Yesterday we had a Tudou board meeting, and two of our VC’s had flown in from Beijing the day before. At least that was the plan, because both had about a 12 hour delay (meaning sitting in the plane on the tarmac for 12 hours, with the plane eventually running out of drinks for the passengers). Today I read on Twitter that David Feng had a 7 hour delay yesterday, flying from Shanghai to Beijing.

What I heard from one person is that the pilot did not want to give a reason why they had such a long delay, and for a long time they did not even know whether they would ever take off or not. I wonder what’s the problem on this route? Are there secret military exercises, like I once had with a severely delayed flight to Macau? And why can they not inform the passengers in advance? In one plane it apparently got so bad that passengers started to beat up the airplane crew, and some people had blood on their shirts.

I fly regularly in China, and normally flights are reasonably on time and the service is quite okay (I still don’t eat Chinese airplane food though). But every now and then you hear these horror stories, and nobody really knows why this is happening. If China truly wants to be a modern first-world country this kind of delays without any explanations should not happen. I checked both yesterday’s and today’s Shanghai Daily for the reason of the delays, but as expected I did not see any article about it. Does anybody know what’s going on?

As many readers of this blog know I am a big fan and happy shareholder of M1NT Shanghai. The club is doing very well, and on weekend nights the place is completely packed. The success of both M1NT Shanghai and Hong Kong now leads to the opening of a M1NT in Beijing.

The location was announced today, M1NT Beijing will open on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Dolce & Gabbana Building, in the same complex that also houses the Park Hyatt. The design will once again be extraordinary, with Andy Hall of MQ Studio leading the architecture and design, and Nathan Thompson of Flaming Beacon in charge of the lighting design.

The Grand Opening will be on New Year’s Eve 2009. Interested in becoming a shareholder of what will probably be the best club in Beijing? You can download an Information Memorandum with all the details and benefits here (pdf). By filling out page 24-26 you can apply to become a shareholder. For me M1NT is much more than a financial investment, but it’s always nice to know that If things keep on going well M1NT plans to go IPO in 2011 already.

I look forward to the opening of M1NT Beijing!

A couple of days ago one of my staff told me that a friend of her was not happy because a comment that he or she had posted had not been allowed on my blog. I was a bit surprised because >95% of all comments are approved, and only in extreme cases I do not allow them on my blog. Normally the comments end up in my inbox and I approve them there, I could not remember that I recently did not allow a comment (except for spam comments).

Today I was approving a comment when I by mistake clicked on the wrong link and ended up in my comment moderation panel on Blogger.com. I normally never go there, but when I looked at the panel I noticed there were about 25 comments that still had to be moderated! I was surprised and realized that these were all comments that I had approved in my mail over the past month or so, but that had not ended up on my blog. Some comments had appeared on my blog but the others were still in this comment list. I am not sure why this happened, I guess it has something to do with the fact that Blogger is blocked in China. Before I could approve all comments from my mailbox (whether using a proxy or not), but now it seems this has changed.

If you left me a comment over the past couple of weeks and you did not see it on my blog, I apologize for this. I will check the moderation panel more frequently from now on to make sure all approved comments indeed end up on my blog. Keep on writing comments, that’s what makes the posts more lively and I like the interaction with my readers.

Today a total solar eclipse was visible from Shanghai – or at least, it should have been visible because about 15 minutes before the eclipse it started to rain hard! A pity, especially for the many tourists that traveled to Shanghai from all over the world to watch the event.

I had seen one total eclipse before in Stuttgart in August 1999, a few months before I moved from there to China. That time we were more lucky, because the clouds opened up just in time to watch the eclipse. Shanghai was not that fortunate, but it was still amazing to see it getting completely dark within a minute and then bright again a few minutes later. I took some pictures (with time stamps), so you can see how quickly it went.

Right before and during the eclipse lots of police were on the street to make sure the traffic would not come to a total stand still. That only worked partially, because the moment the sky suddenly turned dark people stopped their cars to watch. Only when it was completely black they started to drive again.

Most people were very excited before the eclipse already, and on TV, in newspapers and on the Internet the eclipse was a major topic. However, some people didn’t care about it: the workers in our building kept on painting the building during the eclipse, totally unaware of the natural phenomenon that was happening outside.

Despite the rain I enjoyed seeing the full eclipse. It’s just so weird to go from full daylight to a pitch black middle-of-the-night feeling within minutes. The fact that the sun was not visible because of the clouds during the actual eclipse was a pity, but the fact that it gets totally dark is actually much more interesting to me. Not so interesting as to fly all over the world to see another eclipse, but if I would happen to live in the place where a future eclipse will take place I will certainly watch it again. If you like to travel to see one, next year there will be one in Tahiti and in 2012 you can see one in northern Australia. The next big one in China seems to be in 2035, when Beijing will turn completely dark.

If you want to see some videos of the eclipse, you can go to Tudou where we have a whole channel for the 2009 eclipse: http://www.tudou.com/home/09riquanshi
The pictures I took before, during and after the eclipse are here as a set on Flickr.

Over the years I have had my fair share of turbulence during flights. Probably the worst experience was on a domestic Indonesian flight between Mataram and Denpasar in the mid-1990’s on an old Sempati plane. On that eventful short flight suddenly a flight attendant ran out of the cockpit to the back and not a second later the plane made a dive of what seemed to be at least several hundred meters. I thought my final hour had come, but the pilot got the plane under control again and without saying a word to the passengers landed it on Bali. I vowed never to fly Sempati again, which was an easy one to keep because they went bankrupt in 1998 after having lost several of their planes in crashes.

Yesterday night I had another turbulence experience, which was not as bad as Sempati but certainly not fun. A couple of minutes after taking off from Phuket I decided to go to the toilet. I locked the door behind me and at that very moment the plane unexpectedly hit heavy turbulence. I was thrown off my feet and hit my shoulder on the wall before I could grab the water tap with one hand and the water basin with my other. My legs hit the door and for a moment I thought it would fly out, but that didn’t happen.

At the same time the flight attendants were almost screaming through the intercom to the passengers to put on their seat belts. But that was not necessary anymore, because after 20 seconds or so the plane was totally stable again. When I came out of the wash room 2 flight attendants were waiting for me, they thought I had injured myself (it probably sounded like that when I hit the wall and then the door, they were in the kitchen next to me when it happened), but I assured them I was totally fine. I was glad I had not gone to the toilet a minute earlier though!

This weekend I spent on the island of Phuket in Thailand, where Marcel Ekkel married his girlfriend Siu Shan. I have known Marcel for many years already, and he has become a good friend even though we don’t see each other regularly (Marcel currently lives in Hong Kong). At first we met through the Internet, probably around 5-6 years ago. At that time Marcel was a moderator for some Yahoo Groups or mailing lists that I subscribed to (Do these things still exist? Amazing how quickly the Internet changes). I think I first got to know him there or otherwise through Ecademy (a business social network avant la lettre, that missed out on the boom because they decided to charge their customers. I tried to leave them years ago and they still keep spamming me, but that’s a different story).

I think we first met in real life in Shanghai where Marcel spoke at a project management conference and where we had dinner that night with a Dutch journalist – this was before Tudou and Spil Games, when I was still a consultant. Afterward we mainly met in Hong Kong when I was there for weekend shopping trips or for business reasons. Last year we trained for the Trailwalker together, and because of that we spent many hours together on Hong Kong’s mountain trials.

I probably knew before his wife that he was going to propose because we talked about it during the training for the Trailwalker, and I think he even announced it to me on MSN. So when I received his wedding invitation I immediately decided to go, even though Phuket is quite a long trip from Shanghai. My wife could not join because Elaine at 7 weeks is a bit too young to leave alone at home with the nanny, so I had to go without her.

The wedding took place in the Indigo Pearl Resort, a high-end resort on Phuket’s northwestern Nai Yang Beach. I was quite impressed by the resort, the design is amazing (see some of my pictures of the resort on Flickr) and the service excellent. The location on the quiet Nai Yang Beach is also great, although if you prefer nightlife this is not the right place to go: after 11 PM almost everything closes down.

It was actually my first time to visit Phuket, I have been to Thailand many times but mainly in Bangkok or on the islands on the east coast. Phuket is bigger than I thought, but even though it does not have the small island feeling I liked it. I rented a car and drove all around the island, checking out most of the towns and beaches. The west coast beaches are nice, but the towns were a bit disappointing. Mass tourism from Scandinavia, Australia and Russia ruined them, and I left the towns as soon as possible. Stay away from places like Patong Beach if you like a quiet beach vacation.
Phuket is quite cheap (at least at the moment) and most hotels and resorts seem to be fairly empty. This may have to do with the fact that it is low season on the West coast, but likely the unstable political situation in Thailand may also play a role. Not sure if the 2004 tsunami still has an effect on tourism, but last year’s closure of Bangkok airport for a couple of days by protesters certainly certainly did not help to attract more vacationers. So if you want to check it out, now is a good time. You can get rooms in 5-star resorts for less than EUR 50 per night if you do a bit of research. I had several meals in small restaurants on the beach, where you can get great Thai food almost for free. And an ice cold local Singha beer is not expensive either!

The wedding itself took place in the Indigo Pearl resort and was a very nice event. A lot of family and friends had flown over from England, Holland and Hong Kong (plus several other Asian destintaions) and it was an interesting group. After exchanging the vows and the rings in a traditional Thai house on stilts in a lake in the resort, we all had drinks with the newly wed couple. After taking pictures and writing the wedding guest book it was time for dinner. There were some interesting people on my table and we had discussions for hours while eating and drinking. During the speeches I learned a lot about the couple (for example, I never knew that Marcel met Siu Shan while he was a diving instructor on Boracay), and after the toasts were over we all headed to a bar for drinks and cigars. I think the guests all had a great time, I for sure enjoyed the evening a lot. Thanks Marcel & Siu Shan, I wish you a very happy married life together!

Over the past years China has built a great system of expressways. They are a lot better than most highways in the US and Europe, and they run all over the country. However, because almost all of them are toll roads (the easiest and most fair way to earn the investment back) this leads to problems close to big cities. When I drive from Hangzhou to Shanghai, the drive itself is normally about 1.5 hours. However, I have to add at least 30 minutes if I drive on a Sunday afternoon because of the huge waiting lines at the toll gates (especially the one where you enter Shanghai). I hear from friends that on working days it’s normally even worse, especially when there are accidents (like the bus in the picture that crashed through a toll gate).

For years I have been wondering why nobody would do something about the waiting time. It’s not so difficult, just sell pre-paid electronic cards and the flow of traffic will go a lot faster. It’s not rocket science and it’s been done in many other countries. But China didn’t really seem to care, most people just accepted the waiting time (am I really the only one who feels it’s a total waste of time?) and nothing really changed, except that lines were getting even longer.

But things may finally change. An article in today’s Shanghai Daily writes that on the A9 the situation at the toll stations is now getting out of hand, waiting times at the toll gates are normally more than 1 hour during peak hours! I avoid that road nowadays, and try to take smaller roads if I go to Sheshan on weekends. Maybe some officials living in the area have to endure the daily waiting time as well and decided to complain, because the government is going to do something about it.

They announced three measures to ease traffic congestion at the Xujing toll booth: increase the toll gates from 18 to 24, train toll collectors to collect toll within 8 seconds, and install a toll station with electronic toll equipment. I think this might help a lot and I hope they will implement it at all other toll stations around Shanghai as well. And I also hope they will be smart enough to make the entrance for the ETC at least 1-2 kilometers before the toll gates, otherwise you still have to queue up in a traffic jam with all the other drivers.

For several weeks I was not able to download the NRC newspaper on my iLiad. This has nothing to do with the NRC, but everything with the iLiad: for some reason the wifi button stopped working after a few months already and now also the manual connection to wifi hardly ever works anymore. But on Saturday I tried it once again and suddenly I could connect to one of my home networks (but only one, I have no clue why the others could not connect).

So I was finally able to download and read some newspapers this weekend, and therefore I also came across the last page of Thursday’s paper. On it was a picture of last weekend’s collapsed Shanghai apartment tower. Famous Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij wrote an excellent column about the building that had fallen over, and he argued that it would make for a great piece of art: just put a fence around it and ask an artist to write a good description 🙂

That in itself may have been reason for a short blog post already, but what really caught my eye is how he heard about the collapse: he most likely read it on my blog! In the article he mentions that a friend on Facebook had sent him the picture from “the weblog of a Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai”. Interesting how news travels over the world these days, and how it eventually gets back to me again. In case you should read this as well Mr. Komrij, thanks for mentioning it and I enjoyed reading your column!