Normally winters in Shanghai are not that cold, the temperature generally hovers around 5 or 10 degrees Celsius but it hardly ever drops below zero. It feels much colder though, because the Shanghai air is quite humid and most buildings don’t have central heating. Personally I prefer real winters like in Beijing, with very dry air (too dry actually, I always had humidifiers in every room) and temperatures far below zero Celcius.

But it looks Shanghai is trying to catch up with Beijing: today for the third time this winter it is snowing in the city. Very unusual, you normally only see snow once every few years. It’s been snowing for several hours already, but the snow does not stay on the ground yet (at least not in downtown Shanghai) like a few weeks ago.

This weekend we had a problem with our shower, for some reason the water did not flow out anymore. We tried to unclog the pipes but nothing worked. Eventually we got some work men to help, but even they didn’t understand what the problem was and they wanted to come back with other tools on Monday. But Sunday night the water was suddenly gone. I turned on the shower and the water disappeared as usual.

So Monday morning we planned to take a shower there again and guess what: the water again did not flow out. This was quite strange, and we told the work men the story when they arrived. They couldn’t figure it out either, and checked out the whole pipe. Then they found what happened: the water in the pipe was frozen! This never happened before to us in Shanghai, so we did not even think about this as a potential cause. Our house is clearly not built for sub-zero temperatures, because it was only -4 or -5 at night.

As ‘proof’ of how unusual these temperatures are, the Shanghai Daily had a picture yesterday of a boy playing next to a creek with a big chunk of ice. The fact that there was some ice on the water was news in Shanghai! The weather will not change much over the next couple of days so we might see more of these pictures. I feel sorry for all the people without heating in the city…

Tonight I was doing emails on the back seat of my car while driving home, when I realized that I could not keep my eyes open. I didn’t get enough sleep over the past days and had a pretty intensive day today and tiredness suddenly hit me. When I got home my kids wanted to play with me, but the only thing I wanted to do was sleep on the couch for a while. But if I would do that my Friday night would be virtually over, so I decided to push myself to change into my running clothes and do a short run on the treadmill.

It was not easy, especially because the heating in my gym was off so it was very cold in there. But with some loud 70s disco music on the sound system and a sitcom (muted with subtitles) in my DVD player I tried to change my mood from tired and lazy to a more positive state of mind. I decided to do a really slow run (8.5 km/h without incline) and that felt good right from the start. After a couple of minutes I started to feel more relaxed and less tired, and even increased the speed a bit. After 20 minutes I had run about 3.2 km, and I felt so good that I could have easily continued. But because the cook had finished preparing dinner, I decided to take a quick shower (hot, then ice cold for 10 seconds, and then hot again) and don’t let the others wait for me.

I felt like reborn after the run and shower, full of energy and in an excellent mood. I’m not tired at all anymore and I am ready to do a bit more work (or at least ready to writing some blog posts, like I am doing right now). Running is the best medicine for me to get me out of a lazy mood. It’s hard to explain to people that don’t do sports, but if you feel tired or down just give it a try, it just works!

I decided to reward myself with a top to toe massage at Dragonfly later tonight. As Dragonfly describes it on its site:
Our signature therapy, a combination of Oriental Foot Massage with head, shoulder and arm massage by two therapists at the same time guarantees you will leave our retreat feeling as light as a dragonfly.

A good end of the working week and the best start of the weekend!

I don’t think I had to give any presentations until I was about 8 or 9 years old, but things are a bit different now – at least at Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten. Today Scott gave his first ‘presentation’ for his classmates! He talked about his Christmas vacation with the help of a couple of pictures that my wife had printed for him. He had to do the talk in English, quite a feat for a boy who just turned 3 and only learned to speak English about 4 months ago.

Of course I don’t know how the presentation went, because parents can’t attend. And when I asked him to tell me his story tonight he was happy to comply, but he did it in Dutch for me (he always speaks Dutch to me). So I had no idea what exactly he told his classmates in English. But I am proud of him of course.

This was his first presentation, but I am sure there will be many more to come in his later life. At this age it’s the most normal thing for kids to give a talk, so they are not nervous at all. Great that they learn this skill so early already, the earlier you start speaking in front of an audience the better.

On Saturday Scott gave a party for his classmates from Soong Ching Ling and for a few from last year’s nursery class in our compound. He was very excited about it days in advance already, the fact that he could play with his friends with all his toys and that they would have cake together was a very big thing for him.

To make it even more special Grace had decorated the house with happy birthday signs and balloons. For the kids we had also organized a clown who made balloon animals, they loved his performance. He arrived a bit earlier and both Scott and Elaine got a lot of balloon animals made before the young guests and their parents arrived at 11 AM.

We also hired a face painter, who was really good. Problem was that at first the kids were so excited about the toys and the clown that nobody wanted to sit down to get a painting done. Only during the last 30 minutes or so the first child ‘dared’ to get a painting. On her hand, not on ther face, but that was fine as well. Then the others of course also wanted but there was not enough time anymore for all of them.

For food we arranged a catering service from the Green Apple, they did a great job. Among others they had 3 kinds of pasta, 3 kinds of pizza, several salads, small quiches, chicken wings, sausages, cold cuts and a lot of french fries. They even sent 2 people to man the catering station, but because we had our 3 ayis in the kitchen already that was not necessary.

Because the kids are so young most of their parents came to the party as well, so it was good to catch up with most of them. Many of them I see every day at Scott’s school (I bring Scott to school every day) and others I know from the pool or playground in our compound. Before Scott and Elaine I didn’t realize how many people you get to know well once you have kids. I put myself in charge of the coffee (our staff is still not able to make a decent espresso), don’t think I ever made so many coffees in one morning:)

The highlight for Scott was the Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake. Thomas is by far his favorite TV series right now (next to the movie Cars that he watched at least 15 times over the past couple of months), and he has all kind of Thomas toys as well. So when he saw the cake he was super happy.

After the cake most kids were getting tired from playing, running and screaming (and the copious amounts of food!), and all went home for their afternoon nap. Scott kept on talking about his party for the rest of the day, we are really happy that he liked it so much.

As some of you may know I use Google Latitude to record exactly where I am at any given moment (whenever my phone is on). And of course I also share it with a couple of people, so if you want to stalk me you can do that from your couch on a laptop. At least if I add you as a friend on Latitude, I am a bit more conservative there than with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Why do I do this? Not sure actually, I just turned on the feature when it became available to try it out and never really turned it off anymore. I don’t use Latitude a lot, but it’s sometimes fun to look at the places that you visited over the past couple of days. You can calculate exactly how long your daily commute was for example. My phone calculates my location 1-2 times per minute and Google Latitude stores that data in its history.

Generally Latitude’s data are quite accurate, but for some reason the data from Monday night are not: according to Google I was at Schiphol Airport at 4:32 PM and the next morning at 12:11 PM in Shanghai, but in between I made a stop in Mexico for just one minute! At that time I was probably somewhere above Siberia or Mongolia but certainly not in Mexico. My last trip to Mexico was an afternoon in Tijuana last March!

I can’t explain this. I once accidentally left my phone on during a flight and received a welcome message from a Russian mobile provider while flying over Russia, meaning it’s sometimes possible to connect to a base station when you are flying. But my phone was off this time and we were nowhere close to Latin America, so a Mexico location in Latitude is something I don’t understand.

Today my wife has her birthday and I decided to buy her a Kindle 3G (an e-book reader) as a present. For the past years she’s been too busy with her extremely demanding job plus our young kids so she had never had time to read a book (let alone buy an e-book reader). I figured this may be a good incentive for her to start reading books again.

This morning I arrived back in Shanghai after a long and tiring flight. Traveling with young kids is always a hassle, but this was worse than expected. It started in the afternoon when Scott was so excited that he did not want to sleep. So he was very tired before the flight already. In the KLM business lounge at Schiphol airport he did not want to listen (typical when he is tired) and kept on running around. Elaine copies a lot of his behavior these days, so she also started running. Luckily we arrived at the airport quite late, so we only had about 30 minutes in the lounge before the flight started boarding.

Boarding, and especially the security check, is also trouble with two young kids. Scott for example refused to go through the scanner and I eventually had to push him through. Then he ran away when he was on the other side, but I still had to go through the scanner myself. Anyway, long story short, we eventually managed to board and I was happy to sit down in the plane. I didn’t feel completely well (bit of a cold), so took a Tylenol, but that didn’t really help. Scott was telling me ‘ik ben een beetje moe’ several times (‘I am a bit tired’), so I told him to go to sleep. But he didn’t want to do that before we were in the air, so he was getting more and more tired and more and more bored. Try to explain to a boy who just turned 3 why he can’t use his iPad before departure, or why the TV screen in the seat only starts working after take-off. Impossible.

We left the gate with a 15 minute delay and taxied to the runway. Just when we arrived there the captain came onto the intercom and told us that they found a problem with an engine and had to go back to the gate. Scott was very disappointed because he was ready for take-off, but I had to explain him that the plane needed to be repaired first. Back at the gate technical people came on board and after 15 minutes they found the problem and the solution. It would take about 1.5 hours to repair, but at least we would not have to get off the plane. By that time Scott was so tired that he fell asleep in his seat.

After less than an hour the repairs were finished already, so we left the gate again. Scott woke up and was very excited, telling me many times that the plane had been fixed – in 3 languages! I was happy we would finally depart and luckily there were no other problems. But now Scott was awake and he refused to go to sleep again. For the next 3 hours he kept on trying to climb out to walk around the plane, and he managed to get away a few times. I was pretty tired and wanted to sleep, but he prevented that. Finally after the dinner had been served and the cabin lights went off he decided to go back to sleep. And then it was Elaine’s turn to keep us awake, she refused to sleep and only wanted to watch TV or walk around…

It was a long night and I didn’t get more than a few 5-minute intervals of sleep. So when we arrived around lunch time in Shanghai I was exhausted and I had a head ache. The driver picked us up and when we got home the only thing I wanted to do was to take a hot shower and go to bed. But that’s the worst thing you can do (the sleeping part, not the shower), because then you really get a jet lag. So I put myself behind my laptop and spent several hours on emails and RSS feeds. I dozed off a few times, but now I am finally feeling a bit more awake (it’s past 6 PM). I plan to go to bed early tonight (10 PM or so), and hopefully I will not have a real jet lag anymore tomorrow. Happy to be back in Shanghai, but the traveling makes you forget about the holiday very quickly.

My holiday in Holland is almost over, tomorrow we will fly back to China. But today I could still participate in the Dutch TV program Buitenhof to talk about doing business in China. This show is one of the best talk shows in The Netherlands (in terms of high quality guests and discussions), so of course I accepted the invitation.

The driver for the program picked up my dad and me (he joined me) at 9:30 at my parents place with a luxurious VW Phaeton to drive us to the studio in Amsterdam. Because Elaine had had a bad night with lots of crying I hadn’t slept much and I was happy to be able to close my eyes for an hour on the way to the studio. We arrived there at 11 and I realized it was the exact same studio as where I did the Pauw & Witteman show (the other high quality Dutch talk show) about 2 years ago. Just a different decor.

The other guests had already arrived. Bettine Vriesekoop, a former successful Dutch table tennis player and later journalist in China for Dutch paper NRC, Prof. Kristofer Schipper, a retired sinology professor now living in Fuzhou, and Jurjen Groot, lawywer for CMS in Shanghai. I had a chat with them and the show’s producers before going into the powder room to get some make-up. Then we filmed some shots in the bar for the (live) teaser of the program before the show started at 12:10 PM.

The show was live, which I prefer over a taped show (live shows can’t be edited). The program started with an interview with Prof. Schipper about his life as a Taoist master, a sinology professor and now as the founder of the first library in China specialized in Western art, literature and culture. To be honest, he had an interesting story but I could not really relate to him. The China he described in the show was not the China I live in, but the China of a long time ago. For me this part went too slow and lasted way too long, and when I later checked Twitter it turned out that many people felt the same.

After a 5 minute spoken column by Naema Tahir, the discussion part of the program between Bettine, Jurjen and me started. We only had about 20 minutes, way too short for a good discussion. The first question I got was about censorship, so the typical Western negative tone was set. After the pre-discussion with the producers of the program I had the feeling this program would have a more positive tone, with a focus on entrepreneurship and how to do business in or with China, but that was not really the case.

The length of the discussion was also not enough to go deeper into certain subjects. A pity, because now a lot of interesting aspects that were discussed with the producer were left out (e.g. about the the take-over of Dutch companies like Draka by Chinese companies, about why China is so successful, about the fact that China is probably one of the most capitalist countries in the world etc.). Would have loved to talk about these subjects for a while, but it was not possible.

Anyway, I enjoyed being part of the show, but it could have been a lot better. After the show we had a good lunch with the presenter, the guests and the production staff, where I also raised some of these points with the people of the Buitenhof production. Some of the guests also agreed that the discussions were not deep enough and that there was not enough time for all topics. A missed chance to explain what China is really about and why Europe should watch out for what’s happening in China.

Interesting is that when I got home people and I went through the back channel on Twitter most people seemed to have the same impressions as I had. I am not sure if Buitenhof checks the tweets about its weekly