Today is Queens Day in the Netherlands. Officially it is the 30th of April (the birthday of former Queen Juliana), but because that’s a Sunday the festivities have been moved to the 29th. A bit strange considering that most of the Dutch people have no connection anymore with the religious concept that Sunday is a day to rest.

I decided not to spend the weekend in Amsterdam (the Queens Night is a huge party!), but to go to my parents house. A relaxed weekend, catching up on some sleep and overdue emails. And my sister Sonja is also visiting, nice to see her again.

The weather was supposed to be cloudy and rainy, but for now I am looking at a clear blue sky. But it’s too cold to sit in the garden, with only 10 degrees… As a comparison, Shanghai’s mercury reaches 30 degrees today.

This morning I started the day with a run along the Amstel River. Because in Shanghai I don’t have many opportunities to run outside, let alone in nature, I try to use the opportunity to run as much as possible when travelling.

There is a small gravel path next to the Amstel river, so I did not have to run on the main road. I ran to the village of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, and it was beautiful. The sun was just rising on the horizon, and there was some fog over the river that slowly disappeared. It was very quiet, even though this is supposed to be one of the busiest parts of Holland. Far away I could hear the traffic of Amsterdam’s ring road, but the main sound were some birds singing.

At a windmill a bus full of (presumably) Malaysians were taking pictures of each other and the windmill. A runner also seemed to be something special, because when I ran by the camera’s were suddenly pointed at me. I wonder what time these tourists start their tours, because I encountered them around 6:30 AM!

Being able to run from a city into nature in just 10 minutes is something you cannot do in most cities in the world. But amazingly I only encountered two other runners during the one hour that I was running. People living in Amsterdam probably take for granted that they have nature just around the corner. But for me this was the best start of the day that I can imagine!

I am in Amsterdam for a few days, it’s always nice to be back in my home country and breathe some fresh air! Today I went to the Blognomics seminar in the RAI in Amsterdam. A fantastic seminar with some great speakers. I got many new ideas and took lots of notes. I hope to find some time to write about it this weekend.

Just went through all my mails and uploaded another blog post that I wrote on the plane. Now I am planning to get some sleep. I just calculated that since Monday morning I only got a total of 13 hours of sleep, not enough with my current busy schedule. I plan to get up around 5:30 AM tomorrow to go running along the Amstel river, so I better shut down my laptop now!

We had a pretty bad experience to get our office furniture for the new Spill Group Asia office. The desks and chairs were ordered through a furniture factory in Hangzhou. I have used this factory before when ordering furniture for another office, and they make good quality products and are very reasonably priced. For 2 big desks, 6 cubicle desks with dividers, one reception desk, 8 office chairs, a small meeting table with 3 normal chairs, and 8 sets of drawers we managed to negotiate a price of about EUR 2500.

The sales person of the factory came to our former office in mid-March to take our orders, and we paid him EUR 1000 in advance. The goods were supposed to be delivered when we moved into our office early April, but they were not finished on time. I was not too happy with that, but we managed to borrow some other furniture from Jiaotong University, and it would just be for a few days.

But it took longer than that: we called the sales person each day, and each day he said the furniture would be delivered the next day. But always something came up why he could not deliver. After several days of going back and forth with him I got a bit suspicious, because this was not normal anymore. So we finally called the factory owner. He was very surprised, because the sales guy had been fired several months ago……

Oops, it seemed we had a problem. I suspected the guy tried to run off with the money, or at least had used it for something else. But luckily we found out his home address through a friend, so if worst would come to worst there would always be an (unpleasant) solution. We called him again on his mobile and confronted him with what we found out. He tried to talk himself out of it, but that did not really work. But he still promised to deliver the goods to us.

From the factory we then found out that he placed the order on April 10, more than a week after the furniture was supposed to be delivered. He probably got scared because of our many phone calls. But the factory told us he did not give them the deposit, so they would not deliver to us. Many days of fights over the phone followed, but we could not find a solution. Being without furniture for a few days is OK, but after a few weeks it becomes a serious problem, so we started to put more pressure on them.

On Sunday the sales person suddenly did not pick up his mobile phone anymore. The factory could also not reach him. At that point it was clear to me we had to get the police involved and start a court case. We wrote an SMS to the sales person about this on Sunday night, and told him if he did not contact us by Monday 10 AM we would go to the police.

And that worked: Monday he called us and promised to deliver everything that same day. I did not believe it anymore, but at 10 PM an open truck with all our furniture arrived at our office! The sales person himself even showed up, and pretended that nothing had happened. All the furniture was put together and after that, around 3 AM (!), we decided to get back at him by re-negotiating the price. After lots of shouting and haggling we agreed on a price at around 4 AM.

However, we were told by the factory not to give him the money, but to give it to the driver. This made the sales person extremely angry, and he called the factory owner and the head of sales of the factory (they both answered their calls at this time as if it was the most normal thing in the world). But they did not change their minds, so the ex-sales person had a huge loss of face in front of all of us. That gave me a good feeling. All staff had stayed in the office to avoid that things would turn violent, and to help with the negotiations. Luckily there was no fight (except for loud verbal communication), and we all could go home around 4:30 AM to catch a few hours of sleep.

Sometimes descriptions in menus at Chinese restaurants are truly amazing. Yesterday I came accross this one in a Sichuan restaurant next to our office (sorry, picture is not very sharp), where a plate of stir-fried Pleurotus Nebrodensis is available next to a portion of Great Bumper.

What happens is that the people who make these menus just translate the Chinese name in English with a dictionary. In this case a Google search learned me that the Pleurotus is a mushroom, so they should have just called it stir-fried mushrooms. And Great Bumper? I still have no clue how they got that name.

This weekend I went to the BMW Asian Open at the Tomson Golf Club in Shanghai. This event, part of the Asian tour, has been organized in Shanghai for the past 3 years at this golf club, and it is attracting quite a crowd.

Yesterday was the last day, and Jim and I decided to get there early to walk with some of the lower placed players. Jim’s driver dropped us off at the entrance, saving us a 15 minute walk from the parking lot. We watched two players tee off at the 10th, and then went over to the 15th hole, where fellow-Dutchman Robert-Jan Derksen was playing. We followed him for 3 holes, with a small group of other people.

It’s amazing how good these guys are. It seems none of their shots go wrong, it all seems so easy. At the 17th par 3, there is a water hazard over the full lenght of the hole, and the green is right behind it. I would always opt to go for a first shot to the fairway on the right of the lake, but these guys go directly for the green – and manage to get there with one shot as well. As Jim said:”We will never be good at this sport, because we just don’t have the guts to make such a shot”.

Tomson Golf Club is surrounded by some very nice villa’s. However, some of the (mainly Chinese) occupants overdid the decoration: fake Louis XVI interiors could be seen in several houses around the course, as well as people who managed to build a complete pagoda in their front yard. The villa’s don’t come cheap I suppose, a BMW 7, Porsche Cayenne or Mercedes S-Class seems to be the standard car for the people living here.

After a quick lunch (mediocre food, the catering was done by a Chinese fast-food chain that among others offered a noodle hot dog: a bun filled with spicy noodles – no sausage to be found!) we went on to look at Fernandez-Castano and Stenson’s tee-off at the 1st hole. They both seemed quite relaxed. After their tee-off the crowd grew too big, and we went over to hole 4 and 5, where we watched among others Colin Montgomerie. The finale of the Asian Open was great: In the final 3 holes Fernandez overtook Stenson, but Stenson took a huge risk at the 18th and managed a birdie. Then a play-off was necessary in which Fernandez saw his tee shot land in the woods. But with a superb second shot, followed by an amazing chip that landed the ball only centimeters from the hole, he managed to grab the title.

I am not a big fan of watching golf on TV. But seeing this sport live, and being able to interact with the top players (there are not many other sports where you can do that), is a different story. The atmosphere was great, although some of the audience should have stayed home: some did not turn their mobile phones off, were talking loudly with business guests they brought over, or took their little kids here that scream for attention during the silence of a tee shot. I’ll be back next year!

Yesterday the Shanghai court reached a verdict in the case of the fake Louis Vuitton bags that werre sold in Carrefour in Shanghai (see my blog entry about this). The company that operates the Carrefour shops argued that they did not know the bags were fake, so they could not be forced to pay compensation. But the court did not agree witht that and ordered them to pay RMB 300,000 in compensation to LV (LV had sued for RMB 500,000). It makes you wonder what other fake products are sold in Carrefour!

This reminds me of a story I heard a few years ago in Beijing. I had dinner with Don St. Pierre (he used to head Beijing Jeep in the mid-1980’s, and who now owns ASC wines. The Chateau St. Pierre wines that you see in many restaurants are his invention.), who told me that many wines sold in China are actually fakes. It is very simple, he said. What happens is that cheap wine from countries like Bulgaria is bought in bulk, and bottled in China. Then the crooks print fake French labels and put them on the bottles. These bottles are then sold as real French wines to unsuspecting stores and wholesalers. Note: I do not imply that Carrefour is doing this. Carrefour is actually one of the few stores in China where I dare to buy wine (next to ordering online at ASC wines of course).

Yesterday I went to Beijing to attend the China Mobile Game Forum 2006. This was a forum in the Kerry Center Hotel, where content providers, service providers and VC’s discussed the current status and the future of mobile gaming in China. A very useful meeting, where we (Demi Wang, marketing director for Spill Group Asia, also joined) met many potentially interesting companies to work with in China. I also blogged about this on marketingfacts.nl, the article (in Dutch) can be found here.

After the event was over I went over to Carlo Crosetto’s house. We had a drink at his place, and then went for dinner at Ya Wang (Duck King) at Jianguomenwai. My wife managed to take two hours off her incredibly busy schedule (she is working 18-hour shifts right now) to also join the dinner. The food was excellent, with among other kaofu, sharkfin soup, and of course a whole roasted duck. Thanks Carlo!

I had decided to stay overnight in Beijing (Qi lives in the Radisson Hotel, so I did not need a hotel room), and take an early flight back. But the early flight turned out to be a major problem: the first available flight to Shanghai was at 11:50 AM. Because I had a meeting planned in Shanghai at 12 this was a bit difficult. But I could not change it, all planes were fully booked. I wonder what’s going on, in the past I just went to the airport and bought a ticket for the first available flight. But that does not seem possible anymore.

Getting to the airport was also not easy. Because of an accident on the airport express way this road suddenly closed, and we were stuck there. But then the cars collectively decided to back up to the last exit (only a few hundred meters for us) and take a different road. Quite an interesting sight, hundreds of cars driving backwards on an expressway. And that without any further accidents! I told the driver an alternative route (I used to live – and drive – in Beijing for 3 years), and we just made it in time to the airport to catch my flight.