Matts blog

Tomorrow I’m off to Chengdu in Sichuan province, its meant to be a very beautiful place, but is sub tropical so I’m expecting it to be more humid than Shanghai, if thats possible. After walking home yesterday, I was so sweaty you could almost wring out my shirt, thats not pleasnt, even the apartment aircon isn’t coping very well.

So, I think I’m convinced…  Moving to Beijing would be a good thing, and looking at the apartments here I think it’ll be a very enjoyable time.  I’ve visited a new development called R&F in the East of Beijing, not far from the metro, and surrounded by good bars and restaurants, including a Papa Johns, there’s also a Carrefour supermarket 800m away.

The development is very nice, with onsite gym, swimming pool, indoor tennis courts, bowling alleys and mahjong rooms!!!  The apartments are also very good quality, with gas, aircon, and bigger than my flat in Shanghai, Ikea seems to be the style of the day too, so its kinda like bing in London again!

I’m just about to go and look at some more, and talk prices, we are aiming for around 3000RMB pm for 60+ sqm…

There are photos here.

After our africa trip I put together a DVD of us Sandboarding in Namibia and rafting on the Zambezi at Victoria Falls, theres also a 5 minute slide show of some of my Africa Pictures. If anyone wants a copy I’ve uploaded it here

We took a daytrip to Hangzhou this weekend, thanks to a taxi driver that didn’t know where the station was we missed our train, but handily a bus to Hangzhou runs from Shanghai Meilong station to Hangzhou, and takes about 2 hours on the expressway through rice paddies.

We spent time at the west Lake had great food and beer, and visited the Silk market.

Its easy to see why Hangzhou as become known as one of the most beautiful parts of china, walking round the lake is very pleasant even in the rain

As we are in the process of applying for Lizzie’s new visa so she can stay in China with me, we’ve had to give her a chinese name, and after much thought in the office we came up with 彭丽斯 or in pinyin Peng Li Si. My name was chosen by my boss and is 魏马修 or Wei Ma Xiu, which is the name on my business cards here!

Just thought I’d say that being at work with a hanggover in China is just like being at work with a hangover in england, only you sweat the beer out faster

Every so often theres a CD that you know will stay in or close to your CD player for a long time, and today I discovered not one but two.

The new Foo Fighters 2 CD album is one of the best albums I’ve heard from any band, CD 1 is Dave Grohl music at its best, theres not a single song that makes me want to reach for the track skip button.

CD 2 is acoustic and is the kind of CD you can stick in and listen to over dinner, good mellow sounds different from the first cd, but a very good companion.

Aparently the original CD has copy protection on it, but here in China thats not too much of a problem!

After last week working with the Chinese ‘Big 4’ banks, I’ve been asked if I want to move to Beijing to be closer to the bank head offices and work mainly with the Finance industry, rather than Telecoms companies.

It seems to me that the banks are a lot more serious about IT management and see the need for and value of OOBI, so with less effort I think we can make a big impact on the industry, which would be very rewarding.

But do I want to move to Beijing???  It has some good plus points, the history and culture is a lot greater, and it is the Chinese capital, but I’ve got to know Shanghai well, I can navigate, we have a nice apartment, and there’s still lots of places around Shanghai that I’ve not seen yet.

I’ve just returned from a week of travelling about China, and managed to get some sightseeing in whilst away from shanghai.

We started with a friday evening flight to Beijing, and had the pleasure of being picked up at the airport by our driver, so much easier than fighting for a taxi (just need the same in Shanghai!!) and had a lovely night drive through Beijing to the Marco Polo Hotel.

Saturday started early at 6am, we wanted to get up and away before the crowds blocked the roads, and before it got too hot to do exercise. We headed North out of the city towards the 13 Tombs and Huanghuacheng, about 65Km from the city center. I can safely say it was of the best days in China so far, after hearing all the stories of peoples visits to the wall, and finding it covered in tourists, it was amazing to find it devoid of anyone, tourist or otherwise!

The wall was in various states of repair, a great deal of work had been carried out in the east section, and was looking very complete, we chose to ascend the western section, which was somewhat more ‘original’, but some repairs were being carried out.

We climbed to the top of the hill and had a panarama over the next valley, showing the cultivation following the river, it was really hot by the time we started to decsend, but when we got back to the village, we discovered the local ‘farmers house’ eatery had a fine line in COLD local beer!

Lunch was fantastic, the highlight being a barbequed fish basted with hot spices and cumin seeds, it was quite something.

After lunch we headed to Dings Tomb, this is the biggest of the 13 Ming Tombs, and attracts a lot of tourist coaches, so wasn’t an amzing experience compared with the morning, but never the less, was very interesting, the scale of the tomb was much greater than I imagined!

From there we strolled down the Main Sacred Way, the drive of the 13 tombs, this is lined with guarding animals and persons of importance, and is quite something, again we were lucky to be the only people there.

After a slow drive back to Beijing, we were taken out to Dinner by my Sting - my work collegue - and one of his friends, who works for IBM in Beijing, we had a fantastic duck hotpot in restaurant that was once a prinesses home in the Ming Dynasty!

Sunday I showed Lizzie the Forbidden City, Jinshan Park and Tiananmen Square, which were much more crowded than my trip in the winter, when there was only 5 of us on Tianenmen Square! Unfortunatly the afternoon turned very rainy, so we ended up in a bar in Lotus Lane…

After having to leave my PS2 and newly purchased GTA:San Andreas game in New Zealand, after only a couple of days of getting it, I was rather happy to find it had come out on PC, and was really really happy to find it played perfectly on my Laptop, I can’t tell you how happy I am I bought a powerful lappy

So after investing in a 2 quid joypad, and spending a few minutes configuring the game to act just like the PS2 controls, I can now play GTA:SA any time and anywhere Its the small things!