Toodou.com just closed its second round of funding. Granite, Jafco Asia and IDG will invest a total of 8.5 million USD in the company. We are of course very happy with this investment, that allows the company to keep on growing fast!

The Chinese press release can be found here, an English release will be issued tonight.

As mentioned several times on this blog in the past, China Eastern is not my favourite Chinese airline. Their aircrafts seem to be the least welll maintained, and their service (especially on international flights) is quite bad. The last plane crash in China was a China Eastern plane, and it seemed they almost had another one yesterday.

On a flight from Seoul to Shanghai, an Airbus 340 burst 12 (!) of its tires upon landing at Pudong airport. The crew managed to safely stop the aircraft on the runway, but I am glad I was not on board! According to the Shanghai Daily “the accident was still under investigation”. I don’t know much about flying, but it seems to me that if you manage to burst 12 tires something is seriously wrong.

“Some expats do not qualify to teach English” is the headline of the Shanghai Daily today. Is that really news? Almost every foreigner that wants to live in China and cannot find another job eventually ends up teaching, so surely there are (many) unqualified teachers among them. The problem is, as the article also mentions, that many schools assume that if someone has blond hair and blue eyes he/she will automatically be a good English teacher.

Many people abuse this, because the schools have no clue anyway what their English skills are. They simply have nobody who speaks English well enough to judge the knowledge level of applicant teachers. While living in Beijing I befriended some African guys in a bar. I had difficulties communicating with them, and I wondered what they were doing in China. The answer: “We teach English!”

On the other hand, Chinese schools often do not treat their foreign teachers correctly either (problems with not offering the right working visa or not paying the full salary are common), so it probably works both ways.

And what’s the alternative? Native Chinese English teachers are certainly not much better. They may have a large vocabulary, but their speaking ability (especially pronounciation) is often terrible. But at least they know how to teach, and they are probably aware of their lack of oral skills.

Over the past days Flickr was (once again) amazingly slow in China. Am I the only one here who is experiencing this? It takes up to 15 minutes to upload one picture, and some pictures just seem to ‘hang’ and don’t get uploaded at all. During my vacation I took hundreds of pictures, and I wanted to upload about 150 for Tuscany and about 30 for Monaco. But at that speed it takes days – which was indeed the case for me. One of my computers has been uploading day and night for a few days, but now finally all pictures on there.

Making sets of the pictures is equally time-consuming: sometimes pictures are not loaded into the overview screen, and just deleting a picture takes between 10-20 seconds. Flickr used to be my favourite picture site, but because of a total lack of innovation and incredibly slow speeds I might consider switching to a new service. Only problem is then that I need to upload all my pictures to a new site. Not sure if that’s worth it. For now I don’t have time to do it anyway, so hopefully Flickr will get better in the near future.

And if you want to see some of the pictures, you can find all thumbnails of the pictures here:
Tuscany (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72057594134376736/)
Monaco (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72057594134318025/)

The Shanghai government’s campaign to stop jaywalking has given the bureaucrats a very creative idea. After putting a young woman in jail for 10 days because of jaywalking (she first got a fine, and got a bit violent after that, so ended up in the slammer), undercover police have now started to take pictures of jaywalkers.

The creative part is that these pictures are not used as evidence to fine these people, but that they are put up in the office buildings where these people work. And, as the Shanghai Daily explains, also foreigners are at risk to be publicly exposed as lawbreakers. The first picture of ‘two foreigners wearing a blue and a red t-shirt’ is already on display in their office, to ‘enhance education’. I suspect that some of the expat foreigners that I know will set up a competition soon on who will be the first person to have its picture on the office wall!

I hope the undercovers have enough film or digital storage available on their cameras. Sometimes it seems there are more jaywalkers than people who wait for a red light, so they can keep on taking pictures!

It had been in the air for a few months already, but yesterday Shanghai finally decided to increase its taxi fares. And in typical Shanghainese fashion (=fast) it will be implemented not next year or next month, but starting today. The only problem is that all the taxi meters need to be adjusted first, and that will take a few weeks. So when I took a cab earlier this morning the rate was still 10 RMB for the first 3 km (new rate is 11 RMB, and a 5% increase for all subsequent kilometers).

Over the past week Qi and I had a great time in Tuscany and Monaco. We rented a convertible (307 CC) in Nice and drove most of the 1500 km with the roof down. It reminded me of the time that I drove a Fiat Barchetta while living in Germany. China is not a good country to drive open, but the Tuscan hills and French Riviera certainly are.

What did we do? We saw all the major cities, such as Lucca, Pisa, San Gimignano, Volterra and of course Firenze (Florence). We stayed at nice places in the countryside, and had good meals with local wines every day. As every vacation I got pretty much sun burned (I fell asleep at the pool one day, and found out that the Italian sun is already pretty strong in May). And as every vacation I got sick in the beginning, probably as a reaction of working (too) hard.

On the way back from Tuscany we drove along the Italian Riviera. Viareggio was a favourite for Qi because of the combination of a nice beach with lots of upscale clothing and shoe stores. We also passed by Genova (Genua), which is a much nicer city than I imagined.

The last day was spent in Monaco, where we found a hotel room with a balcony right on the Monte Carlo harbour front. One of the nicest views you can imagine, with the harbour full of expensive boats beneath us, the Mediterranean on the left and the Monaco palace on the hill on the right. The fact that they were preparing the F1 circuit already made it even more interesting.

We are back in Shanghai now, ready to get back to work with many new ideas to implement!

I am on my way to Schiphol Airport right now to pick up Qi. Tomorrow morning we will fly to Tuscany for a few days of vacation. We plan to stay at country houses and castles, so there is a good chance that I won’t be online everyday. Expect lighter postings in the next couple of days. Arriverdeci!