is. They also explain what a podcast is, although I could not find any podcasts on their site yet. So maybe they will start with this soon as well. Or they just copy/pasted the RSS description from another site and by mistake also copied the podcast part? The editor even has his own blog and there is a blog for all Shanghai events (both powered by WordPress).

Anther interesting feature is the listings of all bars, restaurants and hotels in the city. A quick check of the bars (217 in total) revealed that all my favorites are in there, so it seems they did a decent job.

And how do they make money from this? It seems likely that many subscribers will not continue their subscription. The only added value is downloading a pdf version of the current newspaper, that it hard to read. But they (intentionally?) put Google Ads on all their pages, maybe that will compensate the loss in online subscriptions a bit.

This morning while driving to work, my taxi driver was watching me work on my computer. That is not unusual, it happens almost every day, and some are looking like they have never seen a laptop before. But this one said: “Ah, pingguo diannao, hen hao!”. For the non-mandarin speakers, he liked it that I was using an Apple computer. So I started chatting a bit with him. In his free time (not much, he works 12 hours per day driving his cab) he likes to program and surf the internet. And he uses an Apple computer as well. He thinks they are the best computers, but very expensive. He paid over 20,000 RMB for his laptop, for which he could have bought 3 local computers. I was surprised how he would be able to afford a laptop that is more expensive than his annual income, but decided not to ask him that question. When he asked me what I do and I told him about Toodou.com, he told me he knew the website.

I had many, normally short, chats with taxi drivers, but this one was the first that was actually interesting. Most of them are about where I am from, how good my Chinese is (which it is absolutely not, I am ashamed that I am still at a very basic level after all these years in China), and about Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit (two long-retired Dutch soccer players, who are still on everybodies mind). But this conversation was fun and he did not even ask me where I was from. If you ever happen to be in Dazhong taxi no. 246357, send him my best regards.