The movie Transformers was a big hit in China a couple of months ago. Some staff at Spill Group Asia even took an afternoon off in the week it was released, to watch the film in the cinema! The blockbuster apparently inspired some people to try to make a transformer themselves. Last week China Car Times reported that Citroen managed to get quite some publicity during the Nanjing Auto Show, when they displayed a Transformer model of one of their cars (a C2). This car was made by 3 men, a nice example of offline user-generated content.

But although the car has not been on display yet in Shanghai, this city now has its own transformer cars. Not one, but two cars are currently on display outside the Shanghai Sculpture Museum (in Red Town, on Huaihai Lu, close to Hongqiao Lu). Quite impressive. It looks like the artist was sponsored by Cici Club, one of the clubs in the area. If you go there be sure to also check out the nice restaurants and galleries that have opened here over the past few months. The place is not well-known yet, but Red Town definitively has the potential to become a new entertainment hot spot.

This morning I was informed that YouTube has been blocked in China. I had not noticed it yet, because I access the internet through a proxy most of the time. But when I went onto a Chinese connection YouTube indeed did not load (message: “The server stopped responding”).

The reason? Probably not directly the ongoing 17th National Congress in Beijing, then they would have blocked the site last week already (unless someone right now uploaded some video’s that would upset the government). I suspect the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users. Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google’s China offices rang an alarm bell about this before the launch. A typical example of the mistakes foreign companies make while trying to do business in China.

I hope for YouTube it is just a problem with their content delivery system or something similar, and not a real block. I don’t like sites to be blocked, even not those of our competitors. But it will be an interesting discussion point for our Tudou board meeting tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Update: While going through my RSS feeds I noticed that Jeremy from Danwei already noted the problem a couple of hours before me.

Next to my food poisoning I had another strange experience last night. After coming back home from the Hunan restaurant dinner, I went for a walk with my wife around our compound. Now that she is more than 7 months pregnant we do this every night before we go to sleep. Quite nice actually, because we get to talk a bit about the day, work and of course her pregnancy. Normally the walking brings the baby to sleep after a few minutes, because he stops kicking my wife’s belly.

When we almost finished our round a young, foreign guy called out to us in English. He shouted that he needed help, and if we could help him. He looked quite innocent, so we walked up to him. He said he was very sick and needed to see a doctor, but did not know how to get there. He did not speak much Chinese, or at least in his state he was not able to speak Chinese anymore. He also said that he was flying to Paris the next day, and that he was very afraid to miss the plane. I asked him what he had, but he was not able to tell me clearly.

He seemed to be panicking, was sweating and said he saw things. He was restless, and could not stand still. He said that if we gave him ten minutes of our lives, we could save his life. I thought this was kind of creepy, and my wife wanted to go away from him. But suddenly I realized that he might not be sick, but having a bad trip. I have seen that once or twice before (interestingly never in Holland, where this should occur more often), and it is quite scary. In case you have not heard of a bad trip, it basically means that you take drugs but the effect is the opposite of what you expect. You can get paranoid, you are scared to death of simple things and you cannot think clearly anymore.

I asked the guy directly whether he had taken drugs, and he told me he had smoked a joint earlier that evening. Bingo. I am not a doctor, but I decided to calm him down a bit. I took him to the 24-hour supermarket below our building where he bought a water (he was hardly able to pay, because his hands were shaking). Then we walked outside, where it was quiet and I assured him that things would be OK, and he should not worry about it. I told him to go home and just stay awake for a few hours until the drugs would wear off.

This made him feel much better, and he started to talk. He said he was French and worked for a foreign game studio in Shanghai on a project (I won’t mention the companies nor his name of course). He was flying back home the day after. I once again said that he should not worry, after which he seemed to relax a bit. He said thanks and walked back slowly in the direction of his apartment, I assume. I hope I did the right thing, I have no clue how to handle a person like this actually, but my actions seemed to calm him down and he did not want to see a doctor anymore. A weird experience around midnight…

Last night I had dinner with Thijs, Peter and Michael at a Hunan restaurant on Dongping Lu. Nice food, a bit spicy, and not too expensive. However, a few hours later while trying to fall asleep I realized something might have been wrong with the food. I felt like I ate way too much, and not long after that I realized that I had food poisoning. I did not sleep a minute during the whole night because of this, and when I tried to go to work this morning I could not even stand on my legs (completely dehyrdrated and very tired because of lack of sleep).

So I stayed in bed for a few hours, and had some sleep (only to be woken up twice, because of business phone calls). Around 12 I felt a little better, and was able to drink some water and later some soup and yoghurt. I am now back in the office, but probably won’t stay the whole day. Strange is that only Thijs had some (minor) problems, the others were tired this morning because of their jetlag, but nothing related to the food. Not sure what caused the problems, but because it is the only place I ate something that evening I am quite convinced it was something in the Hunan food.

After almost 8 years in China, my Chinese is still not at the level that I want it to be. Of course that is totally my own fault, because I have focussed mainly on my businesses over the past years, instead of improving my Chinese. In fact, 5 years ago I spoke the language a lot better than now. I could express myself quite well, and my vocabulary was a lot bigger than it is at the moment. At that time I was even able to write 1000 different characters, right now I already have trouble to write my own Chinese name!

In 2002 I spent one semester at Beiwai (Beijing Foreign Studies University), and my plan was to continue one more semester at Beida (Peking University) right after that. Even though I was admitted to the program, I decided to skip the second semester and focus on my business instead. I had just set up my first company, because just studying only took me 6 hours a day, so there was enough time to do something else. I still regret that decision, but on the other hand I might not have been where I am right now.

Anyway, during my early entrepreneurial career I did not manage to keep up my Chinese skills. I had some good private teachers, but I did not focus enough on the language. Work always came first, and I did not give learning Chinese enough priority. I now feel that I should change that. I want to improve my oral Chinese only (listening comprehension and conversation), without spending time to learn the characters.

My idea is to find a Chinese teacher who can come to my office twice a week in the morning (before work) to teach / talk with me for 1.5-2 hours per session. I am looking for a teacher who does not speak English fluently, I prefer someone who hardly speaks English. The reason is that it is so easy to switch to English, and I want to avoid that. This person preferably should have experience in teaching foreigners and prepare the lessons in advance. Furthermore, the teacher should speak Putonghua without any accent and be able to use pinyin without mistakes (if not using characters I need to rely on pinyin).

I realize that people who fit this profile might not read this blog, but I want to give it a try anyway. Feel free to spread the word (no reward this time :-). Renumeration to be discussed, depending on qualifications and experience. Location: Spill Group Asia office in Xujiahui, next to Jiaotong University. If you are interested, or know a suitable candidate, please contact me at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com, or by leaving a message in the comments.

Yesterday I had a flight booked from Shanghai to Guangzhou, for meetings with the management and other investors in 1bib.com. I was a bit late, but just in time to check in for my China Eastern flight at 2:10 PM. I arrived at the gate around 1:55, but they were not boarding yet. So I sat down and listened to a podcast on my new iPod Touch. After about 10 minutes there was still no movement at the gate, so I asked one of the flight attendants. She said there had been a gate change, which they had announced 20 minutes before that (when I had just checked in but had not yet arrived at the gate). OK, my fault, I should have probably checked the monitors for a gate change, but because I checked in so late I assumed that the gate was correct, and that they would announce a gate change more than once.

So I had to run to the other gate, because it was 5 minutes before scheduled departure time. I arrived at the gate, and saw that there were no other passengers there and the gate was closed. My first thought was that I had missed the flight due to the gate change, so I went up to the ladies at the gate to check if there would still be a possibility to board. Well, it turned out the flight had not boarded at all, because there had been a mechanical problem. They asked me to go to the departure hall again (so back into the public area) and get my ticket changed to a later flight.

Five minutes later I was at the China Eastern desk, where over 100 people were fighting to get to the front of the line in order to get their tickets changed. That’s one of the things I totally dislike in China, people do not have the decency (or education?) to form a line and wait for their turn. Well, I was in the back anyway, so I decided to just wait until the crowd had disappeared.

However, I was not sure if I was in the right line, and nobody could tell me that. So I went to the counter next to the busy one, but China Eastern staff just ignored me. I had to literally knock one guy on his head (softly!) in order for him to answer my question. His answer was still not friendly (just a gesture that I should be at the overcrowded counter) but at least I knew I was at the right place.

I waited for another 30 minutes, and then found out that all tickets on flights that would depart in the next 2-3 hours had been given out already to other passengers. Most flights were fully booked already due to the Guangzhou Trade Fair… The staff was extremely rude and did not want to give any other information. Very badly trained people, who do not care about the passengers, and have likely never heard the word service before.

So I had to wait several hours, if I would be lucky. I checked if any business class seats were available, but also those were sold out. I finally decided to forget about it, and cancel the trip. I was only going to Guangzhou for one day for meetings, and I did not want to spend half a day at an airport for such a short trip. A pity, because now I would not get to meet one of the German angel investors. Also I had not been to the 1bib office in quite a long time, and I would have liked to see how it has changed. The company has grown to about 40 people since I first invested early last year, quite a change since their first office in an apartment in Guangzhou.

Luckily China Eastern was willing to fully reimburse my tickets, although they sent me to 3 different counters before I got the required stamps for this. All in all not a good experience. Maybe I should just stop flying the airline, because it is not the first time this happens (see e.g. my blog posting from May 10, 2005). Problem is that most other Chinese airlines are quite similar to China Eastern. I guess you just have to cope with the fact that airlines here treat you like dirt if something goes wrong. And anyway, in the rest of the world it is not much better.

Yesterday I celebrated my 35th birthday. Normally I don’t really celebrate it, and I generally don’t even tell people that it’s my birthday. But thanks to social networks like Facebook, Plaxo, Hyves and Twitter a lot more people sent me messages and mails congratulating me with my birthday than in years before. I tried to send a personal message to all of them, but because I also had some work to do I might have missed some (sorry for that!).

The staff in my office had also organized a small party for me. After a slightly stressful meeting Winnie (our receptionist) came in and told me to follow her with my eyes closed. I had no idea what she was planning to do, but I suspected it would be related to me getting a year older. She took me to our recreation room, where -when I opened my eyes- lots of colleagues were waiting for me.

There was a big cake with 35 candles and many smaller cakes for the about 70 staff that Zlong and Spill Group Asia have at the moment. I could do a wish and then blew out all the candles (in two times, impossible to blow out 35 at once). Then all of them sang Happy Birthday for me. I also got a nice card and a big picture of all the staff with ‘Happy Birthday Dear Marc’ artistically written around it. Pictures see here. Thanks to all for the nice small party, it was a big surprise to me (and all my stress was gone right away 🙂

When I came back to my room 35 red roses were delivered there (from my wife!) together with a small package wrapped in Tudou.com paper. The package turned out to be a 16G iPod Touch! Very cool, and an excellent toy to play with.

At night my wife and I went to Casa 13, a new mediterranean restaurant on Huashan Lu. This was very nice as well: located in a restored old villa just off the main road (at Lane 11oo, opposite the Radisson Hotel). The food is excelllent, and not too expensive (this is their menu). The only problem was that the main course came too quickly, but that is quite normal in Shanghai (I guess it’s the US influence, where main courses tends to be served much faster after the appetizers and starters than in Europe). They also have some good wines by the glass that are reasonably priced.

The villa is very nicely decorated, in a dark, classical style with big mirrors. Inside the lights are dimmed so much that it is almost difficult to read the menu, but it adds to the atmosphere. They also have a glass covered terrace, and an outside terrace that was completely full last night. The place has valet parking for RMB 10, not unimportant in this city where it is increasingly difficult to find a parking spot at night. On Sunday’s there is brunch from 12-5 PM, and if you are into art, there is an art gallery on the second floor.