Taxis in Shanghai are ridiculously cheap compared to most major cities in the world. For a few USD you can drive all over the city, and you are not even expected to tip (if you tip they will normally hand you the money back, because it’s so uncommon). I have no idea how taxi drivers can earn money at the current rates.

Now that the National Holiday is over and the city is back to work again the local government announced that the prices will go up starting tomorrow. Not a lot, the base price goes from RMB 11 to RMB 12 for the first 3 km, and to 2.4 RMB (from 2.1 RMB) per km thereafter. Prices between 11 PM and 6 AM will increase to RMB 16 for the first 3 km and RMB 3.1 for every additional kilometer. This is of course still very cheap compared to what I am usually paying in Holland, or to what taxis dare to charge in Tokyo (that city must have the most expensive taxi fleet in the world). But compared to the average salary in Shanghai, many people will think again before taking a cab.

I wish the government would put a surcharge between 7 AM-9 AM and 5 PM-8 PM instead of after 11 PM. Especially during rush hour it’s often impossible to find a taxi. That makes a lot more sense than charging more after 11 PM when most taxis are empty anyway.

Picture: The taxi receipt next to this post is from a business partner of mine who was seriously overcharged by a cab: RMB 626 for a 19 minute ride (the driver added RMB 600 in toll fees). He paid for it, and the taxi company later said they could not identify the driver.

My laptop got extremely slow over the past couple of days, so I decided to find out what the reason could be for this unexpected behavior. I could not really figure it out, until I noticed that my trash bin had over 3 million items in it. Several hundred GB of data that I had deleted but that was still sitting in there. After emptying the trash (which took at least an hour) and restarting the computer it is now noticeably faster, so maybe this was indeed the reason?

My training over the past days went pretty well, and I had been looking forward to today’s run: a long run on and around Tianmashan. With 3 friends we gathered at my place at 8:15 AM, and despite a traffic jam we arrived at the hill about 35 minutes later. We started with a climb to the Buddha statue and from there ran to the next top over a concrete path. From that top you go downhill until the path stops and you start running along a small trail through a bamboo forest. And that’s where it happened: I was running in front and suddenly stepped into a hole that was covered with leaves. I heard a tearing sound and felt a terrible pain, and at that moment I knew something was wrong big time. I managed to hold on to a bamboo tree, but the pain was so bad that I had to sit down. The others could not do much of course, but luckily the pain got a bit less after a couple of minutes.

I tried to stand up and realized nothing was broken, something I was very relieved about. But I also realized that we were about as far from our car as we could get, with a hill in between. The best thing would have been if I could stay seated with some ice, but I had to go to the car first. So I bit on my tongue in order not to feel the pain too much and slowly started walking back with the others. After a while it got easier until I stepped on something, and almost fell on the ground because of the pain. I had to sit down for a few minutes again before I could continue. It hurt a lot, but I managed to get over the hill and back to the car. I was very happy that I was wearing my trail running shoes instead of my regular running shoes, the trail shoes protect the foot a lot more and without them I think my problems would have been a lot bigger.

At the car I realized that the right ankle that was sprained is exactly the foot that you use to drive. The other 3 people either could not drive or did not have a Chinese driver’s license, so I decided to give it a try anyway. To make a long story short, it was not a good idea. Driving at a fixed speed was okay, but braking or speeding up was painful.

Because I felt bad for the others that had gotten up early to run a long distance and only spent about 3 km on the hill, I decided to show them Sun Island. This is a nearby island resort, with among others a very nice golf course. I could not walk, so we just drove around there a bit before going back to Shanghai. At home the pain got worse and my foot became about twice its normal size. But after I put ice packs on my swollen foot it now finally seems to get a bit better.

I won’t be able to run for the next 1-2 weeks, however. That means I won’t be able to run the Hanghzou Mountain Race in 10 days…. A pity, I was secretly planning to go there to run the 30 km trail run. But the half marathon in late November won’t be a problem, in 2005 I sprained my ankle less than two weeks before a full marathon and still ran the 42 km race (despite doctor’s advice, and because of this I could not run for 6 weeks afterward – but I did it!).

I am on quite a lot of social networks, but most of them I don’t really use. Only about five or so I use regularly; my favorite one is of course Twitter, but the number two is a quite unknown one where I only have eight friends: dailymile.com. It’s a social network for runners, and running happens to my favorite sport. I try to run at least one marathon a year or something similar. This year it will likely just be the Shanghai half marathon in November, although I am still considering to participate again in the grueling 30k Hangzhou Mountain Marathon later this month. I even read novels about long-distance running, right now I am in the middle of “What I talk about when I talk about running” by the famous Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (thanks for borrowing Richard Yu).

I think I found out about dailymile around Christmas last year, and I started using the site actively from January this year. I use it to track all my runs and to see what my web-savvy running friends are up to. It’s more like a public running diary for me: I track how far I ran, how long it took me, how I felt and where I ran. Almost all my runs this year are on it. I now started training for the Shanghai half marathon, and my daily miles go up a lot. The site tells me that I ran 47 km over the past week, out of which 40 over the past 4 days. In the whole of September I only ran 91 kilometers, so I really picked up my training schedule now (also because of the Chinese holidays of course, I won’t be able to keep this up when work starts again). I normally also mention my runs on Twitter, but there is no way to easily find them back on there, let alone to get some useful statistics.

When I just signed up for dailymile the site was still quite new and had hardly any functions. But after a few weeks they asked their users what functions they would like to see, and I sent them a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. It turns out that 9 months later many of these functions have been implemented. Exactly like I would have done it, they implement changes step by step: not all at once, but one feature after the other. You can now for example sync your Nike+ with dailymile, so it updates your runs automatically. And this week for example, I received for the first time a weekly training report, with the number of kilometers that I ran and the amount of calories that I burned. The site is now much easier to use than when I first started using it, and I really enjoy spending a few minutes on it on an (almost) daily basis.

The site is actually not only for runners, you can also use it for other sports like cycling or swimming. If you like to keep track of your progress or need some extra motivation to keep your schedule, you should sign up for DailyMile.com. And once you’ve done that feel free to add me as a friend!

This morning I decided to spend some quality time with Scott. His nanny has vacation and I had the idea to take him out for a walk on Hongmei Lu and have a drink with him. The first stop on our walk was the golf course opposite our compound. I showed Scott the driving range and he was intrigued by all the people hitting balls. Right at that moment a helicopter flew over (a very rare thing in Shanghai, you never see a helicopter above the city), which he liked even more.

We then walked on to have a coffee somewhere. The terrace at Starbucks was full, but Costa Coffee still had a table, so we sat down there. I had a Caramel Latte and Scott a Kiwi Strawberry Snapple. I also ordered a piece of chocolate cheesecake that I shared with Scott. The weather was very nice, about 26 degrees and sunny, and in the sun it still felt like summer. Scott also seemed to be warm because he finished the Snapple (16 fl. oz, a bit less than half a liter) within 10 minutes!

We then continued our walk and had an early lunch at the Bastiaan Bakery (the Dutch bakery on Hongmei Pedestrian Street). I had a soup and turkey roll that I wanted to share with Scott, but he was only interested in the piece of bread that came with the soup. After lunch we went over to the Pearl Market, that is becoming more and more popular with tourists because of the fake products they sell there. I just went to the foreign language book store (ground floor in the back) and checked out the Nintendo DS games shop, but did not buy anything. The last stop was the DVD shop where I bought an old documentary about China that I plan to watch while running on the treadmill today. Scott was getting a bit tired by then and while walking back he fell asleep. We had a very nice morning together and I want to do this more often.

Today the People’s Republic of China exists exactly 60 years, and to celebrate the occasion there was a big military and civilian parade at Tiananmen Square this morning. A total of 200,000 people performed in the parade and like many Chinese I sat down at 10 AM in front of the TV to watch it. It was an impressive sight, I have to say: China knows how to throw a well organized party. The Opening Ceremony at last year’s Olympics was already a good example and this parade once again confirmed it.

China showed off its latest military material, from tanks and airplanes to nuclear weapons. Quite a sight. Also the thousands of soldiers marching past the leaders at the gate on the North side of Tiananmen Square were impressive. I liked the female troops best, especially the ones in short and tight military skirts and one big group in pink (!) outfits with high white boots. Kinky! The Party Leaders seemed to think the same, because they clapped more enthusiastically when the ladies marched by.

Although the weather in Beijing had been very smoggy over the past days, the government had promised it would make sure the weather would be good, and it worked: this morning the sun broke through the clouds and at 10 AM it was an almost clear blue sky above Tiananmen Square. At the airforce base close to Beijing from where some of the planes for the parade took off, the weather was very different: when the camera’s switched to there before the broadcast you could see it was grey weather and completely cloudy. The reporter even wore a thick coat (this was around 9 AM). Amazing what weather technology can do. As one of the people on Twitter said during the show: If China can control the weather maybe they can also find a way to stop global warming!

What made the parade even better was Twitter. Even though it is blocked in China, many people know tricks to get around it, and a pretty big group was commenting on everything they saw. The comments were often hilarious and this really added to the experience for me. Hopefully during next year’s opening ceremony of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai Twitter will be unblocked so that many more people can join and enjoy the tweets. If you want to get a feel for what people said, do a Twitter search on hashtag #CPC60, I’m sure you’ll find some excellent tweets.

If you want to get a feel for what else is happening in China today go to Tudou. Today we, in cooperation with China.com.cn, broadcast live from 7 AM until 10 PM all the activities happening around the 60th anniversary of the PR China (after 10 PM it will be repeated). The stream is here: http://www.tudou.com/home/dayuebing60 On the same page you can find a lot of video’s of the parade as well.

Yesterday I had a meeting in Hangzhou and during the ride there I noticed that for a stretch of at least 40 kilometers construction workers were building something that looks like a train track. It certainly was not a road, it looked too narrow for that and it would have been strange to build an elevated road next to the expressway. It also did not look like a regular train track, because these are normally not constructed far above the ground in China (there is no need for that). What it looked like is the construction of the Maglev train from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

However, this project is supposed to be suspended according to a Caijing article from March this year. I could not find any information on the Internet that this suspension had been overruled, but it seems that the construction has started. Can anybody shed a light on this?

What’s actually even more interesting, is the way they build this line: in Europe they would probably work on a stretch of a few kilometers at a time, here it seems they work on the whole length of the line at the same time. Everywhere they are building pillars: at some places construction is a bit further than at others, but along the whole stretch workers are busy with the construction. They must use thousands of people to do this, quite a feat to plan and implement such a project if you think about it. It also explains why China can build its infrastructure so quickly, they just build the whole thing at once instead of in many stages.

Every now and then a video suddenly goes viral, and becomes wildly popular on the Chinese Internet. Sometimes a video site is behind this by promoting a video on the home page, but more often it just happens all of a sudden. Something like that happened over the past days with the animation video ??????? (Translation: Hit, hit the big watermelon – official English name: See through). I think the video is excellent, and except for a few Chinese characters there is no Chinese language involved, so also non-Chinese speakers can watch it.

The creator is a guy with the nickname Jokelate, who according to ChinaHush claims to have made the video over the past 3.5 years. He quit his job and worked full-time on the clip, living with his mom on her RMB 1000/month retirement pension. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but if he really did this on his own it might pay off: the result is excellent and I’m sure he will get some good job offers because of this.

The result is almost too good, it looks like a professional animation. Jokelate even thought about putting a preview on Tudou in December last year already (you can find it here). The original program was put on Tudou in late June, but only 3 months later it suddenly became a big hit. It’s an anti-war story, that shows how a war starts and then tells the story of the friendship that grows between two enemy pilots that get stranded on a small island. Enjoy the show!

If you don’t see the video player below, or if the player does not work click here to watch the movie directly on Tudou. Since yesterday the video is also available on YouTube, in 2 parts. It has only been watched 7000 times so far! Part 1, Part 2