Matts blog

If anyone actaully reads this blog, they may remember 6 months ago when Elong acidentally sent me a thread of internal emails about lack of customer service, the original entry is here. Well they’ve struck again, I just recieved a 14Mb email with the following text:

Dear Paul and Matthew,

Firstly, many thanks for taking the time to visit us out here in BJ, we really appreciated the chance to learning learn from and share experiences with you; this is what being part of a global business should be all about.

I have taken a little time to think about some follow-ups to our meetings, and some suggested next steps:

- Monthly meetings. Topics could include:
- Cooperation on leveraging airlines
- Project updates (risk inventory, ‘fix air’, ’summer sun’, ‘kitty hawk’)
- Negotiation updates (Travelsky, other GDSs, key airlines)
- Information sharing. We are starting an industry update at least once a month and would be keen to share it with you. I hope this could feed into your biz intelligence networks, which can all be fed back to us.

I suggest that we could try and fix the first one up for early June. Matthew, would you be able to make the arrangements? (we have a video-conferencing system here now, which we can hook up to Bellevue).

- Contact between analytics teams. Liu shishi is responsible for analytics for us here, and has now been on board for 3 months. Regular 2-way communication between him and Greg would be an enourmous benefit for the development of our analytics function here.

- Documents. I have attached some of the docs we used during your stay. Similarly, you mentioned information sources that you have, such as reports on China, which i would greatly appreciate.

Looking forward to close cooperation,

Regards,

Andy

‘Paul’ is Paul Brown - President, Expedia Partner Services Group and aparently I attended a meeting in Beijing with him!

Attached to the email was 2 powerpoint presentations one giving financial breakdowns, ticket sales breakdowns and other interesting stuff, the other detailing ‘Project Fix Air’ a plan to sort out the customer service within Elong.

Theres been an awful lot of discussion in the media about Google and exactly what it is up to in China and having been in Googles offices in China I was in a position to comment. So I started punching various things in to google.com and google.cn, obviously I was doing this from outside the ‘great firewall of China’ as I’m in Australia at present, and would you believe what I found - HUGE differeneces in search results.
You can see from the screenshots below what I mean, this is from searching for ‘tiananmen’ on google images.

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen


http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Obviously after having ADSL in China for so long I knew a lot was censored - I couldn’t access news.bbc.co.uk for example, but I kind of got used to firing up a VPN client and accessing websites via the US. I had no idea the differences were quite so big its really quite disturbing.

I thought I should write something about my long and almost painful process of transferring my RMB salary in to a GPB account held in the UK. There seems to be a lot of posts on expat forums and newsgroups asking how to achieve this, but very few answers, and I’m the only person I know how has actually achieved this. The first thing to remember is that transferring money is not a problem, the actual electronic transfer works like everywhere else, so take along your bank details, including branch address and find out the IBAN and SWIFT codes for your account, the main difficulty is exchanging RMB to USD/GPB/etc

First of all, allocate a good chunk of time to do the transaction, and prepare well, you will require all of the following documents:

1. Alien Employment Permit
2. Employment Contract
3. Certificate of Salary
4. Certificate of Income Tax Return (Usually one per month)
5. Passport

You’ll need the originals of all of these, and a photocopy as well, I prepared photocopies of all the documents, and photo page and visa pages of my passport, and any page with a red seal from my Alien Employment Permit.

Most of these documents should be readily available from your HR / operations team, and as long as they have the company seal on them all should be OK.

You’ll need to find a reasonable sized branch, my account was held at Bank of China, and I chose to us ethe Guomao branch as they speak reasonable English there. Expect to queue for some time, you’ll probably be one of many at the Fund Transfer or Travellers Cheque counter - I got pointed to this counter from the normal counters.

Once you get to the counter you’ll have to present your paperwork which is checked, particular attention is given to the tax documents, and a calculation of how much can be converted and transfered calculated, I’m not sure what the formula is, but I was OK

Next you’ll have to fill in a number of forms:

• Payment Form For Payment Abroad
  This form details who you are paying, what currency you are paying in to the amount of currency and the reason in the form of a code - mine was 3200 ‘Other Investment’
• Application For Telegraphic Transfers (overseas)
  This details the sender (you) the receiver (maybe you!!) and the bank details, you only have a small box to fit ALL the bank details in to so take care, you will be asked for IBAN, Swift, Sort code, account number and branch address. This sheet also details the RMB amount and the exchange rate (I got 14.37)
  
• A form in Chinese (I’ll translate and put the name here)
  This has your name, phone number, china address, and (i think) the reason for the purchase of foreign currency.

Next a whole load of transaction slips will require signing, and pin numbers entering, this covers the transaction itself and the commission (for me 100RMB).

Once everything is complete the forms and paperwork will be taken away for checking, this may take a while, as the tax payments were recalculated, but once everything is calculated and many, many stamps applied, its all done! Sounds so simple when its written down, but it took me just short of 2 hours to complete.

I’m not sure how long it takes to reach the UK, I’ll update this entry when it arrives.

So after finishing work today, there was only one thing to do….. Have a leaving party, so I knocked up that old classic - Spag Bol and invited my best buddy Sting and his girlfriend Yang around, and Lizzie’s friend Ramona also came. As its -7 or so, we decided the only viable option for drinks was mulled wine and a quick search round the supermarket turned up Cloves and what I think is whole nutmeg. The mulled wine went down a storm!!!! It seems cheap Chinese wine is the vital ingredient

So once everyone was suitably Inebriated I took my chance to ask Yang what my nick name they had chosen for me was, and it turned out it was 蚂蚱 (ma zha) or in English grasshopper, the general consensus was that this is very similar to ‘Matt’ and I have long limbs like a grasshopper, I’m pretty keen on it as a name

Lizzie also received a new name, which was thought to be more fitting to her than her current Chinese name. So Lizzie is now known as 荔枝 (li zhi) and in English that means Lychee or Litchi chinensis Sonn if you prefer a bit of latin, this fruit is native of southern China, which is about the only bit of China Lizzie hasn’t visited, a must of next time obviously.

Right, guess its bed time, no more mulled wine left, and lots of cleaning and banking to do tomorrow.

But hopefully not unemployable, it exactly 6 minutes time I will officially finish work for Cyclades China, and for the second time in 18 months be voluntarily unemployed. I feel happy. Now, wheres that bottle of Bubbly gone???

No matter how much investigation, planning and preparation you do here, when you finally come to implementing the process in invariably goes wrong - today I had to prepare to send my money to the UK, I had a pile of paperwork and thought I was all prepared. Upon arrival at the bank I was told I didn’t have all the paperwork and there was no way I could access my Bank of China Shanghai account in Beijing, my only option was to go to Shanghai. After talking to a couple of collegues I found I should be able to perform a transfer if I was willing to pay a service fee of 1% capped at 50RMB, so returned to the Bank, and queued for an hour, and after a short arguement where I informed the same clerk of this fee he then quickly performed the transfer as requested. It seems you have to know the process back to front and be willing to tell officials about it to get anything done here.

Fingers crossed I should get my required paperwork tomorrow, and can do battle at the bank again to get the money back to the UK, I’ll be glad when its over!

Tomorrow is the day for the box collection of our chinese junk to be shipped to NZ, we seem to be shipping 2 t-chests of rubbish, I’m sure it could all go missing and no loss to us.

An early start lead us to McDonalds for a Egg & Bacon McMuffin and Orange juice to cure our slight hangover from yesterday night in Lan Kwai Fong, then we headed up The Peak on the tram to go find our first Geocache located on the peak overlooking Stanley and Kowloon, The last 200m of the GPS guided Journey was a scramble up a steep incline through natural HK bush, but when the GPS finally indicated we were within 1m of the location I turned round to investigate the area and was amazed by the view, it has to be the best view of Hong Kong.

The rest of the day we spent first with a bread, cheese and humous lunch overlooking Central, then a walk down the hill from The Peak and a ferry over to Hung Hom, the sun broke through, and we had a beautiful walk by the bay.

After a quick trip up the mid-level escalator, and a walk back down to Lan Kwai Fong for a couple of beers and a pub quiz we walkd back down to central and found that in front of the HSBC building was Father Christmas walking round his house. Sourounding his houe were trees covered with chritmas wishes, and a large screen displaying some of those wishes to the world, so for the first time this year it actaully felt like christmas, lovely! Obviously I can’t tell you what I wished for, but I did take a picture of a guy in a suit placng his wish, and shared a smile with him has he left.

After a quick trip up the mid-level escalator, and a walk back down to Lan Kwai Fong for a couple of beers and a pub quiz we walkd back down to central and found that in front of the HSBC building was Father Christmas walking round his house. Sourounding his houe were trees covered with chritmas wishes, and a large screen displaying some of those wishes to the world, so for the first time this year it actaully felt like christmas, lovely! Obviously I can’t tell you what I wished for, but I did take a picture of a guy in a suit placng his wish, and shared a smile with him has he left.

Its getting cold here, I think today is the coldest w’ve seen so far, its 8pm and -4, but witha 45Km NW wind its -13C, pretty chilly, and its SO dry, only 14% humidity (the Namib desert is around 5-10% as a comparison!