Sunday morning my dad and I decided to run around Hangzhou’s famous West Lake. Because of the high temperature in Hangzhou (it’s even warmer than Shanghai, when we drove into the city my car showed an outside temperature of 42 degrees), we decided to leave early. So we started at 6:30 AM to beat the heat and the crowds. But that was in vain: not only was the temperature already above 30 degrees, but also the crowds were bigger than during day time. Everywhere elderly Chinese were practicing Tai Chi, or dancing in the shadow to the tunes of an old tape recorder. A nice sight, but a bit difficult to navigate through if you are running.

The run was nice though, but we underestimated the heat. Halfway we had to buy some drinks to ensure we would not get dehydrated. Also the distance was a bit further than I estimated, or maybe the heat made the run look longer. In total we needed about 75 minutes to run around the whole lake, so I estimate that the distance to be about 14-15 km. A bit too much in the middle of summer, but we had both never run around this lake before (my father has often been on business here, but never had time for the full distance) and we wanted to do it together at least once. Has anybody else ever done this run?

Friday night we drove to Moganshan, a small town high up in the mountains of Zhejiang, not far from Hangzhou. There were no traffic jams, so the drive over from Shanghai took us only about 2.5 hours. Moganshan is quite famous because it used to be a resort for rich foreigners and Chinese in the early 1900’s. The mountaintop is covered with more than one hundred old Western style villas, most of them in a dilapidated state. Instead of one family, most now have several families living in one building, and none of them seems to care to spend a penny on paint or a new roof. Actually, that is not completely true, as most villa’s roofs likely collapsed after half a century of neglect, and now have bright blue corrugated iron roofs. An ugly contrast with the green bamboo tree covered hills.

Mark Kitto, former media-entrepreneur in China (That’s magazines, Voyage), has been coming to Moganshan for 7 years, and is now living full-time here. He and his wife have two villas high on the mountain in the middle of the woods, and they started to run a restaurant/bar in town called The Lodge. Our hotel was next to The Lodge, so it was the first place that we checked out. It is a nicely decorated, with wooden floors and classical furniture, hundreds of books and DVD’s, and a well-stocked bar. They serve dinner here as well, but you have to order in advance so they can make sure they have enough supplies. And not unimportant, there is free wifi, so you can keep on working if you really want to (this time I managed to keep my laptop unopened).

We spent most of the evening (and night) in The Lodge. Mark had invited three friends from Shanghai, John (who is in the medical supplies business, and decided to become barkeeper for the night), Philippe (who brought some great cigars, and coincidentally used to work with my wife about 6 years ago) and Scott (who runs an M&A company in Shanghai). All of them are old-China hands (on average 9 years in China or so), and we had lots of stories to swap. Mark and I talked about doing business in China, and as it turned out some of our experiences are quite similar. After two bottles of wine during dinner, and several whisky’s after the meal, Mark decided to mix some martini’s for us. He is pretty good at that, and it was a nice nightcap!

The next morning Mark cooked us an excellent English breakfast with tea, coffee, eggs, bacon, fried tomatoes and toast. A great way to start the day after a short night. Then we went for a hike to the ‘Queer Stones’, which took us about an hour. The views from the (odd-looking, therefore the name) stones is fantastic, and I realize there is still much to be discovered in the area. From there we walked down through a tea plantation, had a drink at a farm restaurant and then hiked back up the mountain. We finished ouir hike at The Lodge, where Mark and his friends were enjoying a bottle of champagne. Because we planned to spend the night in Hangzhou we only had a quick drink, said good-bye and drove down the winding mountain road back to the plains of Hangzhou.

Moganshan is a very nice place to spend a weekend. It’s a bit cooler than Shanghai (and it even seems to have quite some snow in winter), and the nature there is beautiful. The only downside is that there are no decent hotels yet. There are many Chinese hotels that are OK if you just need a bed, but it’s not more than 2-star quality (at least not the ones that I saw). Radisson manages two old villa’s here, but they did not do a very good job at the renovation. The one we looked at (Priest Villa) had cheap decoration and had a dusty (almost dirty) feel to it. But The Lodge compensates for this (too bad Mark did not start a hotel yet), and it’s a great place to relax after a day of exploring the hills. So if you need to get away from the big city for a day or two, head over to Moganshan.

Last weekend I took a trip to Nanjing with my parents. There is a 8-lane highway from Shanghai to Nanjing, so the 300 km trip takes less than 3 hours. The first 80 km is still quite busy, but once you pass Suzhou the toll road is suddenly almost empty. I was not sure if there are any speed camera’s, so I put my cruise control on 130 and had a relaxed drive to China’s former capital.

Nanjing is a city with a turbulent history, and it still has a lot of historical sites that make it worth to go there for a sightseeing weekend trip. Also the nature around the city is wonderful with the mighty Yangtze river in the north and the wooded hills surrounding the city center.

We stayed in the recently opened Sofitel Galaxy, on the corner of Zhongshan Bei Lu and Shanxi Lu, a 48-story building with several good restaurants, a pool and a nice gym. The view from our rooms on the 43rd floor were amazing, both during the day and at night. The hotel is good value for money, for a mere RMB 550 (EUR 55) we got queen size rooms and even an upgrade to the executive floor.

Nanjing feels a bit like Beijing some years ago, and it’s developing quickly. I had not been to the city since April 2000, when a DaimlerChrysler colleague of mine was murdered there together with his whole family. That had quite an impact on me (I worked closely with him until 2 days before he was killed), and I almost decided to leave China at that time. I am glad I stayed, and I now felt it was time to go back to the city. I even walked by his house (he was attacked at home), but that was more by coincidence.

The nice thing about Nanjing in comparison to Shanghai is the proximity of nature and the relatively clean air. My dad and I ran from our hotel to the Xuanwu lake early in the morning, and then ran all around it (about 10 km), something you cannot do in Shanghai. Great views over the lake, the city and the mountains during the run. There are not too many foreigners yet, and therefore lots of ‘laowai’ cries during the run. Another place that is great for a run, are the woods around Zhongshan Park (where Sun Yat-Sen’s memorial is located). Of course if you are not a runner it’s also nice to just have a hike here, far away from bustling downtown.

What else should you see in the city? The best places are the Confucius temple and the canal just south of it, Sun Yat-Sen’s mausoleum and the park surrounding it, and Xuanwu Lake. These can all be enjoyed in one day, but if you want to do some more hiking you can easily spend two days here.

What is also a nice experience is the walk up to the bridge over the Yangtze river. This structure was built during the Cultural Revolution, and it is a typical ‘communist-design’ bridge. It is about a two kilometer walk to the middle of the bridge, but when we were on top we found out that you can also get there by bus (there is a bus stop at the top of the bridge). Great views over the river and the city from there. We had also planned to visit the Nanjing Massacre museum, but this was closed when we arrived there. It turned out that it is currently under renovation and will not re-open until Dec. 12, 2007 – the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanjing.

As usual I took lots of pictures (over 300), and I put some of them on my Flickr photostream. The whole set can be viewed here. If you want to get out of Shanghai for the weekend this is a trip I would recommend you. From Shanghai Nanjing is easy to reach, either by car over the HuNing expressway, or by a 3-hour train ride.

Alexa is widely used all over the world to track the performance of websites. You can see the reach (how many people out of 1 million internet users visit your site on a certain day), the rank (how many sites are bigger than yours), and the page views per user for every site. I use it daily to check the statistics for among others game.com.cn and toodou.com.

Alexa is, however, not very accurate for Chinese websites. The way they measure the data depends heavily on how many people have installed their toolbar, and also on what kind of people (demographics) install this toolbar. In my opinion in China the people that install this English software do not correctly represent the internet population. Although generally the trend is OK, it sometimes gives very strange results. For example, for Toodou we occasionaly see a big reduction in the Alexa stats although the unique visitors keeep going up. Difficult to explain, especially to investors. But because I think it is still one of the best tools around I keep following it on a daily basis.

However, Alexa generally can be used well to compare similar sites in China. E.g. gaming sites or video sites that are only in Chinese and therefore only used in China. For this there is a nice free tool available where you can compare up to 5 websites: http://www.alexaholic.com/ Give it a try, but be warned that it can be quite addictive!

It is a tradition in China to give mooncakes to business relations in the weeks before the mid-autumn festival. This year the festival will take place on October 6, but the first mooncakes have already appeared in shops. I don’t like mooncakes, especially the ones filled with beanpaste or eggyolk (problem is, you often don’t know what the filling is until you eat them). So most of the mooncakes I get I give to friends or staff. The only ones I really like are the ice-cream ones from Haagen-Dasz (hint for business relations reading this!).

However, often people do not just give mooncakes, but combine the package with some other gifts. It is not unnormal to get a nicely wrapped box with a couple of moon cakes together with a bottle of expensive spirits, or even a combination with silver tableware. This low-level form of bribery (because that is what it is of course) will now be banned according to the Shanghai Daily. The paper writes that an industry association will carry out an examination to ensure that the new rules will be implemented.

I don’t expect that anything will change, giving expensive boxes with mooncakes is too much part of Chinese business culture. The fact that the association cannot penalize the manufacturers makes their effort almost useless. But, they argue, they can still give the names of the offending companies to the Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administrative Bureau. So in case you are a producer of mooncakes packages there is not much to worry about. But if you want to play it safe, you’d better send some of the more expensive mooncakes gifts to the industry association officers to ensure they won’t mention your company name to the bureau.

Gamasutra, the US based website about games and game development, will publish a regular column about gaming in China. Gaming specialist Shang Koo from Pacific Epoch will write the articles, and his first column ‘From Kingsoft With Love’ is now online. I did not find an RSS feed on the site (shame on you Gamasutra!), so I suppose you will have to go back regularly to the site to find out if a new column is online.

At the online gaming conference in Shanghai last month I met Simon Carless, one of the editors of Gamasutra. He spent a week in Shanghai during ChinaJoy 2006, and submitted several articles about the state of Chinese game market. A good read if you are into gaming and want to know what’s happening here.

Brands like McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks are truly global brands. Even in China you can find McD’s and KFC’s in secondary and even third-tier cities, and also Starbucks is growing rapidly. This weekend, for example, I had coffee and a brownie in a Starbucks in Nanjing. OK, the staff at the Sofitel Nanjing had never heard of XinBaKe (is this actually the right pinyin for the Chinese name of Starbucks?), but while driving through the city center I spotted the coffee chain right away.

On the internet I came accross a nice chart that compares the internationalization of Starbucks and McDonalds. Comparing the two brands it immediately struck me that Africa is still mainly virgin territory for both companies. But in Asia both are quite well represented. Japan is not surprisingly still the biggest market for both brands, but China is up-and-coming. Note that this map is based on data for 2003; with data for 2006 both Starbucks and McD would be a lot bigger in China, overtaking most other Asian countries. I wonder when the first Chinese fastfood chain will expand internationally.

The speed of construction work in China never ceases to amaze me. 20 story buildings are constructed in just several months, roads can be built almost overnight, and new subway lines are announced every few months. But also demolishing a building goes really fast. Most of the time old buildings are not blown up, but they are ‘de-constucted’ manually.

A nice example happened right outside my office window. The pictures were all taken within 24 hours. In the morning there was still a 6-story apartment building. Then the bulldozers came in and started hacking and pulling the building apart. At night all there was left was just a big pile of stones. And by the end of the next day even these stones were all gone, thanks to big old blue FAW trucks continuously driving on and off with the left-over material. In Holland this process would likely take weeks.

This morning I walked by the site, and construction for a new building has already started. No idea what they will be building there yet, but I will know in a few months when the new structure will be finished.