View from my hotel over the Kashgar suburbs

During the past couple of days Gary and I made a trip through Xinjiang, I plan to write a few posts over the next days about the journey. We originally got the idea when climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro back in 2008, when we heard of plans to modernize Kashgar, meaning that most of its famous Old City would eventually disappear. It took a bit longer than planned to make this trip, but over a nice bottle of wine in my garden the idea came up again a few weeks ago and we decided to go before it would be too late.

Gary flew in from Beijing and I took a flight from Shanghai to Kashgar – or Kashi, as most Chinese call it. I had never been to Xinjiang province, and during a stop over at the airport in Urumqi I immediately noticed that this was not the same China that I have been living in for the past 12+ years. Suddenly a lot of text was in Arabic Uyghur script and all boarding announcements were made in Chinese, Uyghur and English. That together with the view of many hours of desert from my window seat on the plane made me feel like being in a different world, even though it was still the same country.

Upon arrival in Kashgar I took a taxi to the hotel. That was a bit harder than usual, because the Uyghur taxi driver hardly spoke a word of Chinese. He also refused to use his meter and insisted on getting RMB 80 for the ride. I wasn’t willing to pay that and when he told me that he did not know where the hotel was I told him to drive back to the terminal. He did so but pretended to be very angry. Fine with me, I don’t let myself be intimidated by a taxi driver and had been smart enough to put my backpack on the back seat, so I could get out at any moment if needed.

At the airport the other drivers also wanted RMB 80, but then I saw a Han Chinese driver and when I talked to him in Chinese he accepted to drive me to the hotel for RMB 40. During the ride I enjoyed the views of the city, but the driver kept on talking. The first question he asked about my religion. Always a dangerous subject in muslim territory, so I decided not to go with the atheist story but pretended to be a good Christian. He was happy with that and told me he was glad I was not a Jew… I wisely did not comment on that, but tried to steer away the conversation from religion after that. Or better, I completely stopped talking to him, pretending to make a phone call.

The hotel we stayed at was the only 5-star hotel in Kashgar and was located in the suburbs of the city (the city is quite small, so even suburb means just a 5 minute ride to downtown). When I walked into the lobby of the hotel the staff knew already who I was (I guess I was the only non-Chinese guest) and they told me Gary had arrived already. Gary and I were both upgraded to suites, which was a nice gesture. After putting my stuff in my room I called Gary and we met in the lobby to go out into the city. We asked a taxi to bring us to the Old City and he drove us to the bazaar for RMB 5. I realized that even the RMB 40 that I had paid for my taxi ride was probably still way too much!

Kashgar Bazaar

We crossed a small bridge and walked up a hill into the Old City. We later learned this was actually not the Old City, but a part of the Old City that had been built outside the former city wall, which had been destroyed decades ago already. We later also learned that we should have paid an entrance fee, but we had entered from the back side so got in for free. It was nice to enter into a different world. But it also felt a bit strange because there were hardly any people around and some of the buildings had been partly destroyed. Later we learned that this part of the city will be gone in 1-2 years, so we were just in time it seems.

Part of the Kashgar Old City, this area will be destroyed over the next 2 years

Using Google Maps we navigated through the backstreets of Kashgar to another part of the Old City, but this had been mainly destroyed already. Very sad to see this. The official reason is to make sure that the new buildings would be able to withstand an earthquake (strange enough they never collapsed over the past hundreds of years, there must have been several earthquakes as well!). But in reality the city is trying to ‘Chinesify’ at a very high speed, and the government is succeeding in doing that. It’s a pity, in 2-3 years the city probably won’t be worth a visit anymore, at least not if you’re interested in old architecture or buildings.

The Old City is disappearing fast

But for now you can still see parts of the Old City and at times you still feel like you’re in the Arab world. I guess that will not change completely, but my first impression was definitively very different from what I had expected. Kashgar has for a large part turned into a normal Chinese city with broad streets and typical Chinese office and residential blocks. Most of the inhabitants are still Uyghur, but even that seems to be changing slowly.

Workers making a big hot pot on the streets of Kashgar

At night we went out for dinner and drinks, which was not as easy as we had hoped. A taxi driver took us to the best restaurant in town, but the place turned out to be closed. We finally found another restaurant where we could sit outside, but there we could only get tea with our food (the tea was great by the way). Only later that night we realized that we were visiting in the middle of the Ramadan, meaning that most people fast during the day and are even more strict than usual with regards to alcohol consumption. We tried to find a bar in the city, but did not really succeesd. Eventually we managed to find a place that served us cold beer, but we were the only guests when we arrived (later 3 more guests came in as well), and we decided to just have one beer and call it a night.

Abakh Khoja tomb in Kashgar

The next morning we had a car with driver and a guide to show us the city. The guide was from the Uyghur minority and he seemed a bit afraid to speak his mind when we asked him specific questions about the destruction of the city. He opened up a bit during the day, but it still felt awkward. We visited the standard sites in the city, among others the impressive Abakh Khoja tomb just outside Kashgar. A nice and quiet place, with a huge muslim cemetery next to it.

Id Ghar Mosque in Kashgar, the biggest mosque in China

After that we walked around the streets in the city center and visited the huge mosque in the middle of town. The Id Ghar mosque is the largest mosque in China and even though it has 3000 places to pray it would be too small when we visited again during Friday prayer. Should you ever visit the city, make sure to go in (you have to pay a small entrance fee) and visit the courtyard and the main part of the mosque.

Selling naan bread on the street in Kashgar

What I noticed is that there are hardly any Western tourists, I could literally count all the ones I encountered on one hand. Kashgar being part of the Silk Route, I had expected a lot more of them. I think it can partly be explained by the fact that the city has undergone a complete transformation over the past couple of years, and that it’s less interesting to visit. But likely another reason is that it’s harder for backpackers to get longer term visa for China, meaning that they will stick to the main (=shorter) tourist routes and not the long ones in the far West of China. And lastly, because of unrest in Pakistan the Karakoram Highway from Kashgar to Islamabad is more dangerous now for travelers than before.

The Old City in Kashgar has been largely destroyed already

But instead of Western tourists there are quite a lot of Chinese tourists now, but it’s certainly not a major tourist destination yet. Also Han Chinese tourists seem to be afraid of potential violence. I did not have that feeling at all, and was surprised when a security person joined Gary and me while walking through another part of the Old City. Our guide said that it would make it easier for us to visit local houses, but a few days later another guide told me that it was standard so tourists would not feel scared. I found it very awkward.

Butcher in Kashgar

What feels even more awkward, is that most people seem to be unhappy in Kashgar. Hardly anybody smiles. I guess I can understand why, but it’s not something I had imagined. At first you don’t recognize it, but you feel something is not right. And finally you notice that people just look indifferent. Maybe the Ramadan had to do with it as well? Not eating and drinking from 5 AM to 10 PM in the middle of summer in an oasis city in the desert is not recommended.

There were a lot of police and military police on the streets as well, certainly a lot more than in Beijing or Shanghai. And when you see them they don’t just manage the traffic, but are often actively checking on people. It didn’t feel good to me, it actually felt intimidating. Later during the trip I realized that it’s the same all over Xinjiang, and that this is certainly not the worst place in terms of military presence.

Kashgar Bazaar

Looking back I am happy that I have seen Kashgar. But I don’t think I would go back again for the sights. Not only are they disappearing very fast, but there is just not a lot to see. It’s a nice experience to walk around the bazaar and through the older streets, but you can get that experience in a day and that’s actually enough for the city. If you have been to other Arab countries a lot of the things that you’ll see are very similar, it’s just that they all have a Chinese touch here. The good thing about Kashgar, however, is that you can take the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan, and that is what we decided to do next.

I will write more posts over the next days, so stay tuned if you’re interested in this trip. I uploaded quite some pictures already, you can see them on this set on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157630832031558/

I often complain about the pollution in Shanghai, but since we came back from our holiday the air quality has been almost perfect. The pollution is near zero at the moment according to the US Consulate in Shanghai.

This morning there were still a few clouds when Scott’s swimming teacher came over, and I was watching him get his daily lesson at the pool with Elaine.

But in the afternoon the sky was completely blue. There was a bit of wind that made the outside temperature of 36 degrees Celsius a bit more bearable.

The kids spent a lot of time in the water today and I did the same. I even got sunburned, something that did not happen to me during my holiday!

The weather will stay good over the next couple of days, too bad I will leave Shanghai again on Tuesday – to a place where it’s even warmer than here and where there is zero air pollution (but maybe no reliable Internet)!

The family is happy to be back in Shanghai after a nice holiday in Holland. The flight back was more eventful than usual. Partly because of the kids, because although Scott slept well as usual, Elaine was wide awake for many hours and kept on talking and moving. And partly because of external factors: a few hours into the flight a flight attendant gave boiling water to a Chinese mother who wanted to make soup noodles on board, and spilled some over her young son (6 years old or so I guess).

The boy was in a lot of pain and screamed like crazy. Immediately the staff put him into the business clas kitchen right behind our seats, and he kept on screaming and crying there. After the boy had been treated with a special gel some Chinese who could not sleep joined the discussion between the mother and the KLM staff about who was responsible, I assume helping her to try to get some form of compensation. At that point I decided I heard enough and tried to ignore the noise and get some sleep.

But not for long, because one of the other passengers had an alarm clock in his or her luggage that went off at 5:30 AM and kept on going off. The person did not hear it, but I did. Problem was that I had no idea where the clock was and who the owner was, so I could not do much about it. All in all I got maybe 2 hours of sleep and when breakfast was being served around 8 AM I decided to just have some coffee and orange juice. I was too tired to eat.

At the airport it took us an hour to get our luggage. Normally Shanghai Pudong is fairly quick with baggage, but today that was not the case. Some passengers started to get angry about it and started discussions with the staff (who were of course clueless and unable or unwilling to find out what was happening), but luckily finally the luggage arrived. The driver was waiting for us at the exit of the airport and after that we were home fairly quickly.

In the afternoon I had a short sleep and then went for a swim with Scott. That’s was a good way to wake up! While sitting in the pool with Scott I did an interview with a Shanghai magazine. Because Scott was playing and there were no other kids (everybody is traveling right now it seems) he decided to shoot me with his water gun. Well, my old iPhone 4 could not handle that and the loudspeaker of the phone died while I was talking… Luckily I managed to repair it later by using a hair dryer to blow air at the iPhone for 5 minutes. It seems that often works when your iPhone gets wet, just don’t put it on very hot air.

And now it’s almost 11 PM and time to get some sleep!

For the past 2 weeks I have been in Holland with my family for our annual summer vacation. It was a pretty relaxed vacation, in the sense that I did hardly do any work and not even kept up with my RSS feeds. But it was also quite busy, because my parents in law joined us: it was their first visit to the Netherlands so obviously they wanted to see a lot of the country. Although I did not always enjoy the driving around, I visited a lot of sights that I had not seen in years. The vacation is almost over, I just booked my dinner (Indonesian food!) for the flight back later this week, therefore below already an overview of some of the many pictures that I took during this vacation with a short description. All pictures that I took and uploaded can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157630503176498/

Although I did not work much, I still had a couple of media interviews during the first days of the holiday. For one of them the photographer came to our house for a shoot. Scott and Elaine were very interested in what he was doing.

I like to eat Dutch ‘soft ijs’ ice cream, a bit similar to frozen yoghurt but much nicer. My kids also like it a lot and ask for it each time we pass the ice cream store.

Most of this year’s holiday we spent in Ommen, the place where I lived during my last years in high school. It’s a small town (offically a city, it got city rights in the year 1248 ) in the east of Holland, not far from the German border. Always a good place to relax after the hectic life in Shanghai.

After dinner I normally walk from our house to the Regge river, to watch the sunset (around 10 pm during summer) or just to watch the sheep or other animals grazing on the banks of the small river.

We visited a lot of places in Holland, and the first was Amsterdam. I booked a nice hotel on Dam Square and our room had a view not only of the Dam but also of the Royal Palace.

My sister Sonja also came to visit us for a few days (she lives and works in New York). I see her regularly, but because my kids normally don’t travel with me she had not seen Scott and Elaine in almost a year. They still recognized her, especially because they often talk to her on Skype during the weekend.

Close to Amsterdam is the village of Muiden, where the Muiderslot (slot is Dutch for castle) is located. My father in law had read a lot about the history of the castle while in China, so he wanted to visit it. I had not been there since I was a child and enjoyed the visit as well.

After spending some time in the castle we had lunch next to the river in Muiden. Scott and my dad had a great time together joking which each other. A friend and former business partner, Sierk Vojacek, told me a while ago that he bought a house along the river in the center of Muiden. So after lunch I walked around the main street and indeed found his name next to the bell on a house there! I rang the bell, but the person who opened the door told me Sierk was not in Holland. Pity…

We also visited a couple of regional fairs, to show my parents in law some typical Dutch traditions (windmills, making cheese etc.). Especially during the first week the weather was great for this. The picture above was taken in a country fair in the village of Vilsteren, about 8 km east of Ommen.

But the weather changed during the second week of our visit and we had quite some rain. We brought (and bought) a lot of toys for the kids, so they would not be too bored inside. Above you can see Scott practicing his writing skills, he managed to write the numbers from 1 to 42 without our help.

Another place I had not been to in years – and probably only in winter for ice skating – was Giethoorn, the Venice of the North. Or as the Chinese would say, the Suzhou of Holland. A quiet village where the main form of transport is a boat, because instead of roads they only have small canals. We took a sightseeing boat and we turned out to be the only passengers, so we had a private tour of the village and the surrounding lakes.

During summer there are a lot of events in Ommen, because the place is a tourist destination for Dutch tourists. There are 23 camping places (including some huge ones) along the Vecht river and in the woods around Ommen. One of the events we visited was a skeeler race, comparable to long distance ice skating but then on asphalt. Scott and Elaine loved to watch the fast riders and it inspired me to maybe buy a pair of skeelers (they are not the same as rollerblades) if I should ever live in a more quiet place than Shanghai.

Scott and Elaine never met my grandparents, but I decided to show them their grave in a cemetery in the woods in Ommen. They did not fully understand it (they saw the graveyard as a nice big playground), but it felt good to show them the place.

We also took a horse and carriage ride around Ommen one nigth, as I described in my last blog post.

Another place we visited was Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands. This is the city where I did my university studies. I had been back a couple of times for Christmas dinners of my student club and once to give the opening speech of the Academic Year of the university, but I never spent a day there in summer just for sightseeing.

Maastricht was actually nicer than I had imagined, maybe the great weather also played a role? It was very quiet because most students were on summer holiday and we walked all around the city looking at the sights, such as the old city wall (above).

Even on the main square of the city, the Vrijthof, it was quiet. At least on the middle of the square, on the terraces around it it was busy as usual. It was great to be back in Maastricht and I decided to return to spend more time here in the near future. I think it’s the most beautiful city in the Netherlands, very different (much more French in look and feel) from cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Of course a visit to Maastricht should also include a tour of the caves in the St. Pietersberg. I used to illegally venture into these caves on my own while I was still a student, but with a guide it’s interesting as well (and probably a bit more safe!). Inside the caves we came across this (partial) map of the current cave system.

After Maastricht we spent a night in Brussels, mainly doing sightseeing at famous places such as the Grand Place and Manneken Pis.

And of course enjoying excellent food and drinks, such as this seafood dinner with a bottle of Sancerre on the Rue des Bouchers.

We also spent some time in Antwerp, a city I like even better than Brussels. Too bad the weather wasn’t too good, it got cooler and it started to rain.

That’s the down side of a summer holiday in Holland: it can be great weather but it can also be cold and rainy, like today. This afternoon at 5 pm it seemed to be raining all over Holland!

But even when it rains you can still run, I actually like running in the rain (Grace does not seem to believe this). My dad and I ran a lot over the past couple of days, mainly on trails in the wood. It’s one of the things I miss most when in Shanghai…

But several times after a rainy day it got dry later in the evening and we still had a beautiful sunset, such as this one above the Regge river. Despite the bad weather in especially the second part of the holiday I had a great time. And to be honest, I sometimes prefer the cool and rainy weather over the hot and humid Shanghai summer. Luckily I travel a lot!

I am on holiday in Europe with my family at the moment, spending most of the time at my parent place but also doing a lot of sightseeing around Holland, Germany and Belgium. A very relaxed holiday where I finally managed to manage my own time, instead of letting my phones and email decide my schedule. I basically shut off my main mobile phone most of the time (for the first time in years) and only answer the most urgent emails right away (and answer most of the other ones every couple of days). It works pretty well for me, now I get up and have breakfast instead of first spending an hour behind my laptop or on my phone.

I spend a lot of time with the kids and try to be there for them when they call me, instead of the usual “one minute, just need to finalize this email”. Today Grace and I took the kids for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Well, at least that was the idea, but after seeing the big horses both Grace and Elaine decided that this was not their preferred mode of transportation, so my parents were willing substitutes for them.

A friend of a friend is very active in this field, and he was happy to ride us around the fields and woods of Ommen in a carriage with 2 horses. He regularly competes in races and we used his marathon carriage for the ride. It’s a relatively small carriage, but it’s perfect for the woods because it has air-filled tires and an air suspension, and it can easily change direction.

At first Scott was a bit afraid and did not dare to sit on the front seat next to the driver, but he soon became more courageous and wanted to sit on my lap on the front seat.

The ride was great: I thought I knew the woods around Ommen pretty well, but today we rode mainly on the part north of the Vecht river and there are quite some areas that I had never been to. I will come back soon to check them out during a run, because it’s not only a beautiful place, but also a totally deserted area.

The driver had tons of stories about the nature we drove through, but also about the history of the area (esp. about the 2nd World War, his father had been in the Resistance and we learned that in total 16 English planes had been shot down in the fields around here). His family had lived here for ages (literally), and it was very interesting to hear about all the changes that had taken place over the years. History is most interesting when you hear it from people who have experienced it themselves, or heard it from their direct relatives.

The driver was very experienced and showed us some of his ‘tricks’, among others riding up a sandy slope, but also driving off road through the trees with sudden turns at a pretty high speed. I was impressed, and had to hold on to the carriage at times in order not to be thrown off. Probably good that Grace and Elaine did not join.

In the end we caught one on two rain showers (this is Holland after all!), but luckily we had umbrellas with us. And Scott was actually happy, because he finally saw a rainbow! He had learned about rainbows in class but had never seen one. So when a rainbow suddenly appeared he was super excited.

During the last part of the ride Scott was even allowed to take the reins. At first he was a bit hesitant, but when he realized the horses kept on going if he did not pull the ropes he liked it and seemed quite proud of himself. Scott had a really good time tonight, he learned a lot and seemed to truly enjoy the horse ride. And so did I, it was even better than I had expected. I had not been on a two-horse carriage in 23 years or so (at that time I cleaned and painted horse stables as a summer job!), so it was great to experience this again. And with Scott it was double fun of course!

For more pictures of our current trip, see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157630503176498/

You can’t say that the New York Times is not entrepreneurial: after making a deal with Flipboard earlier this week,they launched a site specifically focused on mainland China this morning. The site, that has the exact NYT look and feel, contains a combination of translated articles and new local content. cn.nytimes.com is free to use for now and paid for by luxury goods advertisers. Smart idea? Maybe. Or maybe not.

The New York Times decided to host the site outside the Great Firewall, which is probably a necessity because they would have likely never received a Chinese Internet publishing license. But by doing that they run the risk that the site can by blocked at any moment. It is difficult to judge how likely that is, but for sure the government doesn’t like it when foreign media companies start targeting their population in simplified Chinese. YouTube is a good example, they were allowed in China until they launched a simplified Chinese language site.

So far the NYT was not blocked in China, although sometimes specific articles were censored. But with a Chinese site that may be different. One wrong article could lead to the whole nytimes.com domain being blocked (for some reason they did not use a separate domain name for their Chinese site, something I would have done to test the waters), meaning that also English language content won’t be available anymore.

I hope I am wrong, I love the NYT, it’s the only news app that I pay a monthly subscription fee for (both their iPad and desktop apps are great!). They have fantastic content that is absolutely worth sharing in Chinese as well. They even set up a Weibo (=Chinese Twitter) account for that, but shortly after the Chinese language NYT news came out this morning their Weibo account was suspended already. Not a good sign…

Update: The Weibo account worked again around 7 pm tonight, and already has almost 18,000 followers – at least that’s a good sign!

This morning I came across a Tudou video in a Shanghaiist post that made me laugh so hard that I wanted to share it here as well. This is what happened: in a rural part of Xi’an villagers found a huge mysterious mushroom while digging a well. They had never seen a thing like this and called the Xi’an TV station to check it out.

Young and innocent female reporter Ye Yunfeng came to check out the object and made a 2 minute segment about the “mushroom”. You see villagers inspecting the thing and Ye Yunfeng mentions that this is a special kind of mushroom that is only found deep underground and is therefore not well known.

The way she describes it is hilarious in hindsight (translation from Shanghaiist): “On this side, you can see what looks like a pair of lips,” she adds. “And on that side, there is a tiny hole which extends all the way back to this side. The object looks very shiny, and it feels very fleshy and meaty too.”

Well, yes, that is a compliment to the producer I guess, because what she has in her hands is not a mushroom but a “double-headed masturbation toy with an artificial vagina on one side and an artificial anus on the other”! The villagers and the reporter have obviously never heard of a thing like this, but Xi’an TV viewers were quick to identify it. With this in mind the clip below is hilarious, and it went viral very quickly (right now the video already has over 1.5 million views on Tudou).

Today I found an excellent presentation on SlideShare about China’s startup ecosystem, made by ZhenFund, one of China’s biggest angel funds. Not sure anymore where I found the link (probably in my Facebook timeline), so not sure who to credit for this.

Although for me most of the information is fairly standard, I think it’s a great introduction for people who want to understand how entrepreneurship and funding for Internet companies work in China. I recognize a lot of the things that I come across in daily life, especially when you compare them to the situation in the US, like this presentation does.

For example, most people don’t realize that M&A deals are very uncommon in China (most exits are actually still IPOs!), very different from the US. The presentation also talks about copycats, and why they are so common in China (partly due to VCs, partly to low hanging fruit). And the slides discuss some of the difficulties of starting your business in China, e.g. finding good C-level or enginereering people, the lack of trust and unwillingness to share, and the fact that there are not many serial entrepreneurs yet.

I embed he presentation below, if you can’t see it you can find the slides here as well.

If you’re interested in this topic also check out InnovationWorks’ Chris Evdemon’s presentation from April 2011 about Technopreneurship and the Early Stage Ecosystem in China on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/finnevdemon/technopreneurship-and-the-early-stage-ecosystem-in-china-2011-9725714