Early this morning (at 4:40 AM) I landed in Amsterdam for a short business trip. After a shower and an early breakfast I decided to go for a walk along the Amsterdam canals, and of course I took a couple of pictures there. The sky was clear and it was just getting light, the most beautiful moment of the day. I like Amsterdam’s city center. It’s always so quiet there, especially when you’re used to Shanghai’s noise and chaotic traffic. Going for a walk there was a great start of the trip.

Yesterday I bought a Xbox360 with Kinect to play with at home. In case you are not familiar yet with the product or technology, it’s basically a game console that let’s you play games without a controller, using your body to play the game. A bit similar to the Wii, but this time without even holding a controller in your hand. For example, you move to the right and the game character moves to the right, or you kick like you would kick a ball and on screen you see the ball going in the direction you are kicking it in. It’s very intuitive, you just set it up, calibrate the system and get going. Within minutes I was playing my first games.

Of course Scott and Elaine were curious as well to see what I had bought, and they wanted to join right away. Elaine is still a bit too young to use it (she runs away from the sensor so the connection is lost), but Scott picked up it quickly. It’s the most natural thing for him that when he jumps the person on the screen also jumps. He was able to play a level of River Rush in Kinect Adventures (see image below) with a decent score. With a controller he can’t do this yet (he just turned 3 years old), so this is the perfect game console for young kids.

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Kinect_Adventures_cover.jpg

I am sure I’ll be spending quite some time with the Kinect over the next couple of months. This is the future of console games, and maybe in the future for casual online games as well. The experience to play games together is amazing. Too bad I am flying to Holland tonight for a short business trip, I would have loved to play a bit more today.

A couple of weeks ago the Joy City Mall opened, conveniently located just a few hundred meters from my office. Even though not all restaurants have opened yet I now regularly go there for lunch. While walking to my favorite (Japanese) restaurant I noticed a lot of strange (or at least interesting) things in the mall and I took a couple of pictures them.

First of all this ad. As the saying goes “Sex sells”, but I am not sure if the Chinese copywriter really understood what he was writing in English. Combining your ‘soft opening’ with a ‘sex roll’ in an ad certainly gave me a good laugh. But whether I want to try the sushi once the store opens I don’t know yet.

Not all the elevators are working yet and when I walked by one I noticed an engineer sitting on top of the elevator reading a magazine! Not the most logical place to sit, but at least nobody can disturb him there.

The ad for the ‘Ministry of Waxing’ store is also quite nice. Coming up with a decent ad for a waxing salon is not an easy feat (esp. not in conservative China), so I like the creativity of combining a hairy ape with two girls just wearing a bikini.

And when going up the escalator I suddenly realized that the ‘Ministry of Waxing’ has a glass front where you can literally see the women laying in the waxing chairs. I am not sure if that’s really what I want to see when going for lunch. And even though the word privacy is virtually unknown in China, I still don’t think that clients like to be watched while they get a waxing treatment.

Wages for waiters and waitresses are still quite low in China, but increasing fast. This restaurant found a good way to reduce the number of staff required and also made the ordering process a lot easier. They use terminals outside the restaurant where you order your food before you go in and get seated. Smart idea.

The last picture that I felt worth taking is of the ferris wheel that was built next to the mall in order to attract customers. The idea itself is a good one, free entertainment always attracts crowds, but the only thing is that the views from the mall itself are much better than from the ferris wheel. This picture was taken from a middle floor in the mall, and you already look down on it. And as I wrote in an earlier blog post about this ferris wheel, they advertise with looking at the Suzhou Creek from the wheel but as you can see in this picture there is no way that you can see the actual river from up there. Nice try though.

It’s probably getting boring, 3 days in a row posts about the snow in Shanghai. But last night and most of today it snowed so hard that I felt that I should put some pictures up, it hardly ever happens that this city sees so much snow. It’s beautiful outside, but I am afraid it won’t last long. I promise this will be my last post about snow in Shanghai – at least for this month.

The kids play area in our backyard
Scott at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten this morning

Elaine in the backyard

Yesterday I blogged about the low temperatures in Shanghai and that it had started snowing again. The snow kept on falling for most of the day, and overnight even stayed on the ground. This morning most of Shanghai was covered in a very thin layer of snow. Of course Scott loved it, and when we arrived at his kindergarten he immediately started running through the snow. Today’s temperatures will be a few degrees above zero Celsius, so likely the snow won’t be here for long.

UnitedStyles.com is looking for girls for a photoshoot again, this time a bit older than during our last shoots. If you are a 8-12 year old girl living in Shanghai and interested to help with fittings and photoshoots, please feel free to get in touch with Ms. Anna Haude of United Styles at 1376 432 1290 or per email at annahaude@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you!

Normally winters in Shanghai are not that cold, the temperature generally hovers around 5 or 10 degrees Celsius but it hardly ever drops below zero. It feels much colder though, because the Shanghai air is quite humid and most buildings don’t have central heating. Personally I prefer real winters like in Beijing, with very dry air (too dry actually, I always had humidifiers in every room) and temperatures far below zero Celcius.

But it looks Shanghai is trying to catch up with Beijing: today for the third time this winter it is snowing in the city. Very unusual, you normally only see snow once every few years. It’s been snowing for several hours already, but the snow does not stay on the ground yet (at least not in downtown Shanghai) like a few weeks ago.

This weekend we had a problem with our shower, for some reason the water did not flow out anymore. We tried to unclog the pipes but nothing worked. Eventually we got some work men to help, but even they didn’t understand what the problem was and they wanted to come back with other tools on Monday. But Sunday night the water was suddenly gone. I turned on the shower and the water disappeared as usual.

So Monday morning we planned to take a shower there again and guess what: the water again did not flow out. This was quite strange, and we told the work men the story when they arrived. They couldn’t figure it out either, and checked out the whole pipe. Then they found what happened: the water in the pipe was frozen! This never happened before to us in Shanghai, so we did not even think about this as a potential cause. Our house is clearly not built for sub-zero temperatures, because it was only -4 or -5 at night.

As ‘proof’ of how unusual these temperatures are, the Shanghai Daily had a picture yesterday of a boy playing next to a creek with a big chunk of ice. The fact that there was some ice on the water was news in Shanghai! The weather will not change much over the next couple of days so we might see more of these pictures. I feel sorry for all the people without heating in the city…

Tonight I was doing emails on the back seat of my car while driving home, when I realized that I could not keep my eyes open. I didn’t get enough sleep over the past days and had a pretty intensive day today and tiredness suddenly hit me. When I got home my kids wanted to play with me, but the only thing I wanted to do was sleep on the couch for a while. But if I would do that my Friday night would be virtually over, so I decided to push myself to change into my running clothes and do a short run on the treadmill.

It was not easy, especially because the heating in my gym was off so it was very cold in there. But with some loud 70s disco music on the sound system and a sitcom (muted with subtitles) in my DVD player I tried to change my mood from tired and lazy to a more positive state of mind. I decided to do a really slow run (8.5 km/h without incline) and that felt good right from the start. After a couple of minutes I started to feel more relaxed and less tired, and even increased the speed a bit. After 20 minutes I had run about 3.2 km, and I felt so good that I could have easily continued. But because the cook had finished preparing dinner, I decided to take a quick shower (hot, then ice cold for 10 seconds, and then hot again) and don’t let the others wait for me.

I felt like reborn after the run and shower, full of energy and in an excellent mood. I’m not tired at all anymore and I am ready to do a bit more work (or at least ready to writing some blog posts, like I am doing right now). Running is the best medicine for me to get me out of a lazy mood. It’s hard to explain to people that don’t do sports, but if you feel tired or down just give it a try, it just works!

I decided to reward myself with a top to toe massage at Dragonfly later tonight. As Dragonfly describes it on its site:
Our signature therapy, a combination of Oriental Foot Massage with head, shoulder and arm massage by two therapists at the same time guarantees you will leave our retreat feeling as light as a dragonfly.

A good end of the working week and the best start of the weekend!