Shanghai by night

Last week I spent a couple of days in Shanghai and Beijing for among others a Dianrong board meeting, for meetings with other VCs and investors, and of course to catch up with friends. It was a busy week where I did not sleep a lot, but a trip that was totally worth my time.

I am now back in Vancouver and my mind is so full of thoughts and observations about the trip that I decided to put some of them on virtual paper and post them on my blog. We have now been away from China for over 2 years and that gives me some much needed distance to see the country in a more objective way than when we were living here or when we had just left. I will put my thoughts online in 2 separate blog posts, because there is way too much information for just one article. The first one is more about life in general, the second one will be more about business and investment related topics.

Pollution
The bad air was probably the main reason why we left China. I got sick (literally!) of not being able to run outside and I felt really bad for the kids when they could not play outside most of the time. Waking up to a grey world in the morning while the sun was supposed to shine made me feel angry while living in Shanghai. But interestingly, during this trip it did not bother me as much. Why? I guess because it’s just for 5-6 days and after that I would be back in the clean Vancouver air. Although I started to cough again and felt my throat while running, I just shrugged it off.

 

Smog during approach to Shanghai Pudong airport

The smog was not too bad as well, most of the time between 150-200 PM2.5 (which is merely unhealthy, although in Vancouver probably nobody would be allowed to go outside anymore at these levels), which means that it was normallyhazy but that you could easily see a few hundred meters. I couldn’t run outside though, which was a bit of a nuisance, especially during my early morning 25 km run on Sunday. Generally I did not feel that the pollution was much worse than 2 years ago, but this was just a 6 day sample – and the day before I arrived Beijing had a hazardous 800+ pollution reading – so this is in no way a scientific observation.

Taxis
While living in China I had a car and a driver, so I did not use taxis much. However, when I needed them I could normally easily hail one on the street. That has changed quite a bit in 2 years because of taxi apps. If you don’t have these installed it’s very hard to find a taxi, even outside of rush hour. The reason is that the taxi apps subsidize their drivers, they get a few extra RMB on top of the taxi fare to lure them to work with the taxi app company. The downside is that they are not very interested in picking up passengers on the street or at hotels anymore.

The problem for most non-Chinese is that the taxi apps are in Chinese, so they are difficult to navigate. Uber works in China as well (it’s called People’s Uber here), but it’s not as good as in the US. The drivers seems to be new and often have no clue about directions, but at least many of them speak some English (that hardly ever happens with normal cab drivers). I tried to add my Chinese phone number to the regular Uber app but could not input the verification code, so the app was suddenly useless.

The few normal cabs that I used suddenly relied on their taxi app GPS system to get to the destination, instead of just thinking themselves about how to drive there. In the past drivers often had no clue about where to go and I had to guide them, but now they first take minutes to input the address, then they follow the directions exactly (instead of thinking about taking a faster side street like in the past) and one still drove past my destination (I had to point it out to him). One small difference is that many now seem to accept tips, so I could round up to the next 10 RMB and didn’t get tons of coins or bills back.

Internet
My biggest headache in China was the slow and censored Internet, it drove me totally nuts at times. In Canada I am so used to using my smartphone for everything, it’s like my second memory. But in China that second memory was suddenly extremely slow or did not work at all. I did have a VPN but it did not always work or it got blocked for a while after visiting ‘harmful’ sites like Google.com. Even with VPN I could not load Facebook on my laptop, although I managed to get an occasional connection on my mobile phone. Most of my business is done through a Gmail account, but half of the time I could not access it, not even with my VPN running.

The non-Chinese Internet seems to be much slower and stricter than 2 years ago. This was my biggest frustration during the trip, much bigger than the traffic or the pollution. If I should ever try to live in China again this should be solved first, I guess I am too spoiled after using normal Internet in Vancouver. Maybe a better VPN and a faster mobile Internet connection may help, not sure.

Cultural changes
I feel China, especially Shanghai, has become a lot more Western over the past 2 years. Shanghai was already the most Westernized city, but the way people dress and behave in places like Xintiandi is virtually the same as in higher end places in North-America. While having breakfast in Xintiandi on the weekend I noted several fathers with their young sons having (Western) breakfasts as well, just like I would with my son Scott. There are a lot more outside terraces (esp. on the street outside Xintiandi Style) where people are having coffees while chatting with friends, much more than before I left.

The number of high-end shopping malls seems to continue to go up, despite the fact that many are quite empty. I suppose brands need to be visible, so people know what to buy during their trips outside China. The shopping malls are world class, better than anything you find in North America, and comparable to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. I don’t like shopping at all, but I did not mind strolling around some of the malls looking at the high-end products for sale.

People keep on dressing better as well. Especially in the business districts of cities like Shanghai or Beijing people seem to dress better than in the US or Europe. Less casual and with higher quality clothes than just a few years ago. I dress quite casual myself (high end jeans, dress shirt & jacket) and found myself underdressed on at least 2 occasions…

 

Traffic at the Guomao intersection of the 3rd ring road, there are traffic jams all day.

Traffic
Not much change, although it seems to be even more busy now than it was when I left. It’s virtually impossible to do more than 2-3 meetings a day in Beijing, unless they are in the same area or unless you are willing to take the metro. People still drive like they did before, not caring for others and using the horn constantly. On the first day I almost got hit by a car while on a zebra crossing with a green pedestian light. I guess I have become too North-American and forgot that that does not give you any additional rights as a pedestrian.

What I noticed that cars seem to be much nicer than before. There are not many old cars on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai anymore, likely because of the license plate taxes and because of environmental requirements. The number of super high-end cars is not as high as in Vancouver yet, but seeing a Lamborghini, a Ferrari or a Bentley is quite common.

Hotels
The top hotels in Shanghai and Beijing are so much better than in North-America, it’s almost incomparable. In Shanghai I stayed at the Langham in Xintiandi and in Beijing at the Park Hyatt close to Guomao, and both hotels were amazing. The service is impeccable and very fast, and staff has been trained well (often a problem in Chinese hotels and restaurants). The rooms are very well designed and much nicer than for example those of Langham hotels where I recently stayed in North America (in Pasadena and in Manhattan). Especially the Park Hyatt room was beautiful and very modern, with a huge bath tub (that I didn’t use) and sliding doors to divide the room into a bedroom and a bathroom. Small things like a power plug in the safe to recharge your gadgets, or boutique toiletries and high-end linen on the beds make the difference between a good hotel and a great hotel. The only bad thing was the slow Internet in both hotels, but I guess that’s not something you can blame the hotel for.

My second blog post with some observations about business in China is here.

Yesterday I wanted to do run in the evening, but because I had a board call with China at 6:30 PM I decided to do a 12 km run to and around Stanley Park during lunch.

While running on the path around Lost Lagoon I saw a greyish unleashed dog in the distance. I did not see the owner, which was a bit strange. I slowed down a bit and when I got closer I noticed that the dog didn’t wear a collar and looked scruffy. The closer I got the more I realized it actually didn’t look like a real dog and that it might be a coyote…

It seemed to look at me for a short time but then just ignored me. I walked as close to the lagoon as possible, trying not to startle or provoke the animal, and was happy when I passed it (the coyote was probably just 10 meters away from me at one point).

Two weeks ago nobody had heard of Meerkat and now suddenly everyone is talking about it (well, at least all the super-early adopters that I surround myself with). It’s quite amazing how quickly this video streaming app has gained traction, despite the fact that it’s actually nothing new. It reminds me of how Twitter’s exponential growth started at SXSW in 2007, and Foursquare at the same show in 2009 (coincidentally this week SXSW takes place again!). Why is Meerkat growing so fast?

For those of you who have not used Meerkat yet, it’s basicaly just a live video streaming app. There are many of these apps but none have really taken off like Meerkat has. Already back in 2008 I was using live streaming app Qik at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. I still remember that because it only worked on Nokia phones and I just had my first iPhone, so the team came to my hotel a few hours before the Olympics started to give me a Nokia phone! Qik was too early, the mobile Internet speeds were too slow and the data still too expensive (or you could not connect to the Internet at all, like happened to me at the Olympics), so they did not take off. Eventually Skype bought them and that’s the last I heard of them.

There were many other live streaming apps, but I didn’t really use any of them until I found Meerkat a few days ago. Suddenly I saw the light, Meerkat did 3 things better than other players. The most important one is that it was built on top of Twitter. When you go to Meerkat and you start streaming, automatically all your Twitter followers will get a message that they can click on to immediately see what you are viewing. This leads to a viral effect, because people retweet the tweet.

The second is the user interface, it is so simple to use it. You can give your stream a title or you just click start, that’s all you need to do. Nothing to set up, nothing to link, it just works. And you can see who is watching your stream and these people can interact with you. Excellent!

The third one is the fact that the stream can only be viewed live, it is not recorded so you can’t watch it again. You can record your own streams and publish them if you want, but that’s not the aim of the app. This may actually lead to a lot more video being streamed, because if something awkward happens only the people who watch it live have seen it. Theoretically they could record their screens, but that’s unlikely, and Meerkat obviously does not allow them to record the stream. This is one reason why Snapchat took off, people seem to want this.

This morning I decided to try out Meerkat while driving from a meeting to the office. It was a super boring stream, just showing me driving while listening to some Latin music on Sirius XM. I did not say anything and I did not show much of the surroundings. The stream was only about 10 minutes, but during those 10 minutes I had 10 people live watching me drive! If I can generate 10 viewers during such a short time for such a boring video, while most people did not even hear of Meerkat yet, it means this thing has legs.

Suddenly I realized that this could be huge. At any time I can now stream live what I do and the whole world could theoretically watch me. And I have control of the stream, nobody else can post it somewhere for others to watch. I never thought that was important, but I probably would not have recorded myself driving if I knew the stream could easily end up on YouTube.

Is this sustainable? Nobody knows, sometimes apps have huge growth and then they suddenly fade away, see for example Chatroulette in early 2010. But to me Meerkat is more than just a fun app like Chatroulette. It may have found a video solution for the basic Internet need of sharing and showing off. It’s easy to copy and because it’s built on top of another service they depend on them, but if they manage to keep the current traction they have a good chance to become huge. Because of Twitter the service can grow virally, which is a very smart. For sure the timing seems right, mobile Internet is much faster and cheaper than a few years ago and Twitter has almost 300 million active users that can view and share Meerkat’s streams. In my opinion Meerkat may have nailed it.

Twitter just bought Periscope that seems to do something very similar to Meerkat, but if I were Twitter I would offer Meerkat $100-150 million and integrate it into Twitter. Meerkat needs Twitter to grow, so I think they might take the offer. Or they may want a multiple of that, live video is at a tipping point and there are clear business models for this, meaning that this could be worth a lot more than “just” $150 million. An acquisition might lead to huge new growth for Twitter itself, because so far you can only use Meerkat with Twitter. Interesting times ahead, looking forward to following (and using) this app!

If you want to become a multi-millionaire there is normally no real short cut. As an entrepreneur you have to be smart and willing to take big risks. You’ll have to work extremely hard for many years, with tons of stress, failing relationships, and sometimes even health problems as a result. For entrepreneurs the result is never guaranteed, so you could still end up with nothing. Is it worth it? Of course, because most people don’t do it for the money, but because they like the thrill and the feeling of winning. But if there would be an easier way to earn your first millions that would certainly be nice.

It turns out that a few weeks ago there was a huge opportunity to become a multi-millionaire in a short time without too much hard work. Business Insider, a site I actually used to write for a couple of years ago, posted an article about a stealth start-up that offered non-employees up to 100,000 shares in the company. Like most people I dismissed the article as a scam, but I probably should have read it a bit better.

The stealth start-up turned out to be Jet, a company that has not launched yet but already closed a second round of funding at a rumored $600 million valuation. The 100,000 shares are the same amount given to very early top management employees, meaning probably somewhere in the 2-5% range. That would put the value of the 100,000 shares at a staggering $12-30 million right now! To be fair, these are stock options and I don’t know the strike price, but assuming that they are based on the first round which was probably done at about $200 million post-money they would still be worth $8-20 million right now. And the company has not even started operations yet!

What did you have to do to get these shares? Very simple, you just had to get other people to sign up for the site. In January an IT guy at a funeral insurance company in a small town in Pennsylvania, Eric Martin, read about the contest and decided to check it out. He went online and saw that 10 contestants who would manage to sign up the most people would get 10,000 shares and that the number 1 would get 100,000 shares. The funeral insurance guy asked 3 of his family members to sign up and was suprised to see that while he had rank 232,582 when he signed up, he went to 13,767 with one sign up and to 5232 with just 3 sign-ups. So what do you do in such a situation?

Eric was smart and realized that if your rank goes up so quickly most people were not really competing for the big prize. He downloaded a statistics app, plugged in the numbers, and was surprised to find out that he should be in the top 10 with just 2000 sign-ups. If you know a bit about the Internet you probably realize that that’s actually not so hard to do if you have enough time or if you are willing to spend a few thousand dollars. Time was not on Eric’s side, however, because he only joined the contest a few weeks before the end and most people had been competing for over 6 weeks already, but he was willing to spend some money.

There are a lot of websites where people (often mothers sitting at home) go to earn some money by filling out forms or surveys. Eric knew of these sites and decided to spend a total of $3000 on Swagbucks.com to get people to sign up using his referral link. The result was that within a few days Eric had 2000 sign-ups and was in the top 10 already! At that moment he probably smelled that he may be able to win this contest if he would continue this strategy, especially after he received an email from Jet that had the total numbers of sign-ups of all the contestants in the top 10 in it. It turned out that the number 1 only had 4000 sign-ups so far!

So Eric decided to double down and started to spend serious money on his campaigns, making him the #1 with just 3 days to go before the competition ended. Of course the other competitors also did not sit still and bought ad campaigns as well, but by putting up a big Facebook campaign on the last day of the contest Eric managed to win. He spent a total of $18,000 on this, but that may turn out to be one of the best investments ever if Jet gets an exit.

I love this story, it shows that if you are smart and willing to put some money at risk you can have a chance to earn a life-changing amount of money. It’s a bit like angel investing, only in this case the pay-off is significantly higher than the average angel investment. I hope for Eric that Jet will make it!

Last weekend I was in Cancun for the wedding of one of the co-founders of Uvamo.com, a new P2P insurance company that I am involved in. It was my first time in Cancun and I had a good time there: the resorts are top class and the Caribbean sea beach is amazing (see for some of the pictures of the trip this set on my Flickr page). It’s not the real Mexico of course, but that’s probably an important reason why many tourists come to this place. They look for a safe and relatively cheap place for their beach holidays, and that’s what Cancun provides them. Most never seem to leave their hotels or resorts and when you travel to local markets in Cancun city you hardly see any tourists.

Cancun is so focused on tourism that the place decided to change its timezone during the time we were there (not just Cancun, but the whole state of Quintana Roo): in order to make it more convenient for tourists from the US east coast they changed from CST to EST, meaning that the clock was set one hour forward. This time change happened in the night from Saturday to Sunday, the night we had the wedding party.

The next morning I woke up, looked at my phone and then my watch and realized they were showing the same time. I had not changed my watch yet, however, so that should have shown a different time (my iPhone always changes time zones automatically). I checked with some friends and it turned out that all iPhones had the same problem, and that Apple’s timezone database did not include the Cancun time change. When I turned on my laptop it also still showed the old time in Cancun, meaning that it was actually an hour later than the time on my laptop. I manually set the time on all my devices to New York, so at least I would not make any mistakes.

This can cause a lot of problems though, because people rely on their mobile devices for the time. As long time readers of this blog may remember, the same happened to all iOS devices when Russia changed its time in 2011. Because of that I actually missed a flight from Moscow to Cyprus and because I did not have a visa for Russia I ended up in a hotel room jail for a night…

It surprises me that Apple doesn’t have access to a reliable time zone database that updates the times on its devices if countries decide to change time zones. Actually, I just realize that even Google gets it wrong when you Google the time in Cancun, it still thinks that the tourist place is based in the Central time zone. Is there is still no service or company that can provide reliable time information in 2015?

Today Bitcoin exchange/wallet/service provider Coinbase announced that it closed a $75 million round. Among all the major funding announcement of other tech companies $75M may not seem like a lot of money, but it’s actually quite significant. Not only is this a record funding for a Bitcoin company (one that puts total funding for Coinbase at $106 million), but even more important are the investors that put their money into Coinbase. They are not just venture capital funds, but for the first time also top financial institutions.

Among the investors in this round are the New York Stock Exchange, Spanish banking giant BBVA, US military insurance company USAA and Japanese telecom operator DoCoMo. Also the former CEOs of Citi and Thomson Reuters both invested privately in this round. I think this is a game changer for Bitcoin that shows that the crypto currency is no longer dismissed in the board rooms of the largest financial institutions in the world. Now that the first banks are on board the rest will have to take Bitcoin more serious as well.

Why would the NYSE invest in a Bitcoin exchange? I believe they want to better understand how the blockchain works and how they could potentially integrate it into their own systems. Investing in Coinbase will give them access to doing this with the market leader. NASDAQ was for a long time seen as more innovative by tech start-ups that wanted to list (that changed a bit after the Facebook IPO), but with this investment NYSE shows that they are not as traditional as many people used to think.

Having a mega bank like BBVA invest is also significant, because this is the first time that such a bank invests in a Bitcoin company. Banks actually have a lot to lose if they invest in Bitcoin technology: they make their money mainly through fractional reserve banking (basically creating new money) which is not possible on the blockchain, because you can see exactly where each Bitcoin is. The blockchain is the ledger that banks provide for their customers and many of the bank functions are not needed anymore if Bitcoin would start to take over the financial industry. I am aware that you can of course circumvent this by creating money through off-blockchain transactions, and that might happen eventually, but I don’t think that’s why they would invest.

Probably BBVA’s thinking is that it’s better to be the first to embrace Bitcoin banking than to be a follower. Now they are able to buy a share in the leading Bitcoin company in the world for what may turn out to be a low valuation. Normally a $75M round implies an approximate $400M valuation of the company, but if Coinbase would really become the first Bitcoin bank that’s peanuts (BBVA itself already has a $50+ billion valuation, 125 times that of Coinbase).

Many might not know this, but BBVA is a very innovative bank. Last year they bought Simple, a debit card ‘bank’ that was on its way to disrupt the banking industry. I loved Simple and was a bit disappointed that they sold out, but at least BBVA seems to be a good parent company (Simple is still around, but I have no idea how they are doing).

Having former Wall Street CEOs on board as investors may not seem to be a big thing. However, even though these guys don’t have the power anymore that they used to have, but they are still extremely well connected and will spread the word about Bitcoin in the right circles. The fact that they see Coinbase as an investment opportunity means they understand that the financial world is going to change.

I don’t think this is the last big Bitcoin funding announcement that we’ll see, it may actually open the floodgates for even bigger investments in companies like Circle, Bitpay or Blockchain. Or we may see more M&A activity in this field, with $75 million in the bank you can do some interesting acquisitions. Good times in Bitcoinland!

The falling Bitcoin price gives many people the impression that Bitcoin is dying, but actually the opposite is true. Yes, the price has been on a downward spiral for a long time and right now there is massive panic selling going, but for me that does not mean that the currency or the blockchain have failed. After record VC investments last year I expect a lot of companies to release Bitcoin related products over the next couple of months, and I think that once the price reaches a bottom a lot more people will start using it, either directly or indirectly. I am now sitting on an airplane, so I finally have some quiet time to put my thoughts in a post.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, what is happening with the price? I am regularly asked by people what is going on, some are just curious, others are annoyed that their investment is not doing well and some are panicking because they put too many savings into Bitcoin. To be honest, nobody really knows for sure what determines Bitcoin prices on a daily basis, but I have some thoughts on this. I am a member of several private Bitcoin message roups on WeChat and on Telegram and the price is a regular topic of debate there (but certainly not the only topic).

Everybody has different opinions, but the consensus seems to be that the huge volatility and price drop we are seeing right now was not expected among the people who spend most of their time in the Bitcoin world, but that it’s also not unusual for such a young and hyped currency, and that Bitcoin has seen this kind of drops before.

Most people were not part of Bitcoin yet in 2011, but in early June that year the price reached $32 only to fall to $10 a few days later. The bottom of the following bear market was at $2 in November 2011! So if history repeats itself the price could fall a lot more than it has done so far, and maybe that would be a good thing.

I still spend a lot of time on Bitcoin and am surprised that Bitcoin would fall so much. The main reason that the price has been on a downward trajectory is actually partly because of its success: more companies accept Bitcoin (among others Microsoft, Paypal and Dell now take the crypto currency) so more people are using Bitcoin that they already own to pay for goods. The problem is that merchants change these bitcoin for fiat currency right away, leading to an increased supply of coins. Only when they would hold on to them (e.g. when they could use BTC to pay their suppliers or pay their staff, or if they would believe that the value would go up) the markets will stabilize, and that is just not happening yet. And in a downward market there is less incentive to buy new Bitcoin for people who spend it, because people expect the price to be lower in the near future.

To make matters worse, the Bitcoin miners that used to hold on to most of their Bitcoin are now spending them to pay for electricity. The lower the Bitcoin price the more coins they need to sell to pay for their costs. At current prices it’s almost impossible to make money with mining and some companies even stopped their mining operations (see for example http://www.coindesk.com/cex-io-halts-cloud-mining-service-due-low-bitcoin-price/)

What we are seeing now is that people who bought coins in the uptrend are panicking. Many of these must have bought coins when prices were far higher than today and they may now worry that the value of Bitcoin may eventually go to zero, and so they cut their losses and sell. Smart? If you need the money it may be a wise decision, but if you bought the coins with money that you were prepared to lose I would hold on to it.

This is typical behavior of small investors and it normally indicates that the bottom is near. Soon bulls will come back into the market and start buying coins on the cheap. The question is of course when this will happen, and that is something nobody knows. I personally have not sold a Bitcoin over the past months and I am not planning to do so now either (many people are like me it seems, 70% of all Bitcoin have not moved in the past 6 months). But I am also not buying yet, mainly because I feel I have enough exposure to Bitcoin in my portfolio. If I would not have Bitcoin yet, however, I would probably put some orders in soon. Don’t take this as investment advice of course, and keep in mind that most people are a lot more risk averse than I am.

Actually, Bitcoin usage was at an all-time high a few days ago, with several days of over 100,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. Still tiny compared to other financial transactions, but there is a clear uptrend despite prices going down. And take into account that so far there are hardly any good use cases for Bitcoin for the average consumer.

I am probably one of the bigger Bitcoin users in the world right now (in terms of number of transactions), because I have a Bitcoin debit card. This card was issued by Blade Financial, a company that CrossPacific Capital invested in and where I am on the advisory board. I use the Bitcoin debit card on an almost daily basis. All over Vancouver I pay in Bitcoin, but none of the merchants know that of course, and they don’t have to know it either (they only see dollars, not BTC). It works great and I believe that once this card launches officially (this is just a test card) a lot more people may be exposed for the first time to Bitcoin.

VC investments in Bitcoin companies are still on the rise and I hear about new Bitcoin companies on an almost daily basis. Bitcoin is far from over and maybe the shake-out that will be caused by the low price is a good thing. Of course the low price will lead a lot of people to be even more skeptical about Bitcoin, but that can change quickly if the price stabilizes and will start increasing again.

Like I said earlier, nobody really knows what determines Bitcoin prices. I am just pointing to some trends that I observe in the market and that play a role in Bitcoin prices. One thing I did not mention yet in this post, but that I talked about in the past, is that institutional money can still not invest in Bitcoin because there are no ETFs on the market. I had expected that the first ETF would have been launched much earlier already, but the SEC is taking its time to approve these funds. The first one will likely be the Winklevoss fund and that could well lead to an unexpected rally when suddenly demand goes up much higher than supply.

I find the Bitcoin world fascinating and I am still very happy to be part of it. The low price leads to completely new dynamics in the market and because of that I keep on learning new things (sometimes the hard way!). Changes go much more slowly than I had expected, but I see that changes are taking place, both with blockchain applications and with Bitcoin as a currency. I look forward to the next year in Bitcoinland and being part of it as a participants, an investor and as an evangelist. The best is yet to come!

Grace and I just got back from a 3-day trip to Las Vegas. It’s an easy destination to get to from Vancouver, both Air Canada and Westjet have direct flights that bring you to Sin City in less than 3 hours.

Leaving dark & rainy Vancouver

The past weeks had been extremely busy so about 10 days ago we booked a flight and a hotel for the days before Christmas. Unfortunately work and private issues messed up our schedules a bit, so in the end we almost decided not to go. Because of that we both had to do phone calls and many emails while on vacation. Not the best way to relax, but we couldn’t change it and the only alternative would have been to stay home.

Because I’m not a big fan of casino’s (I hate gambling and have trouble understanding how people can sit at slot machines or casino tables for hours) we booked one of the few hotels that does not have its own casino or slot machines, the Mandarin Oriental. I love the chain, it’s one of the hotels that I prefer to stay at in Asia as well. Their Las Vegas hotel was excellent with very friendly staff, a great room and good services. Almost comparable to 5-star hotels in Asia, which is something special in North America.

We had decided to go to Las Vegas because we wanted to be away from the dark and rainy Vancouver winter days, and Vegas normally has dry and sunny weather (it’s in the middle of the desert). We were lucky because we had temperatures up to 23 Celcius while there (which is much warmer than usual), so I could walk around in a t-shirt during the day.

View from the Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas

Grace’ main activity was to go shopping, while I was sitting in the hotel room behind my laptop, although I joined her a few times as well. A bit of a sacrifice, because I’m not a fan of physical shopping, I prefer to buy my things online.

What I like about Las Vegas is of course the nightlife, although we did not go out a lot. I was so tired from work that I slept 9-10 hours per night during the trip, just to recover. We did have some excellent dinners though. The first night we went to Picasso in the Bellagio, a French restaurant with a classical feel to it. I was glad I wore a jacket, otherwise I would have felt underdressed. We decided to go for the Menu Degustation, a multicourse tasting meal that featured the best creations of the chef. A great choice, but quite a large meal if you also take the wine pairings.

Filet Mignon at Jean Georges Steakhouse in Las Vegas

We found out that Jean Georges also has an establishment in Las Vegas, in the Aria Resort. We had dinner there quite late on the second night, after we first had a foot massage in a Chinese spa on the outskirts of the city. Jean Georges did not disappoint, but it was not as high end as the one in Shanghai. Many of the other top restaurants that were on my shortlist (e.g. Hakkassan and Twist by Pierre Gagnaire) turned out to be closed during the week before Christmas, so that’s something to check out in advance before a future trip.

On the last night we had dinner with friends from Vancouver that were coincidentally also in Las Vegas (the husband is actually a successful entrepreneur who lives mainly in Beijing, his wife and kids live full-time in Canada). Good for me to practice my Chinese a bit. We went to the Cirque du Soleil show Michael Jackson ONE with them in the Mandalay. There are always so many shows in Vegas that it’s hard to decide which one to go to, but after some research this seemed the best one. It was indeed a good choice, it was a combination of acrobatics, performance and dancing on the music of all famous Michael Jackson hits. Micheal himself also played a role with his 3D hologram dancing on stage, pretty cool!

View from Mix Lounge at Delano over Las Vegas’ skyline

We’re now back in Vancouver where I’ll work one more day on Wednesday before trying to take a few days off. It was a fun trip to end the year but next time I’ll try to plan it during a time when we are less busy.