On Tuesday afternoon a representative of a big US website came to talk with us at Toodou about potential cooperation. At 6 PM we were informed that the electricity would be turned off in the office (due to maintenance), so we decided to go for a drink at Bar Rouge instead. Getting there was not that difficult, but getting in turned out to be impossible. The reason: we arrived at 6:15 PM and they did not officially open until 6:30 PM. Our offer to just sit inside without ordering or stand on the terrace was not accepted, even though lights and music were on already. Bar Rouge is getting more and more arrogant, they seem to be having a too easy business. It seems they don’t realize that customers like to be treated nice. This is my second bad experience there, and I won’t be going there anymore soon.

So on we went to Three on the Bund for a drink at New Heights. We sat outside on the terrace overlooking the river (there was outside heating). Next to us the terrace was cordoned off, and I did not pay too much attention to the people there. It seemed like a movie crew having fun after a day of shooting. After a couple of drinks our potential cooperation partner left, and I went on to have dinnerat the same place with Gary, Ninie Wang (see yesterday), and some other INSEAD alumni who turned entrepreneur. Ninie had just moderated a forum in the Grand Hyatt about entrepreneurship in China and had taken these people along.

Charles (one of the INSEAD guys) then told us that he just went to the toilet when a short guy came in. He looked at him and got a shock: it was Tom Cruise! It turns out that the people who were having drinks outside earlier were Tom’s film crew (they are shooting the latest Mission Impossible outside Shanghai). Tom Cruise had dinner in the private room at the corner of the building, which was guarded by two gorilla type guys. Interestingly, the food did not come from New Heights but from another restaurant in the building (likely Jean Georges).

The dinner was fun, it’s always nice to talk with fellow entrepreneurs and hear their stories. After dinner the BusinessWeek correspondent from Hong Kong came over to have a drink with us, and Gary and I told him our Toodou story. Gary also mentioned an interview he had with CCTVon Monday night and that was done by webcam (they are also innovative). Because the interview was delayed until 00:30 AM he decided to do the interview from his bed, and just to wear a shirt, so nobody would notice that he would be in bed. But what he did not realize until after the interview, was that his bed has an iron frame at the end that was clearly visible for the audience. So everybody knew he was doing the interview while sittng in bed!

Update: I am not the only one who does not like Bar Rouge anymore. Shanghaiist had a post about it today. Check out the comments!

Last night we had a small dinner party at the latest South Beauty restaurant in Shanghai: South Beauty 881. The place is located on Yan’an Xi Lu, between Tongren Lu and Shanxi Lu, on number 881 (hence the name) – right opposite the old exhibition center.

We had dinner with Arnoud Groot, a Dutch journalist for among others Nieuwe Revu, Jetsetters and de Financiele Telegraaf, who will also write about this restaurant. With Marcel Ekkel, a Dutch entrepreneur from Hong Kong who is speaking at a congress in Shanghai tomorrow, and who is also a fan of endurance sports. With Marcus Koppen, a German photographer who accompanied Arnoud during his interviews in Shanghai. With Ninie Wang, a Chinese entrepreneur in Beijing, who runs Pine Tree Life Institute (the first company in China focusing on senior citizens, or as she calls it “people in the happy age”). And of course with Qi (who managed to get off work on time!) and myself. Some great conversations about China, entrepreneurs and long-distance running, accompanied by excellent Chinese food, a couple of beers and Australian Chardonnay.

The complex consists of an old villa that is transformed into a trendy but cosy bar and a newly built restaurant. It has the potential to become a big hit in Shanghai, it is different from other places and prices are reasonable. The place has a beautiful roof terrace where you can relax and overlook the garden and part of Shanghai.

The restaurant itself is very bright, with mainly glass walls looking out over the garden and the old villa. It is quite spacious, but does not feel like a huge restaurant. Interestingly, the building was built around an existing tree! The tree is covered by glass walls and comes out of the roof (I only noticed it while on the roof terrace later on).

The food is excellent, like at all South Beauty restaurants. We had among others the spicy fish (Qi’s favourite), beef cooked at the table in 200 degree oil (by putting hot stones in them), fresh seafood, crispy rice with mushrooms and seafood (I always forget the name), and several vegetables. Everybody loved it! The service was also excellent. Waiters came immediately if there was somehing and they were very friendly.

I think this place has the potential to become one of our favourite restaurants in Shanghai. It is nice to find a place that does everything right: great food, great ambience, great menu, great location and great service (plus reasonably priced: 5 people eating (Ninie came later) including wine for about RMB 1400). Good luck to Steven Gebhardt, the GM, with making it a success! In case he reads this: I noticed that the restaurant is not (yet?) included in South Beauty’s website – that’s a shame of course for such a great place.

The marathon is 3 days ago already and I finally can walk around without too much pain. My muscles are still quite sore, but each day it’s improving. I hope to be able to start doing some sports again by the end of the week. Some pictures of the Shanghai Marathon 2005 (the others can be viewed at my Flickr account):

Before the start at Nanjing Road (in front of the Peace Hotel)

The CCTV camera crew in front of the top runners

Running at about the 8K point (Corner of Zhongshan Lu & Hongqiao Lu)

The most difficult part of the marathon , around 33-34 km. Every muscle is hurting and your body tells you to stop, but you still have another 8-9 km to run.

And the best moment: after the finish!

I did not know it existed, but today for the first time I saw ‘taxi money’. What happened is that the taxi driver from the Dazhong taxi company did not have change for a 100 RMB note. Therefore he handed out taxi vouchers that looked remarkably like real money. They have a value of RMB 10 each, and can be used for Dazhong’s buses, taxi’s and transportion vans. They even have a bar code on there to make sure they are real. Not that this helps much, because the taxi driver did not have a bar code reader in his car. The owners of Dazhong are quite smart: they not only print their own money but earn additionally by putting ads on it (the back is an ad for gas stoves and heaters).

Against doctor’s advice, who last week told me not to run for at least a month, I decided that the pain in my ankle had reduced so much that I would give the Shanghai marathon a try anyway. I promised my wife I would stop when it would start hurting too much, but I was lucky because I hardly felt the injury during the run. And yes, I did it: I finished the marathon with a net time of 03:59:28

We had to get up at 5 to be on time at the registration. I did not feel very well last night and could not sleep until 4 AM, so with only 1 hour of sleep I started my run this morning. Interestingly, the registration desk that you had to sign up for before 06:30 did not exist. For some reason this was cancelled, but nobody knew for sure. So I had one hour before the race would start and I walked around a bit, talking to some other runners and watching a performance. 10 minutes before the start I entered the start area, that was quite full already. After a short ceremony that included singing of the Chinese national anthem the race started. It took me a little over a minute to pass the start line, and almost 10 minutes before I could run at my own pace. Some people in front of me started to walk almost right after the start. They should not be allowed to start from the front, because they brake the speed of everyone behind them.

After the first 1o minutes I found a small group to run with. We were running at a pace of just over 12 km/hr, very nice. The weather was sunny but it was still a bit chilly. The start was at the Bund and from there we ran all of Nanjing Road until Yan’an Lu. I was thirsty and had my first drink at the 5 km point. After 59 minutes we passed the 12 km sign, and I felt great. Qi handed me some Gatorade at the corner of Zhongshan Lu and Hongqiao Lu, and would meet me again at the 17 km point where the full- and half marathon runners split. Because of the high pace I was there before her, and she waited for an hour before realizing I had passed. After the half marathon point (in 1 hour 46 minutes) I still felt fantastic, but got a bit hungry. Qi was supposed to give me a banana at 17 km, but because I did not see her there I was without food.

During the race there were lots of people cheering the runners. Many schools had given their students flags and drums to beat on, and everyone was cheering “Jia You!”. In difficult moments that helped a lot.

Soon after the half marathon point it got more difficult. My muscles started to hurt and the pace went down quite a lot. At the 25 km point I decided to drink a lot of Gatorade and walk for 2 minutes, that helped a bit. But aroun 30 km my legs were hurting so much that I started to worry about being able to finish. But luckily I met Qi at 33 km and her cheers (you are almost there!) and refreshments made me feel a lot better. However, the pain got so bad that I had to slow down my pace even further. At the 40km point I realized I could just make it within 4 hours, and I decided to give it a try. My body protested, but I did not to give in. It was extremely hard, but I managed. Although my gross time was 4:00:32, my net time was over a minute faster. I was very happy!

I could hardly walk anymore and totally collapsed on a towel on the grass (because of the nice temperatures it felt like summer, except for the Christmas songs piped out through the loudspeakers of the shopping center opposite Minhang stadium). After relaxing in the sun for 20 minutes I could not get up anymore, and had to ask someone to help me! Then Qi arrived and we went to get my certificate. We had to wait in line for 1.5 hours for this… This is almost dangerous when you just finished a marathon. And what I feared happened: a older man a few spots in front of us suddenly collapsed and had to get CPR. Shortly after that another participant was carried away on a stretcher into an ambulance. This was totally irresponsible, and the organization should learn from this and send the certificates by mail.

At home I had a long hot bath and then slept for 2 hours. Feeling a bit groggy now, but still plan to have a nice Italian dinner with Gary Wang later (he also wrote on his blog about me running the marathon I just heard, but it is in Chinese: http://www.toodou.com/channel/index.php?blogId=121 – and when you are there anyway also check out the interview Gary had with Pacific Epoch, it is the blog entry right below this one). And after that I plan to have 12 hours of sleep! Tomorrow will be a busy day again: I need to change my laptop, then an interview with a Dutch journalist at China Bay and maybe later Toodou, followed by a meeting at China Bay, and at night drinks and dinner with Ninie Wang, a succesful entrepreneur from Beijing and INSEAD classmate from Qi.

A couple of days ago I blogged about the problems with my Apple Powerbook, and the very bad service I got. The problem has in the meantime been solved, but certainly not to my satisfaction. The Apple store in Hong Kong where I bought my Powerbook seems to have replaced the orginal harddisk when I bought the laptop (that is what caused the warranty problems when it broke down). Even though I called the store many times I never received an answer from them. They kept saying that they had to check with Apple and would call me back. The last call I made was last week Monday, when they told me they would call me back within one day. That is 10 days ago now and I still have no reaction. I already had a problem with them once before when they ‘forgot’ to install the airport card (wireless card) in my computer before shipping it to me. I will never buy an Apple laptop in Hong Kong at the Designer Group Company in Causeway Bay anymore. They claim to have received the worldwide best Apple store award in 1999 and 2000 – but they are not performing up to that standard anymore.

The Apple service center in Shanghai is not much better. They forgot to call me when they figured out what the problem with my computer was and I am still in conflict with them on how to compensate me for the problems they caused me (their current offer: a free keyboard cover and an bag). After two weeks without my computer I decided to switch back to Windows and bought a BenQ laptop. Nice computer, but of course not an Apple. The quality is just not the same, the laptop looks and feels cheaper and the specifications are much lower than my powerbook (only max. 512 MB internal memory to 1.25 GB for my Apple – even though my Apple is over a year old already). But it is quite nice to finally be able to use Windows only software like Gtalk, Google Earth and a regular version of Skype.

Anyway, the BenQ worked well for a few days… Until the mousepad started having problems and one USB port did not work correctly. I went back to the store, where they tested it but could not find anything wrong (in German this is called the Vorfuehreffekt – not sure if there is an English expression for it). So today I went to the service center. They wanted to keep my computer for 4 days for a detailed check, but I told them to first run a quick check. Luckily I did that, because it turned out there are some serious hardware problems. But they solved it nicely: tomorrow I will get a brand new computer (and my harddisk will be replaced so I do not need to reinstall all software). Apple should learn from them!

The Shanghai Daily reported today about a crack-down on counterfeit mobile phones in China, closing illegal phone markets in some of the major cities and regulated the second-hand phone market (how can you do that?). I normally skip this kind of reports, because it typically is a bunch of rhetoric statements that are not implemented anyway. But what struck my eye was the sentence that 25% of all mobile phones sold in China are counterfeit!

I wonder what counterfeit means in this context: do they copy the model and manufacture it at a different location, or is it actually the same phone but just not sold through official channels? Maybe this explains why my former Siemens phone did not work when temperatures dropped below zero (I used this phone while living in Beijing, so had a serious problem during the winter) or why my current SonyEricsson’s software is messed up (showing wrong names at missed calls for example).

This afternoon I went to pick up the start number for the Shanghai marathon. Even though I wom’t be able to run it due to my injury, I wanted to pick it up anyway. I got a nice running shirt (not a normal t-shirt, but a special Mizuno shirt that keeps dry during running), a marathon chip, a book with info about the Shanghai Marathon and some sponsored things like chewing gum. In total there will be over 10,000 participants for the marathon, half-marathon and fun-marathon (4.5 km). Because I was quite late with signing up I expected a high start number, but it turns out I got start number 132.

When I looked at my name in the book I noticed they put me in there as being from Germany. A closer look revealed that there are only very few Dutch participants, but a lot of Germans with Dutch names. What happened? Everybody who wrote down Dutch as nationality was automatically put as German (Deutsch).

Picking up the number did not go too smooth: I waited for almost 1.5 hours, it went incredibly slow. Many people had questions and most people still had to pay a deposit for the chip. Furthermore many names could not be found due to misspellings (my name was written as Vanderchijs instead of Van der Chijs for example). I hope for the participants that the organization this Saturday will be better.

I wish I could particpate, but my ankle still hurts when walking so it is not smart to do it. At least I don’t need the crutches anymore. The doctor told me not to run for a month (if I injure my ankle again things will be much worse), but it is very tempting to give it a try anyway.