Today is Valentine’s Day, which also in China is gaining more importance. Many couples send each other cards, flowers and chocolates (I just finished a small of box of Belgian chocolates, thanks Qi!), and of course many restaurants will be fully booked today. My wife and I plan to go to Finestre tonight for a romantic dinner. It will be so busy there that we had to choose to either dine at 6:30 PM or at 9 PM. Of course we chose the latter time, which allows us to have a drink somewhere in advance, and we would not have to hurry to be on time.

Valentine’s day also seems to be a good day to get married. According to the Shanghai Daily there will be 3 times as many people that tie the knot today than on a normal day. The ‘Shanghai Marriage Management Division’ even started work at 7:30 AM instead of 8 AM to reduce waiting lines for couples (can you imagine waiting in line for hours to get married?). Luckily marrying in China does not take much time, normally you can finish the whole procedure in less than 10 minutes. And if you cannot make it today you don’t have to wait a whole year: China also has its own Valentine’s Day on the 7th day of the 7th month on the Lunar Calendar (this year on August 19), where you will have another chance.

I arrived in Shanghai this morning, and still feel a bit jetlagged. Because this is the last week before Chinese New Year there is quite a lot of things to do, and I went from the plane almost straight to the office. Normally that’s the best way to overcome jetlag (in my experience), but today it’s not working. I have a splitting headache, and it’s hard to keep my eyes open. Maybe the fact that I only slept 4-5 hours per night during my trip also plays a role.

I just did a TV interview, and I think I was blinking my eyes every second or so because I was so tired. It was an interesting interview, the TV station (Shanxi Satellite) was doing a program about Gary, and they interviewed me about Gary’s habits, how difficult it is to work with a friend etc. I kept it positive Gary 🙂

Tonight Spill Group Asia and Zlong Games have their annual New Year Party in a Sichuan restaurant on Guangyuan Lu. After that I plan to meet for drinks with business guests, so I don’t think I will be in bed early tonight…

After the warm weather in Shanghai earlier this week, I had to adjust a bit to the cold Dutch weather. Yesterday it even started snowing heavily. The authorities issued a weather alarm because of heavy snowfall, and half of all trains in the Netherlands were cancelled. Typical Dutch, it seems the country can not handle extreme weather anymore.

I just read an article in De Telegraaf that said that the weather alarm is actually announced to avoid that people can issue claims to amongst others insurance companies. It seems that the US culture of sueing is slowly entering Holland as well. The Dutch railways love it, and can save some costs by just cutting the train schedule in half. Totally unnecessary, but for purely economic reasons. At 9 AM most trains already stopped riding, even though the snow did not start until lunch time.

But at least the snow made Amsterdam look beautiful. I was mainly inside having meetings at the Casuality gaming conference, but managed to take a few pictures when it just started snowing.

Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching, and people start preparing for the trip back home. Yesterday morning I saw a huge line for a travel agent close to my office, at least 40 people were waiting to get in. Especially train tickets are hard to get, but plane tickets are still widely available. You can even get discounts on some of the major routes like Shanghai-Beijing, also for the days right before Chinese New Year. Flights to smaller cities are full-price, however, according to my colleagues. The holiday season affects business quite a bit, and most offices, including Spill Group Asia, will close for a week. Also most domestic helpers will leave the cities to visit their families in the countryside. Our ayi told us yesterday that she had waited in line from 3 AM to 8 AM to get tickets, but just when she was at the ticket counter they were sold out. She will now need to find overpriced tickets on the black market.

It is quite amazing to which length urban Chinese families go in order to cope with the temporary absence of their ayi during Chinese New Year. For us it is a nuisance that our ayi will go back to her hometown, but it just means doing a bit more cooking and housework ourselves. Some families, however, seem to rely a bit too much on their ayis and cannot live without them anymore.

My wife was reading a story to me from a Chinese newspaper that had some good examples of this. One family did not want their ayi to queue for train tickets to her hometown, because then she would not be able to do housework during that time. Therefore the husband of the family decided to do this for her. He waited in line for four days in order to buy her tickets! I like my ayi a lot, but I would never imagine waiting in line for her so she could do our dishes.

Another family will go even further this Chinese New Year, literally further: their ayi will go back to her village and they have rented a room in a hotel close to her home so she can still take care of their baby. If I would be the ayi I would not be too pleased with that, having just one holiday per year, and then still having your employer around all the time. Or maybe it actually gives her a lot of face, because it shows her fellow villagers they cannot live without her.

Sitting in the lounge at Pudong airport now, with free wifi. Just find the tp-link wifi connection and enter password tp-link. Always a good feeling when you can check an reply all your mails before boarding.

I am going to Amsterdam for a short business trip, so it will be a long day again today. When I drove out of the city the weather was sunny, but close to the airport it suddenly got very foggy. You cannot even see the runway from here (which is less than 200 meter away), and I hope this won’t cause the flight to delay.

I noted that it was very quiet at the airport as well, at least in the international area (domestic flights had long lines). At the KLM check-in desk there was nobody waiting in line in front of me, this has never happened to me before in Shanghai. The passport check just took 5 minutes, instead of the usual 30-40. I had expected it to be quite crowded because of the upcoming Chinese New Year, but it is the other way around. I guess most people who fly international only leave China next week?

The Caribean island state of Grenada used to have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but gave these up in 2005 in favor of China. As a ‘thank you’ for this, China then financed a new 40 million USD cricket stadium on the island. This weekend the Queen’s Park Stadium was officially opened, with the prime minister and the Chinese ambassador present. All went well until the Royal Grenada Police Band started to play the Chinese national anthem. At least, they thought they were. But someone had made a mistake and they were performing the Taiwanese national anthem instead. The Chinese ambassador was not amused, and the prime minister immediately ordered an investigation. It seems the Chinese censors also did not see the humor in this blunder, because I could not find any news article in the Chinese press so far about the incident.

Since mid-2005 I have been using www.marc.cn/blog for my blog (my old blog was at http://radio.weblogs.com/0141040/, but most entries have have been lost in cyberspace). I planned to set up good website on the main page, www.marc.cn, but never put it high enough on my priority list. With hindsight I probably should have hired someone to do it. For that reason www.marc.cn has been displaying an error message for the past 18 months. I now decided to forget about a nicely designed site at marc.cn for a while and forwarded the main page to my blog. So if you type in the name of this blog, you can from now on just enter www.marc.cn. Your browser will do the rest.

This morning Gary and I did an interview with Dutch magazine Elsevier, and because of the nice weather decided to do it outside in the sunshine. It was really warm on Tudou.com’s roof terrace, at 11 AM I even had to take off my jacket because of the heat.

I just checked the official temperature in Shanghai, at 4 PM it was still 24 degrees Celcius – and it’s only February 6… It’s amazing how quickly cold weather can change into warm weather, and the other way around, in Shanghai. This warm front likely won’t last long either, and will be replaced by much cooler weather soon. But it’s nice to enjoy a short early spring!