I'm in a cap in Shanghai, trying to find a Sushi place where I'm supposed to meet my colleges. That's always a challenge. Taxi drivers plainly refuse to read street names written by me in English on a napkin. If I try reading to them, they refuse to listen. I have to call a chinese friend, spell out the street name, and ask the driver to listen to a correct pronunciation over the phone.
Any attempt to sidestep this procedure leads me outside the city from where I have to call my friend anyway.
To make things easier, I carry a collection of business cards with Chinese addresses of various places I may want to go to. But of course the card from the Sushi place is missing...

Labels: Asia, eat+drink

Returning to Shanghai for an economics session at Fudan University, I'm glad to see Park 97 is still hip.
Today we had our final exam. One question, asked how Shanghai shows the economic development of China. Luckily I remembered a fitting discription from The Economist.

"Nowhere is China’s continuing transformation from Communist backwater to economic powerhouse more visible than in Shanghai. Twenty years ago, its streets were filled with workers in drab blue Mao suits, silently pushing identical black bicycles down derelict streets. Shops spread the few goods they stocked across bare shelves and there was so little to do that the city was asleep by early evening. Today, Shanghai is wide awake at every hour, seething with energy, noise and unbelievable traffic. Foreign labels in glittering shops entice China’s newly wealthy, while the skyline is dotted with futuristic skyscrapers. It is often the tourists who feel badly dressed."

Labels: Asia

Getting some time off, from our classes at Beida (that's Peking University), Andreas and I where lucky to have a smart fellow showing us the new Olympia stadium. Which looks like a bird's nest. The 2008 Beijing Olympics mark a new high point since Chinas open-up up in 1979 and it's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001.

Deng Xiaoping pioneered "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" and Chinese economic reform, also known as the "socialist market economy". He opened up China and reunited it with Hong Kong as "one country with two systems". He laid the foundation for the market economy, which lifts millions out of poverty every year.

A smart fellow indeed.

Labels: Asia, Economics