Americans celebrate Halloween. I don’t understand what it is about, or what one is supposed to do. Being an outsider, I was surprised to learn that the spooky American tradition is known and celebrated throughout the International community in Shanghai as well.
It’s bit different as:
- Ringing the doors of our Chinese neighbors for trick-or-treating probably isn’t appreciated.
- Costumes are hard to get by, so you have to be creative
- Commercially exploited festivals are a bit shallow anyway
Instead of going to the Barbie halloween party, or the disco parties, we watched a movie with some Pizza’s with some friends.
Our friends really put out a lot of effort, next to pizza’s, decoration and a projector, they found a very scary movie to fit the Halloween theme. We watched Paranormal Activity, a recommendation, for us inspiration to share more scary stories throughout the night. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching. After a while, we went to the Shelter (club with one of the worst air quality in Shanghai, but lot’s of people in costumes) I didn’t like the air, CNN Go reviewed as follows “Imagine your grandmother’s basement three months after a summer flood. Now triple that. And throw in a dead pet.”Kuche Kuche.
Happy halloween everybody!
Taobao, the internet shopping portal for B2B e-commerce group Alibaba has announced that they will launch a short message-based price comparison service.
This weekend we made a small trip of 180km out of Shanghai to see the West lake in Hangzhou China, with 6.5 million people not a small town, but due to the beautiful scenery of the lake and the hillside, it’s a favorite destination for many Shanghainese. For me, it was a trip down memory lane, because I had been there for a few weeks during my first stay in China, ten years ago.
I’ve got a special vistior from the Netherlands over this week. Giel Talsma is a former neighbor of mine and we’ve known each other for over ten years. I ran into him when I 
Previously, Google signed a contact with China’s biggest carrier to gain footprint in China, however, their number one competitor in this nation signed a deal that will add their search pre-installed on many of the next generation phones, starting with a side-by-side display on the 
The pre-installed services will include internet search, music store and message forum and will be put on 3G handsets, including iPhone from China Unicom. For China Telecom, services are also embedded, but Google signed the search and application search on those particular phones. While the market is preparing, competition seems to be getting fierce, can Google stand a chance being side-by-side a local competitor? 
We all know there are plenty of games on Facebook, 
Regina Walton
George Godula
Lucas Englehardt
Dr Mathew McDougall
Marc van der Chijs
Masaru Ikeda
Suna Cho
Jaideep Khanduja
Jasmine Ji 
Interesting discussion on the latest 
When people enquire about typical Dutch cuisine, the first thing that pops to my mind is the “potato eaters” painting by Vincent Van Gogh. To me, this ‘cozy setting’ visualizes how Dutch peasants have been eating potato’s every day for at least 400 years, in a typical Dutch way. Besides the painting, I was raised eating potato’s almost every day – thankfully in a much brighter environment – and growing up on a small farm, I still remember being occupied with bare-hand potato harvesting for a number of seasons as a kid. It stuck to me that this is typical Dutch lifestyle and cuisine.
I bet that we can expect heaps of great Korean developed games and apps from Korea from 2010. The iPhone is will be introduced in South Korea in November. While South Korea is arguably miles ahead in tech, the iPhone has been absent from store shelves ever since its first launch in 2007. Web companies are preparing for the introduction of the iPhone and the Apple store. Today, South Korean search portal 
It all started when a news agency Xinhua reported (made up) the existence of a city in the northern Swedish woods with 25,000 inhabitants, all hot women living together to satisfy their Scandinavian sexual desires. The city, called Chako Paul was founded in 1820 by a rich widow and is guarded by two blonde guards that will strike men down that try to enter the city of Nordic lesbian love.
Today, almost all Chinese have a day off to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Just like most Shanghainese, we stayed indoor to watch the parade on tv. 
Last week, the entire 
While walking around Shanghai last weekend, we came across the most particular scene at the People’s Park. Hundreds of elders had gathered and were having a market like situation where a few were adverting something and others were inquiring.
With the whole Seoul 
One of the nice things of living in China is to witness the feel-good energy that (most) people receive from the tremendous growth the country is going through. Development can be turbulent, but I am receiving a lot of smiles on the street as well. I was talking with a 60 year old Chinese woman in a plane from Beijing, and she was so excited to fly for the first time that it made me smile. There was sheer joy and even a little cheer throughout the plane when we took off, as if we were in a fun park ride. It made me happy as well.
I have experienced some Chinese culture, one of the things that made me interested in the country were the fireworks. In The Netherlands, we can only light fireworks for a number of hours per year, during new years eve. From the age of six, I used to spend every new years eve with my Chinese friends (in a small town Chinese restaurant) to celebrate the new year and to play with authentic Chinese fireworks.
I have seen some interesting food in Asia over the years. Most interesting dishes were definitely in China. I don’t want to bother you with the cliché backpack-like stories that hit the blogosphere daily, because eating culture is indeed different here, nothing new, I know.
I came across an interesting article on the website of the Korean Embassy in the Netherlands. Apparently, a tribe based in Bauer Indonesia has chosen to use Hangeul (Korean writing) as its official writing system.
Imagine sitting at the gate, waiting for your plane from Amsterdam to Shanghai to arrive and you hear your name announced over the speakers. This happened to me yesterday. 
I was stroling around Pudong yesterday and got annoyed by the amount of leaflets that were handed out to me. Instead of the expected massage or rolex offers, they turned out to be compound brochures. While housing prices in my home country have gone south, 
I aimed to have fun, and accelerate my pace at the end of the race. It worked, I finished at 1 hour and 44 minutes, my new (and first) record. As you can see on the graph, the start of the race I slowed down, mainly due to the vast amount of people running before me on the street, creating a funnel effect. Later, I could accelerate due to the latitude and goal in sight. I raised 1.286.714 KRW for Unicef in total we raised a stunning 6 million KRW. I’d like to thank all my 29 sponsors, (I know who you are!) for your support, it was a great motivation to keep on running!
Don’t be fooled by these buildings, the whole area is full with artsy shaped casino’s. Macau was both the first and the last European colony in China. In 2006, gambling revenues from Macau’s casinos were for the first time greater than those of Las Vegas Strip (each about $6 billion), making Macau the highest-volume gambling centre in the world. We lost track of time as well, amazing place to be!
The Korean government sends text messages to all mobile phones every once in a while. This way of informing the nation is new to me and proves to be rather effective. Sometimes it’s a simple request, asking to clean your porch from snow, but today I received a warning. “Tomorrow the yellow dust from China will reach Korea”. I wondered, what is yellow dust?
RTL Interactive, the Internet brance of the RTL Group (German) announced their 100% takeover of 
I haven’t participated in a sport event ever since the 