Things never go exactly as planned when you do an international move, and our latest one is a good example of that. The Chinese moving company had told us that they had reserved space on a vessel that would leave Shanghai on March 2 and would arrive about 2 weeks later in Vancouver (our goods were packed and custom cleared 4 days before the shipment date already). But when we checked on March 5 it turned out that for some reason the container had not been loaded. However, the moving company told us that they would try to put the container on a boat to Vancouver on March 9.

So we waited until March 9, but did not receive a confirmation that the container had left China. After a call to our moving company we heard that some administrative documents were missing so the container again had not been loaded. Now I was getting a bit worried. Things sometimes go wrong with containers, and when it’s a container with all your personal possessions and you are already on the other side of the world you prefer to hear something different.

But what can you do? Fly back to sort it out yourself? That might help but it’s not guaranteed, so it’s more a last resort if nothing else works. At least the moving company was now focusing on the case and indeed a few days later we received the message that our container had been loaded on the Ever Uberty, a Singaporean cargo ship en route to Vancouver. I immediately started following the ship on MarineTraffic.com and saw that it made good progress in the direction of North America. Our Canadian company told us that the vessel would arrive in Vancouver on March 29 and they sent me the confirmation that it had arrived on the 29th. So when I checked the ship’s status last Friday I was very surprised that the ship had sailed to Tacoma (close to Seattle in the US) instead of to Vancouver…

Memories of a similar experience with a container in the early 1980s came to mind, when I moved with my parents and sister from The Netherlands to Curacao (an island in the Caribbean), and for some reason our container ended up in New York. We had to live in a hotel for 3 months until everything had been sorted out…

Anyway, because of Good Friday the moving company was not working, so I could not check with them and would have to wait until Monday. This afternoon I checked MarineTraffic again, and guess what? The Ever Uberty had left Tacoma this morning at 2:33 AM and arrived in Vancouver about 10 hours later! Very happy to see that, so I don’t need to bother the moving company – although I will certainly ask them why they gave me the wrong info.

Now we have to handle the custom clearance in Canada, which should take a couple of days and then the moving company will bring the big container to our home. We’re looking forward to finally getting all our goods and to be able to decorate our new house.

Time flies, we are almost one month in Vancouver already, tomorrow it’s exactly 4 weeks since we left China. Life has been busy, but not just with work. Lots of things had to be arranged for our new house and we also did quite some sightseeing already. Just a couple of pictures from the past 4 weeks with some short comments, to give you an idea of what we are up to here.

Trail running in Vancouver is amazing, the forests are beautiful with hundreds of kilometers of well-maintained trails. I run here regularly, this trail is about 15 minutes running from our house.

The only thing I am worried about while running is wild life. There are quite some bears around, but I was told by a fellow runner that the bears are generally fairly harmless. Just don’t make sudden moves, don’t look them in the eye, and try to move away from the bear. I don’t look forward to my first encounter.

There is still quite some snow on the mountains, so we do winter sports regularly. The first thing we tried was snowshoeing, a  nice way to hike in the snow. I also did some downhill skiing already and went cross-country skiing.

Hollyburn mountain has some good snowshoe and cross-country trails, just 20 minutes from our house. It’s amazing how quickly the environment can change. One moment you are having a coffee in the sun in your garden and half an hour later you are in the woods surrounded by huge masses of snow.

View from my new office at CrossPacific Capital in Vancouver, the office is located in the middle of Gastown, the entertainment district.

Beach in Kitsilano, with view of Vancouver’s North Shore. In summer it will be a bit more busy here!

Heavy snow while driving up to Hollyburn and Cypress Mountain. If it rains in town it normally snows on top of the mountains.

Having a drink while watching the sunset. After years of only seeing Shanghai’s urban jungle I still enjoy every time I see the sunset here. That may be different in  6 months, not sure.

Elaine is proud of her season pass for Cypress Mountain, but…

… she does not like skiing very much yet!

Scott’s first time on skis, he was very excited. We’ll put him in a ski class in December this year.

High up on Cypress Mountain, with a view of the ocean and Bowen Island in the back

Horseshoe Bay as seen from the ski slopes of Cypress Mountain

Scott watching a big ship passing under the Lions Gate Bridge

View over Gastown from Notey.com’s rooftop terrace – and with a view of the XPCP office.

With the kids in Stanley Park after a visit to the Vancouver aquarium

Scott climbing the logs at Dundarave Beach

Elaine on the playground at Dundarave Beach

After I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago on this blog about why I had decided to move from Shanghai to Vancouver, a CNN journalist contacted me and asked if I wanted to write an article for CNN.com about the reasons why I wanted to leave.

I did not mind and the article was published today. Especially on Twitter quite some people are talking about it, mostly positive but some people also question why I needed to write this. Last year there were some ‘famous’ farewell China posts (among others this one from Mark Kitto), I guess people compare my piece to those ones and don’t like to see more of them.

I hope the message came across that I still think quite positive about China and believe in its future, but that I just don’t think it’s the right place to live right now with a family when you have the choice to live somewhere else.

On Thursday and Friday I was in San Francisco for some meetings and to give a speech. I flew over early on Thursday morning, and because there were hardly any clouds between Vancouver and San Francisco I had a great view of the whole West coast. The approach to SFO was interesting as well, because the pilot took the touristic route and we had a nice view of the whole city from the sky.

While landing at SFO I noticed that another plane was flying right next to us at the exact same altitude. I guess it probably happens regularly at airports with parallel landing strips, but I don’t think I have ever seen it before so I took a few pictures. We literally landed at the same moment.

The trip itself was quite good, but actually a bit too short. I am trying to travel a lot less (which is working well so far), so I only spent one night in the US and was back in Canada on Friday evening. I think it was also my first time in San Francisco without a jet lag, it feels very different when you arrive somewhere after 2 hours instead of after a 12 hour flight.

The Westin in Palo Alto, decent but too expensive for what they offer (rooms are quite old)

My talk during a dinner organized by Silicon Valley Bank and the Asia Society went well, I focused on why foreign companies so often fail in China. I did not write out the speech or prepare any slides (I just used some key words on a piece of paper), so I can’t post it on my blog, but I may write a post about this in the near future.

One of the points I talked about is the difference in business ethics between Chinese companies and foreign companies. In my opinion this is an important reason why it’s hard to compete in China for non-Chinese businesses. Because the Chinese consul in San Francisco was also in the audience plus several high level Chinese business men, I was not sure whether I should bring it up, but I decided to talk about it anyway. Nobody blinked and there were no questions about it, so I guess I was overcautious.

I among others visited Lending Club headquarters in San Francisco, a great company!

After just a few weeks in Canada I realize that it’s a very different place than Silicon Valley. Vancouver feels much more laid back and you can even see it in the driving style: in Vancouver everybody lets you in if you need to change lanes, but in Palo Alto that’s not the case. Small things that say a lot about the difference in culture! I still like San Francisco a lot though and I am glad it’s so much closer to home now.

One of the perks of living in Vancouver is the incredible view from most of the city. This morning when I woke up I looked from my bedroom windows out to Bowen Island, where the first rays of sunshine where just lighting up the top of the Mount Gardner. To my surprise there was fresh snow on at least the top 200-300 meters of the hill (which is 719 meters high), something that I  had not seen over the past 2 weeks since I moved into my new place.

View from the XPCP office this morning

I am now in my office and also from here you can clearly see that there is fresh snow on the mountain range north of the city. The white trees against the blue sky are a beautiful sight. The Cypress Mountain website shows there has been 5 cm of new snow overnight (and a total snow depth of 442 cm!). The ski lifts are open until 10 PM, so maybe I should hit the slopes tonight?

Hollyburn Lodge and First Lake

When I woke up this morning I saw a clear blue sky above the snow-covered mountains. Even though it’s mid-March the snow is still great around Vancouver, so I decided to do some snow sports today.

My initial idea was to go cross-country skiing, but because Grace also wanted to join and she has no previous cross-country experience, we decided to opt for snowshoeing instead. This is something both of us had never done, but which is as easy as going for a hike through the snow. Snowshoeing is very popular in Canada, but less so in Europe. I had actually never seen anybody with snowshoes in the European Alps, but maybe things have changed since I have last been there about 10 years ago.

We drove up the road to the Cypress Mountain ski area, from where you can also go to Hollyburn for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. We rented snowshoes and shoe covers at the base of Hollyburn Mountain and 10 minutes later we hit the trails (total cost for our rentals including access to the trails about $30 per person). Snowshoeing is indeed fairly easy, it’s basically like walking with very big shoes on.

One of the very few flat cross-country skiing trails with a track for classic skiing

Hollyburn has extensive trails both for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, and all trails are clearly marked. If you like cross-country, make sure you rent skating skis instead of the classics, because there are hardly any classic tracks. Also, if you are used to cross-country in Europe you will find trails here to be a lot harder: there is hardly a flat part in any of the trails! Most are very wide, so it’s easy to skate on them.

The trails for snow shoeing are quite narrow and all of them lead through the trees. There was still at least 2-3 meters of snow, but with the snow shoes you can just walk over it without any problem. Also steep inclines or declines are no big deal.

After an initial easy trail we had lunch at the Hollyborn Lodge and from there we took a more challenging trail up the mountain. After a while Grace decided that it was a bit too much for her for a first time on the snow shoes, so she went back to the lodge. I continued the trail and tried to run on my shoes. It worked quite well, and I managed to get into a nice rythme. A bit like trailrunning, but a lot heavier because of the snow and the altitude. I did not run too far and because my speed was much higher than Grace’ I actually arrived back at the lodge before she did.

After that we walked back to the base area, handed in our shoes and drove back. Twenty minutes later we were home already, it’s great that the skiing areas are so close to where we live!

Our new home is in Vancouver’s suburbs and I work in downtown Vancouver. That means we need at least 2 cars to get around, but of the cars that we ordered only our family car could be delivered before we moved to Canada. My new car has a production and delivery time of 4-5 months, so I need to rent a car for the next couple of months.

So today I got a small Volvo (a C30 T5) from Hertz as a temporary car to drive to the office. They gave me 2 keys with it on a key chain, and when I was back at my desk I wanted to put one key in my drawer in case I would lose the other one. I tried to open the key chain, but I could not figure out how to do that. Some of XPCP’s portfolio companies are in our office as well and most of the people working there are technical guys, so I asked one of them. To my surprise he also did not manage to open it, so eventually I decided to Google it.

And guess what? These rental car key chains can’t be opened, you have to destroy them in order to get the keys off! I am obviously not the first one who has this problem, and I probably would not care too much if it would be a rental car for just a few days. But carrying both of these huge keys with me for the next couple of months does not seem like a good prospect.

But it made me wonder, who came up with the stupid idea to put both car keys on one key chain that can’t be opened? Either give the customer one key or give him/her 2 separate keys. If I should lose my key now, I will lose both keys. Where is the logic in this? It not only doesn’t make sense but it’s also customer unfriendly.

I am considering to just cut the key chain, but I will likely get into trouble with the car rental company for this. I never take car insurance with my rental cars, so I will probably have to pay for a new key chain myself and that price will be about 20 times higher than what you would pay for this piece of metal yourself. A small dilemma…

After over 13 years in Beijing and Shanghai I felt it was time for a change of scenery. So over the past year Grace and I started looking for a new place to relocate to with the family. My time in China was fantastic, better than I could have imagined when I moved here as a 27-year old expat for Daimler. But over the past years I realized that China was changing and that I had changed as well.

Our main criteria for a new home were based on a different lifestyle for the family: a place with more nature around us, with a better air quality and where I would not have to work 24/7 anymore. We made a shortlist that included among other San Francisco (USA), Auckland (New Zealand) and the south of France, but after spending a week in Vancouver last August we eventually decided that would be our preferred place to settle down.

We applied for immigration in early November, got our visa approved in early December, bought a house in early January, arranged cars, schools and furniture in early February and a couple of hours ago the whole family took a one-way airplane trip from Shanghai to Vancouver. We are now somewhere above the Pacific flying towards a new life. Things moved very fast, because once I have made up my mind I don’t want to sit around but just move ahead.

The last weeks were extremely hectic, preparing for the move and saying goodbye to many of our business and personal friends in China. There was not enough time to see all of them personally, but luckily the Internet makes it easier to stay in touch and I am sure we will see most of them again in the future. We wound down most of our business activities over the past weeks as well, mainly changing directorships and shareholdings in companies. In hindsight we should have taken a few more weeks for everything (Grace told me so but I insisted to leave sooner rather than later).

Last Tuesday I had a farewell party at Spil Games Asia with some really touching speeches. I am normally not very emotional, but during that event I just managed to keep my eyes dry. This morning while saying goodbye to our staff and to Grace’s family at the airport even I had tears in my eyes. Partir c’est mourir un peu…

I will miss China. I will miss the fast-paced business life, the amazing clubs and restaurants in Shanghai, and the luxury of having staff at home to help you with everything. What I won’t miss is the air pollution (which was the #1 reason for us to leave), the traffic jams and the slow, restricted Internet. Every country has its advantages and disadvantages, and although the balance has shifted a bit recently the advantages of living in China have always outweighed the downsides for me. If it was purely for business reasons I would likely stay, but I have a family with 2 young kids now and I also need to think of them.

Luckily I will still be back regularly for projects and investments. In Vancouver I joined a venture capital fund (CrossPacific Capital, see www.xpcp.ca) that invests mainly in Canadian/North American companies and actively helps them to expand to Asia. This fits my experience as entrepreneur and investor in China and I look forward to my new role. More about this in a later post.

As for this blog, I plan to keep on writing it although the focus will likely shift to my new life(style) in Canada. But I will closely keep following what happens in China, so I expect that there will be regular posts on that topic as well. I look forward to my new life in Canada and I hope all of you will keep following me here.