Nowaday there are so many social network that one could be member of: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MSN Space, etc. Being in mainland China, Facebook and Twitter are not accessible, and I’m not going to make huge effort to cross the wall to access them, not worth the trouble. I’m now online mostly on the Chinese microblogging site weibo.com (新浪微博) under the alias of @CK桑. You’re very welcomed to follow me if you happen to be on there and can read Chinese as well. I will check my 4 email accounts on a daily basis, chekim.com, Hotmail, Gmail; and my work email too; long with cell phone and SMS, all that should keep be very well connected to the virtual world.

I do see some comments on some of my posts here, it’s all well appreciated. I wish you all a happy life and wonderful time with your family!

CK

See the Autumn @ Lujiazui album here.

Here’s the live picture on the National Geographic site, and a screen shot of it.

The chosen photo appears here in my own album.

As someone who has seen Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Japan, I thought I’ve seen it all in Asia, until I landed at Kathmandu… The landscape, mountain, people’s appearance and attire, food, language, monument, temple, religious symbol, daily life scene, everything seem so remote and different but yet we’re just across the Chinese border! There’s no lack of strangeness to see everyday in every corner of Nepal. But, after a while all the mountains look alike, all the temples seem like the same, all the food and menu seem like coming from one source, except one thing that always caught us in surprise is what we see on the road, especially when going long distance. Some of the toilets on our way must deserve a Guiness record for their… uniqueness… and diversity.

Nepal is a perfect place for taking photo. Every place and everybody are so colorful, and the nature as well. But that doesn’t beat seeing the sun rising from behind the Himalayas, inch by inch, seeing the starred dark sky turn orange then turn blue, projecting on the golden tip of the faraway range of Himalayas, seeing the fog rising from the bottom of your feet then turn into cloud, then at night seeing the moon coming out as the cloud clear their way to turn back into fog again, sleeping above the peaceful villages. Capturing that is not an easy task though, and rendering the beautiful scene on screen is even harder!  

My photo is the 5th from bottom up in this page.

The trip was actually consistent with our expectation, we knew that there’s nothing spectacular at Osaka, just an easy-going city, cheaper and less fashionable than Tokyo. It did turn out that way, eating is significantly cheaper at Osaka for the average restaurant. Shopping is sometime cheaper too. Thanks to a friend’s reference, we stayed at the very central and convenient Shinsaibashi [心斎橋] area. We could basically walk around the 3km radius and have access to everything that Osaka has to offer, between Namba and Umeda subway stations. We stayed at the Hearton hotel which is a short block away from the underground city.

We visited two touristic attractions of Osaka: the Osaka Castle Museum [大阪城] and the world-famous Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. The Osaka Castle is a typical Japanese castle style similar to the more authentic and famous Himeji Castle [姫路城]. I feel that the park surrounding it is equally interesting. We’ve been to other big aquariums before, at San Francisco and Shanghai, what is special with the Kaiyukan is its gigantic tank which is the central attraction, with two big Whale Sharks in there, and a whole lot of deep sea species that I can’t remember their names, sharks, hammerhead, stingray, etc.

Actually what we enjoyed most at Osaka is the friendly Shinsaibashi-suji shopping street. We basically live there during our entire trip duration, passing by and eating by every day and night. It strikes me to see how the young japanese girls dress despite a not-so-warm Winter time: ultra-short skirts/pants, fancy hairs, impeccable make-ups and mostly very high heel shoes. Not as sexy and fancy as Tokyo girls, but still quite a show for a tourist like me… Mary has had her own time in the numerous drug stores and female accessories stores, she could literally spend a day in each one of them! That was it for Osaka.

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed by the grayish-ness of Kyoto. We took JR train to Kyoto and only spent half a day there, visiting 3 temples: the iconic golden pavilion Kinkaku-ji Temple [金閣寺], the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine [北野天満宮], and the impressive Kiyomizu Temple [清水寺]. Other than that we also had an okonomi yaki for lunch, which is a kind of DIY japanese pizza… it is just funny to try but doesn’t really taste anything special.

Moving around in Kyoto is just inconvenient, I heard people walking around Kyoto but I feel that it’s too far away between each interesting temple/shrine to make that attempt. We took the daily bus fare (very limited subway coverage there), visited North and East of Kyoto. There’s nothing in between, not even young people to see… We were lucky  not having to stay there at night and to endure boredom. I’m sure that my half day trip is not making justice to such a famous and glorious city, I’m giving myself a goal to return to Kyoto again during the sakura blossom season, with more time to visit it, and maybe have a more comprehensive plan…

That’s it for this trip, we didn’t plan so much, just went spontaneously and sniffed around. It wasn’t bad, we’ll return again in the future.

Click here to see the entire Osaka and Kyoto albums, and the portrait album.

Overreaching is a deadly sin for any empire in human history, starting with the Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the Mongol empire, the Ottoman empire, the Spanish empire, the British empire, the Napolean empire, the Russian empire, and now the American empire with its 800 military bases around the world. In most cases the empire’s military and financial strength was not challenged by any external entity, but it ended up collapsing on its own weight.

A half-million army strong, all highly educated of various technical qualifications, healthy and energetic, disciplined and patriotic, creative and determined; sent to a far away desert to fight for the empire’s desire to dominate a region where it is admittedly unpopular and unwelcomed. Behind this half-million army there is a colossal crew of highly skilled (and well paid) support personels and private contractors of all sort, working at home and abroad, to handle the logistic of a remote war. It is estimated that for every soldier sent to the war zone there are two support personels behind him, so we’re talking of effectively one million additional head counts of highly skilled and well paid workers just for this war!

Just imagine for a moment, rather than being the most efficient killing machine of all time, if we could deploy this 1.5 million active people (roughly the size of a nordic country) to create value for America, such as building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and industries, how that would have been better? Imagine if deploying them to research on curing diseases instead of deadly explosive chemistry, research on green technology instead of blowing up the world, create high-tech gadget instead of high-tech weapon, give a hand to civilians instead of pointing guns at them? Not only America could greatly benefit from them to remain the world superpower for another century, the world could also benefit from a prosperous America!

Instead of spending over $3 trillions on the war on terror, if that could be spent on creating value to humanity, these people could stay in their country, with their families, and build a much stronger country. Wasn’t that the purpose of fighting terrorism anyway? Why is every empire so eager to “make” an enemy of its own and fighting that so relentlessly to a point of self-destruction?

Unfortunately, the empire is sticking on its own agenda………………………………………………………….

After some missed shots for Xinjiang and Xi’an, the team finally decided to go to Xiapu during November. We were lucky, the fast train from Shanghai to Xiapu (2 stops before Fuzhou) was opened at then end of September, it is just a convenient 5-hours train to get there directly. Xiapu is located at the North East of Fujian province, somewhere in between Wenzhou and Fuzhou. It has a long coastal line of 400km, with a large portion of sea shore protected by mountains and rocks (calm and safe), making it perfect for fishers to establish since the past thousand years.

For the last couple of years, an emerging touristic activity is photography, which attracts large number of photo enthousiasts from all around China, and still growing. Large scale of floating village, infinite seaweed field, thousands of rows of bamboo planted in sea shore, endless number of fisher boats going to high sea, crew of fishers carrying their catches to the land, colorful sand, breath-taking sunrise and sunshine, those are unique and abundant things that Xiapu has to offer to every photographer. In addition, the cost of lodging and eating at Xiapu is a fraction of what is costs in Shanghai, beside having much fresher and better selection of seafood!

The 6 of us have hired a local guide, Mr. Zhang, who is member of the association of photographers of Xiapu. He was born there and have lived all his life there, so he knows the place, the people, the weather, the view, and the timing. We wouldn’t be able to shoot any great pictures if any of the 5 elements was missing! Under his guide, we were able to witness amazing tidal effect at the sea shore, within 30 minutes, a seemingly boring place “suddenly” becomes a spectacular zebra-like oyster field; a muddy place suddenly becomes clear white as water fill up. For all of us coming from city, this was such a great show given by Mother Earth!

One last thing worth mentioning is, 2 of crew members are new to our team, Perry and Momo, because Max and Roger were not able to join us this time. It turned out we had a great time together, eating and drinking every night, playing cards and singing too. It was a memorable trip, and probably one of the cheapest I ever had. It costed us only 2000 yuan per person, for 5 days in total, all inclusive!

Click here to see the entire album.

I woke up the morning with full of excitment that I’m going to see Tiger in real person, really close, seeing him doing thing that he does best: winning a game of golf. After 3 days of competition Tiger’s cumulative score is at -12, second only to Phil Mickelson’s -14. Unfortunately Sergio Garcia is a distance -2, not sure what went wrong with him this year coz he won the cup last year at this place!

So, after a long metro transit from line 2 to line 4 to line 9, we arrived at the Sheshan metro station after 10am. We then took a taxi because we were too lazy to walk for ten minutes, which turned out to be a mistake because the golf club entrance wouldn’t allow taxi to go in, apparently traffic was a big mess around there.  So we wasted almost an hour of effort and time trying to figure out how to get to the entrance to see our friends and obtain the tickets. Finaly, we arrived on the field around 11am, completely exhausted!

Then, as every new visitor getting in, the first question is to ask around: which hole is Tiger at now? At that time he was only at the 3rd hole, there’s a huge crowd following him, along with media and bodyguards and employees of the country club. There is nothing like a normal golf course should be: ordinary grass, lousy people, people running & walking while there was clear sign to stop down, kids playing, and worst of all, the big bad bodyguards looking at spectators as if we’re trying to steal something from Tiger. It’s amazing how Tiger is the center of all attention, while leaving Phil and Sergio with just a small crowd. I’m sure they don’t mind at all…

Clearly Tiger was not in good mood, within the first 9 holes his score dropped from -12 to -9. Not only did he not make any birdies, but he was falling into bunkers repeatedly, and you can see his unhappy face from very far away.

I managed to take a few photos from far away, because the bodyguards were giving me a shit face when seeing my big lens camera. The big guy insisted that I should put my camera inside the bag, I ignored his request, but I was thinking to myself that this is not worth fighting for. I admire Tiger’s skill and reputation but he is not a role model in any way to me, I won’t sleep with his photos! So, few minutes later I packed up my camera and just watch with naked eyes.

An hour later we left the golf course to return to the city, joining our friends for a small gathering at her showroom, much more comfortable place, familiar friends, red wine, cheese, chips, etc.

Next year we won’t ask for tickets, it’s not worth all the trouble to get there and then be treated like dirt by the very people who came to collect the money that Chinese spectators and Chinese corporate sponsors were paying them. Those people don’t think that without our strong enthousiasm, they won’t be given such a generous prize! They just take for granted, because Tiger is a celebrity. Frankly, I’m very disappointed by the way this tournament is organized and run. It’s going to lose its prestige very quickly if thing doesn’t improve.

The first remarkable event happenned during the Tuesday diner at Shu Zhe Hui restaurant. We were 15 people sitting around a huge round table in a private room. The atmosphere was good, we all know each other pretty well, especially the respected DE who has been with us for a week now. At one point, she launched a challenge to all of us. Each person would say one thing (a word or short expression) that characterises leadership, then the next person had to repeat the previous words before providing his/her word, and so on.

At first I worried that we would not find enough words by the time we finish half the table, but then it just went on and on. Eventually everybody had found at least one thing to say about leadership, and there were still words that we hadn’t use. So, here’s what we said about what a leader should have or should be:

• Influence
• Do the right thing
• Change agent
• Visionary
• Special
• Passionate
• Inspire
• Take ownership
• Lead by example
• Optimistic
• Confidence
• Mentor/coach
• Trust
• Risk taking
• Empathy
• Forgiving
• Honesty
• Perseverance

To our surprise, it takes quite a lot to be a good leader, to be a leader that is respected and sought after. And I’m sure that are obvious things that we’ve not thought of.

At Thursday and Friday, I had a classroom training on Technical Leadership Today (TLTP), given by a mature (mentally) and passionate instructor. He skipped most of the official content to focus on the most important material, which I found truely impressive because he mastered the content very well, and tailored it based on the duration of the class and the level of the students. Beside the important lessons that we learned from his experience sharing and the interesting stories shared by classmates, I was really enlightened by two statements from the instructor:

• Excellence is not an act but a habit.
  This is a quote from Aristotle that I’ve not heard before.
• Draw a horizontal line for your IQ level and a vertical line for your passion, your life achievement is the triangle surface covered by joining the horizontal and vertical line!
  In other words, your achievement depends as much on your IQ as on how much passion you have. If you only have great IQ without passion for anything, you won’t go very far in life. If you have average IQ but lots of passion for what you do, you can probably achieve much more than the high IQ guy!

The first statement is logical to me, but hearing it in such a short straightforward sentence make it really strong. The second statement is new to me, I always felt that my IQ is just average so I can’t achieve anything great, but with this enlightening concept inspires and encourages me a great deal, now I know that passion can overcome some of my IQ limite. Yeah! 

Once again, we booked our trip on ctrip.com, upgraded to a better located hotel right on Xi Dan street [西单街] where all the major shopping malls are found, and just 1 subway station from the Imperial Palace [故宫]. It was really worth the minor cost addition for all the comfort and time saving everyday after the guide tour is over. We had guided tour up to 5pm everyday, sometime earlier, so we had plenty of time to walk around the busy street, actually my mom has done quite some shopping there on her own, while I was skimming through my email inbox. To my surprise, I prefer to walk among the local “cheap shop” rather than the western-look modern malls, because those are all alike everywhere you go, they have the same recognized brands and same products everywhere, nothing special.

What I was mostly pleased with during this trip is the gorgeous clear blue sky, with a bit of pure white cloud hanging around, everyday. Sometime I felt like, staring at the blue sky is already worth the trip, or maybe I left Canada too long time to badly miss a clear sky. Also the weather was dry, around 28C, it was simply the perfect time to travel. I couldn’t ask anything more on this.

I was very pleased to see the great renovation being done on the major touristic attractions, such as the Imperial Palace, the Tian Tan Park [天坛公园], the National Theater [国家大剧院], etc. Photographying those sites was a pure pleasure, plus the good weather in the background, all the sites were at their best appeal in front of my camera! We were in small group, mostly just 4 people (including us) plus the guide. So we had plenty of time to talk and ask questions on the historical relics. Our time was flexible when I need to stop down a minute to take a shot, or waiting for people to clear out.

That was for the old Beijing attractions. The new Olympic attractions are the Bird Nest [鸟巢国家体育场] and Water Cube [水立方国家游泳馆]. I went there to shoot night scene on my own, and was really lucky to have found an excellent spot to shoot the Birt Nest. That photo alone was worth all the troubles and sweat. Unfortunately the Water Cube was not so nice to look at close, nor photographying, because it’s too flat with a messy surrounding, there’s no way to get a clear shot of that building.

To summarize, this trip has totally changed my perception of the capital. The warm reception of my special colleague (Cool) during Saturday night also helped this cause. Enough is to say, last time when I came, I almost swear that I’d never come to live in the capital. But after this time, I feel like I can take this very well, not only that, I’m considering maybe give it a try soon, whenever an opportunity shows up. Just to remind myself again, never say never…

Click here to see the entire album.

With that, I thought I would simply pack up and follow the crew and just take photos on the road. Then the next day Desmond asked me to review the plan and give feedbacks to Sandra, coz no one else is gonna do it… I said to myself, ooops, have to do homework after all. So I took a good look at various websites, including Wikipedia, Google map, visitscotland.com, etc. Three days later I had a rough idea of what I’d like to cover in this 7 days trip. So I responded with a proposition to cover a larger area of Scotland, from Edinburgh to St-Andrews to Pitlochry to Banffshire to isle of Skye to Inverness. The good thing about doing the homework is that I didn’t feel lost on the road coz I had some idea about the Scotland geography.

After about a dozen of plan adjustments over 3 weeks, we basically settled down on all aspects of the trip, including itinerary, golf courses, restaurants (for Desmond’s birthday) and B&B, with reservation and everything. In parallel, Henry did much of his part in updating GPS, register the destination addresses and reserve the car for the crew. Graham promised to bring us some unbreakable rain gear as weather forecast was pretty dim.

As we approached the 2^nd July we were all feeling more and more excited to go, while I was just returned from another trip to Shan Xi 4 days ago with colleagues. At the time we had to leave for the airport, Desmond had a business diner that last until the very last moment, then there was unexpected road construction on our way to the airport, traffic was stuck at 9:30pm after the bridge, for a moment we thought seriously that we might miss our flight and call the trip off… Luckily we arrived at the Pudong airport exactly one hour earlier (instead of 2.5hrs as demand) at the check-in counter, no problem, we were in, for sure! Luggages checked in, golf bags checked in, calm was restored among us.

A dozen hours later, fully packed in the KLM budget flight with kids in front and behind our row, we arrived at the Edinburgh airport in relatively good shape despite our inability to get a cup of coffee at the Shiphol airport at Amsterdam because of the very early hour of our flight transfer. Few minutes later we were able to meet Henry in the aiport as it is a quite small place. We had a quick breakfast and a pint of ale while waiting for Graham to arrive two hours later. Beside Graham’s delayed golf bag, everything seems to be aligned for a great trip to get start.

Summer at Scotland could easily be summarized as one word: green! There is greenery everywhere we were, the mountain, the pasture, the highland and the golf course. For this tiny country there are over 500 golf courses, which is more than what the entire China has today! Obviously there is a deeply rooted culture of golfing at Scotland tracing back to 500 years ago, which was first played somewhere around the Old Course that we visited immediately at our arrival at St-Andrews.

Click here to see the entire album.

St-Andrews is a small town, but a well polished one that makes visitors feel comfortable and welcomed. For a crew accustomed to megacities, St-Andrews is a nice peaceful retreat that suddenly wash away the work stress. We really enjoyed taking a walk on the Old Course fairway, with the imposing club house in the front view, the blue sea and blue sky as a large canvas. The grass of golf courses at Scotland are the greenest I’ve ever seen so far, the purest and best maintained as far as I can tell.

A dish of fish & chips and a pint of ale after a game of golf is the best fast food money can buy, and relatively healthy too. I truely admire and enjoy the respect of Scottish toward golf, as a sport, as a social activity, and as tourist attraction. It was really exciting but also so relaxing to play golf in such beautiful surrounding with such amazing golf buddies. We all have different background and specialties, but we speak many common languages and have many common interests such as golf, photo, traveling, food and wine. Though all of them have developped a great degree of addiction to whiskey, I haven’t really gotten into that yet, still trying to remember the very few whiskey names during our tasting session. But at least, we all bought a bottle of 30-year Talisker at isle of Skye, signed by all of us and sealed for “very special occasion”. The default delay is to open a bottle every three years, unless that “special condition” happens before the target date.

As we were having great weather everyday, with sunlight from 5am to 11pm, we couldn’t resist playing golf everyday. Within 7 days we played 4 games of 18 hole and 2 games of 9 hole, at the 7^th day my middle finger of right hand really hurt that I refuse to play, that’s why we had a chance to visit Edinburgh after Henry and Graham left for London earlier the morning.

Our actual itinerary was like this:

Day 1: St-Andrews, golf at Jubilee’s

big diner for Desmond’s birthday

Day 2: St-Andrews, golf at Duke’s, got my first birdie there, hole 6 par 5, yee!!!

big diner for Henry’s upcoming birthday, and for my birdie

Day 3: golf at Duke’s again, couldn’t resist playing 9 hole while driving there to pick up my 7 iron, but terrible score…

Pitlochry, walk at pasture and the beautiful Pitlochry golf course

Day 4: driving on the road to Skye, breath-taking view of Scotland raw landscape

took the ferry at Mallaig, visited the golf course at Mallaig

arrived at Skaebost B&B, played 9 hole (too many mosquito…)

took crazy photos at night

Day 5: visited Dunvegan castle

visited Talisker distillery at Skye, had great oysters and mussels

driving back to Pitlochry, raining heavily

arrive late, golf at Aberfeldy until 10pm!

have Chinese fast food as diner…

Day 6: golf at Gleneagles, horrible score but beautiful course…

stay at B&B near Edinburgh airport, had diner in Indian restaurant

Day 7: drop Henry and Graham at airport early morning

visited old town of Edinburgh until noon

return car and left Scotland in a fully packed KLM flight, again.

This trip was memorable in many ways. We were all guys, had many common interests, enjoyed every activity that we did, had great conversation, had unexpectedly great weather everyday and had a smooth itinerary in overall. If I had to choose something to complain, it’d be that my golf score wasn’t good enough, but honestly I never expected it to be good in short term anyway…

At the end, we had some good discussion about the next destination, but there’re simply too many places that we’d like to go, together or separately, that make such conversation an infinite day dreaming chat. Actually I’d rather think of one spontaneously and just do it, rather than planning long time ahead!

To be honest I didn’t expect a lot from Shanxi, not hearing anything nice from there ever. The only thing people keep saying about Shanxi is the mines, the miners and the boss of the miners [煤老板] who are insanely rich and dumb. In fact I didn’t even know the capital of Shanxi until I have the flight ticket in hands.

What I read in magazine is that Shanxi is a living museum of the Tang [唐朝] and Song [宋朝] dynasties, which are two of the most prosperous dynasties in China history. Unfortunately at the end of Song dynasty is hundred years of long lasting war with the various northern tribes, until it was entirely taken over by the Yuan dynasty [元朝]. That pretty much ended Shanxi’s famed period.

What is left of Shanxi today is a poor province with only one type of natural resource as revenu, coal mine. Not much else as economy, not much agriculture, no trade, no port, no hub. They might be able to count on touristic industry but transportation isn’t fully developped yet based on my observation.

Anyway, pessimistic as I am, we did have a great trip with all those guys. We took lots of photos, had fun in hotel room (that was memorable), and saw amazing historical heritage of ancian time. For 4 days short trip I feel that we’ve gotten much more than what’s worth. On the bus returning to airport at last day, we even had a karaoke and sung for 3 hours, for free!

You can see the entire album here.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the CIO/CTO in the list are working for american companies (these are american magazines after all), the usual recipients are from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Fedex, UPS, JPMorgan, Prudential, NASDAQ, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Shell, 3M, Xerox, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, etc, etc. Those are the world wide recognized innovative companies where their CIO excel in transforming business practices and processes by leveraging cutting edge information technologies. That is what I’m used to read for the past decade and a half, until now…

In the latest Global CIO 50 survey of InformationWeek, I was extremely surprised and delighted to see that there are 7 Chinese CIO in the list, I don’t remember seeing that many in any previous list. Seven mainland Chineses companies have made it into the list of Global CIO 50, that is something worth celebrating, let me explain…

The 7 CIO are:

First of all, the fact Chinese companies show up in the list of an american mainstream IT publication is quite significant to me. Many Chinese companies have been listed on NASDAQ for years without showing up on the radar of the average american investors. Now with globalisation a fact of life in every major industry, some well managed and innovative Chinese companies are having exposure on the international arena, not as a “3rd-world-country-companies picking up on modern technologies” headline, but as an equal peer with the very best of the world like Boeing and Rolls-Royce and IBM! This is one giant step toward the day where people don’t just think of the lead paint in toys and milk scandal when they think about Chinese companies.

Secondly, the fact that some Chinese companies can stand on this list will bring more attention to other companies that might have similar spectacular achievement to be recognized and learned from. Just imagine the gargantuan size of the Bank of China, ICBC, China Telecom, Chinese health care system, social security system, etc. Running those organizations’ IT department certainly have many challenges of their own that no other peer companies in the world could imagine and handle.

More over, these Chinese CIO not only use IT to support the business operation, but they manage to squeeze much competitive advantages out of it. I’m sure many other CIO are doing that too, this is just the beginning of a phase where Chinese companies are forced to become competitive globally to survive, forced to evolve and innovate continuously, just as their counterparts in the West.

I think that, by treating Chinese innovative companies as equal of organizations in the developed world, we can encourage them to try harder to bring their IT usage and infrastructure inline with the developed world, and that means that IBM will have a huge opportunity to capitalize on such movement, and so do I!

You can download the report in PDF here.

Summer is officially here, since yesterday! All the sudden temperature rises to higher than 30°C, Sun light is stronger than ever. The major sites in Shanghai, such as People’s Square and Lujiazhui, have been throughoutly decorated, probably for the Spring and Summer, but most likely as preparation for the Expo 2010 that is only 358 days away from us. Subway TV is showing hourly promotional ads to prepare the citizens’ mind for welcoming people from litterally all around the world. Street signs are being re-translated for proper and standardized English. I once saw a huge billboard on Xietu road showing the Expo pavillion mock ups of many countries, one of them being spelled as Switch, instead of Swiss! Not that people won’t be able to guess it, but if someone could just check the dictionary once this kind of stupid mistakes could be avoided.

It seems to me that today’s People’s Square look more beautiful than last time I visited at Winter, and much better than during 2004. With such wonderful colorful flowers and clear blue sky, I have to say that, it’s easy to get lost on the streets and keep shooting and shooting until my head is burned by the Sun.

Besides flowers popping up from the grown, love couples also popup from their nest for wedding photo shots, en masse! Everytime I see them being posed and photographed on street for the entire day, I couldn’t imagine myself doing that one day, I just can’t stand it…

Anyway, it’ll be fun to hang out at Shanghai this time next year. Click here to see the whole album.

To avoid missing any golden opportunity, I brought my big camera bag, with both the 24-70mm and 70-200mm lens. I can feel the trouble that I was causing to people’s circulating around me. Everytime I tried to get into a crowd to shoot a model, I was continuously pushed and blocked by visitors extremely eager to shoot every single model they see on their way. I manage, painfully and unthoughtfully, to take more than 200 shots of mostly female models and a handful of car shots. Actually I didn’t see any truely impressive car during the day, or maybe the dense crowd has prevented me from focusing on car details, all that I could easily spot was pretty models, and they were more than 200 of them around, popping up here and there as we visited the 9 sections.

Beside the pretty models, all in high heels and long legs, there were plenty of local Chinese car brands that I’ve never seen on street before. Car design aside, those brands seem so anonymous that I couldn’t remember any one of them as soon as I turned my head around. I think the majority of those local brands were simply copycat of something European or American or Japanese. The most extravagenza of them being a copycat of Rolls Royce, the brand is something ending with GE, which is ironically similar to the short name of General Electrics! Believe me, the car does look like a Rolls Royce if you don’t look at the details! I think more than half of these brands should merge into something more meaningful and trustworthy to the local buyers. With such a mushrooming of small unknown car builders, the local consumers are confused and would prefer to stick with the well known international brands, at least they have the confidence that the car is more reliable on the road. The automobile industry should not make the stupid mistake of the plasma TV industry that have killed profitability and innovation because of too many generic products flooded on the market without clear competitiveness and distinctive elements.

Though it was fun to see so many car and models, I’m hoping that the Shanghai auto exhibition organizer will one day find its raison d’etre, its unique characteristics, and drive innovation around those areas. Like the Frankfurt auto exhibition is known for concept cars, Tokyo is known for small electric cars, Detroit is known for big car show, etc. Shanghai should find its place or it will risk being a female models cat walk instead of car exhibition in the long run!

Click here to see the whole album.

With the rise of its reputation across China, the many scenic areas within Wuyuan have gotten together to create a multi-sites pass that costs 180 rmb, linking 12 sites in total. If you go to any of these sites, you have to buy the combo ticket, but you can use it for 5 days as many times as you want. To make sure you don’t resell this to another individual during the valid period, they record your fingerprint in the card during first use, and subsequent uses must be authorized by the same fingerprint. Smart, but potentially troublesome, and I suppose this doesn’t come cheap in equipment and maintenance. I just wonder how much more money are the site owners making in using such system… or maybe the money just go to the county touristic department first and they redistributed to the site owners, in which case I doubt they would receive their full entitlement…….

Well, the first 2 days were cloudy, as typical in the Jiangxi and Anhui provinces. The 3rd day was absolutely blue sky and great weather. During this trip I did see much more of Wuyuan, so much that I felt the villages were repetitive and basically indistinguishable in photos. With the convenience of a car, we drove back and forth among the 3 observation decks of the Jiangling [江岭] scenic area 3 times during the morning. We actually stayed one night on top of the mountain, allowing us to be at the observation deck very early the next morning (7am). But then we realized that people were much more crazy then us, they were there way before we woke up! When we got there, people were already filled up the place with tripods and long lens. Once again, the cloud was thick, sky was blue, what a wonderful world I told myself! Seeing a small village on the mountain dipped in the cloud, I couldn’t stop pressing the camera shutter, on and on and on.

Trying to capture different aspect of Wuyuan this time, I was pleasantly surprised by the Yue Liang Wan [月亮湾] scenic area. We were not aware of this place when we drove cross a crowd of more than 50 amateur photographers lining up beside the river. We decided to pull off and joined the crew, spent more than an hour of truely enjoyable shooting time. It was a really nice discover for me. I feel that I did shoot many different views of Wuyuan this time compared to last year, and I felt more comfortable in shooting with the new camera now. I feel that my framing skills have improved during this year too.

Click here to see the whole album.

The road from Quzhou to the Sanqingshan scenic area isn’t far, about 100km only, but serpented around a few mountains and getting there by the rainy dark night wasn’t exactly relaxing, but we got there safely and on schedule, despite my first time driving in China! We stayed at a hotel just underneath the cable-car entrance, so we were able to get there very easily and early at the next morning.

The cable-car took us to the middle height of the mountain, it was a thick foggy day. Then we started climbing the stair, which is neatly built and maintained, making the matter much easier than I’ve expected. I brought a tripod and big lens (70-200mm F/2.8L IS) beside my regular camera 5D Mark II and the 24-70mm F/2.8L lens. I’m glad to have two healthy colleagues with me to carry the extra equipment in rotation. An hour later we were able to get to the point of pretty scenic view but the omnipresent thick fog simply hide everything of 50m away from us!

Following the excellent open walk way like a long balcony literally hung at the middle of the mountain, we walked and walked and walked, then suddenly the fog cleared away, showing the tip of a far away mountain. By the time I took the camera out of the bag and powered it on, the fog had already gotten off half of the mountain, fabulous and astounding are just too mild to describe the feeling of seeing such wonderful natural view, and such “fog play” at such amazing speed. After about 5 shots the fog started to cover up the mountain again, and before I had time to find another angle (or get away from the tourists who insisted to be shot together with the view) the fog had already covered up the mountain entirely, then we were back to the same thick white view everywhere again…

Walking another 15 minutes we got another “fog play” at another place, we learned to be very quick and decisive. No more waste of time framing and adjusting camera settings, just clack click clack and move on to another angle! We got about 2 hours of luck that day. After that it started to rain badly, and we were hungry, and tired, and legs hurt, wet, geez, it was truely painful by moments… But whenever the fog cleared out and show some mountain, we instantly forgot about the pain and immediately got into action.

In overall, it was a truely memorable day seeing such wonder of this land, it reminds us of how this world is filled with little wonders in every corner of Earth to be discovered.

Click here to see the whole album.

The few days that we were at Lijiang and surrounding, the general impression is that it’s a pretty neat town with good weather, albeit very variable from minutes to minutes, good air quality and nice view everywhere. We mostly stayed within the Lijiang Dayan old town [大研古城] and also visited Suhe old town [速河古镇]. We didn’t spend any time in the normal Lijiang city. With its strong reputation inside and outside of China, it’s no wonder that the consumption price is very high in the old towns, almost comparable to prices at Shanghai!

As part of our package, we visited the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain [玉龙雪山], watched an outdoor show there, and also went to several touristic attractions surrounding the mountain. This mountain is considered a sacred mountain by the Naxi ethnic. Geologists also praise this mountain for being this and that, but as a simple person coming from Montreal and having seen many ordinary sky snow mountains there, I didn’t get any excited when seeing it for the first time, neither for the last time… Admittedly, the surrounding of this mountain is pretty because of large open green fields, but the mountain itself is yet to impress my girlfriend and I. We thought it is a must-see due to its reputation but would not pay for seeing it another time.

Out initial plan was to visit Shangri-La during 2 days. Driving distance from Lijiang to Shangri-La is only roughly 200km, but it took us almost 5 hours to get there because we had to cross many mountains. At half heigh of the Haba snow moutain there was snow all over the place. By then we knew that the place was hit by a week-long snow storm. Poor us going all the way there to escape the coldness of Shanghai, but finally hit but the worst snow storm of 2009! We stayed the night at the hotel at Shangri-La, sufferred from high altitude reaction, lack of appropriate clothes/shoes, bored to dead in the hotel room, then early morning next day we were brought back to Lijiang because all the touristic attractions at Shangri-La were not accessible. They were worried that the road back to Lijiang might be blocked if we didn’t leave quickly enough. That was out encounter with this famous place that was once called Zongdian county [中甸县] then renamed to Shangri-La at 2002 to attract tourists from all around the world!

Overall, we did enjoy the time at Lijiang, but everything else was not exactly exciting, considering the high price that we paid to go there even though it was considered low season. Given another chance, we would not choose to go there are that season, but rather at June as we were constantly being told by the locals. Now we know, and will remember forever, that Yunnan is far from being green at all seasons. That only happens at Kunming and part of south of Yunnan!

See the whole Lijiang album, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain album and Shangri-La albums.

We flew from Shanghai to Xiamen [厦门], spent a night at Gulangyu [鼓浪屿] which is a touristic island annexed to the south east sea of Xiamen. Although weather was excellent that day, it is still a Winter day and people were walking at the beach with Winter coat on, so there’s nothing sexy worth mentioning here. Small island with lots of tourists, sea wind, cold beach, salty smell, that’s about it!

The next day we drove west to the mountain side of Fujian where most Tulou are located. Over the next 3 days we hoped from one to another Tulou all over the places. We saw round, square, large, small, new, old, solid, collapsing, semi-finished, at any shapes of Tulou that could possibly exist. Not that we’ve gone through the 3,000+ Fujian Tulou, but we’ve been through two dozens of them, and passed through hundreds of them on the road. So much that at the end of the trip, we were no longer excited to see one, and we could judge by the outside surrounding whether it’s worth stopping down and go in visiting.

Though mentally tired we were, the large Tulou are spectacular to see, outside and inside. What’s truely amazing is that, despite so much dramatic changes occurring over the last thousand years, there are still more than 20,000 Tulou in active use today at Fujian and surrounding! Many of those were built during modern time. Although today’s Shanghai is so different than 20 years ago, the people living in tulou have barely seen any major changes in their life over the past century. There are many old people over 80 years old (mostly females) living in tulou, I wonder in their eyes what was the most dramatic change between today and 1920…

Click here to see the whole album.

I do have dream of course, but it’s always the same one year over year. It’s the universal dream of improving my life situation, which includes career, finance, life style, knowledge and family, without any particular order. For 2009 I think career and finance are priority, not that the rest are not important but one must have a relatively narrow goal in order to focus effort on it.

My choice of relocating to Shanghai at 2007 remains a good one despite all the events of the past years, and as far as I can see, will remain a good choice for my personal and career growth. I just hope that my family at Canada have a peaceful time so that I won’t have to worry about them, which is — thanks God — so far so good. Without any doubt, I want to settle down at Shanghai as my permanent location from now on, if everything goes as expected.

As I grow older, I realize that every gain in life comes from persistence, perseverance and determination. To earn love and care from someone, you have to consistently, day after day, offer love and take care of that person. To earn trust and intimacy with friends, you have to consistently keep up the promises and spend quality time with them, day after day. To make career advancement, you have to consistently keep up the good work, go beyond your responsibilities,  continuously learn and share your knowledge, be patient, open and tolerant, day after day. To earn good health, you have to consistently keep a good regime of diet, balance work and life, day after day. There’s no easy gain in life, only some people do it painfully while others just do it naturally not feeling any pain at all.

The ox year is such a natural symbol of perseverance, giving without complaning. There couldn’t be a better zodiac sign for this recovering year. Be persistent in your daily life doing good things, persevere when facing challenges, and be firm and determine toward your long term goal. I’m talking to myself of course!

These photos were taking at my residence building and Jing’an Temple. Click to see the album Capturing 2009 Spring Festival at F/1.4.

Click here to see the whole album.

• By 2010, India will surpass Japan in purchasing power parity
• By 2020, China will surpass the U.S. in purchasing power parity
• By 2041, India’s economy will be twice as big as Japan’s
• By 2041, China will become the world’s largest economy
• Asians comprise only 5% of the U.S population, but …
  • 15% of the PhDs in engineering
  • 13% of PhDs in computer science
  • 13.3% of BS degrees in engineering
• 2002: Asian-Americans owned 27% of all minority-owned business in U.S. (1.1 million businesses, 49% of the total gross receipts, 46% of MBE employees)
• 2006: Median Asian-American household income over $64,200 (14K higher than any other race group)
• 1990 – 2011: Asian-American purchasing power will grow 434%

Based on these predictions from UN, I really feel good to have moved to Shanghai at this period. By the time of my retirement, Asia will be like North America, and vice-versa!

(Updated 2009/1/23) Oh! I forgot to mention about Canada… With an aging population of roughly 1/10th of USA’s, but owning a reasonably stable huge territory, we can only imagine that every Canadian (including me) will get a bigger share of the natural resources as the population is shrinking, and therefore automatically become richer and richer (ye!). Unfortunately, all the extra wealth are being used to feed a flock of incompetent and greedy politicians, including our beautiful but useless Governor General Michaëlle Jean, a troop of losers debating about pointless ideologies and fighting for power all year long!

For all my proudness that Canada is still an important member of the G8 as well as NATO, I can only imagine that, by the middle of the century, Canada’s role in world will be as important as Spain’s role in Asia… virtually nothing!

While the world has learned the concept of United We Stand long before modern history, a quarter of Canadian population, namely most of the Quebekers, have been fighting to separate this tiny population into smaller chunks, singing Divided We Win for the past four hundred years. This will lead to the inevitable loop of even greater division if they ever win their cause one day. Once all the Quebekers are grouped into one single entity (or nation as they prefer to call themselves), they will find other characteristics to divide themselves even further, such as by birth region, family name, ancestor ethnic, language accent, etc, until they finally find themselves in an entity so narrow that only one person belongs to it. And even that, they might continue to divide a single individual into something like “my body belongs to this entity, my mind belongs to that entity, but my past belongs to another entity” and so on.

For all the wonderful intellectuals that have populated Quebec for the past centuries, they should have learned that only diversity can flourish, only multi-ethnic states can last. More than 80% of the single-ethnic countries in the world will disappear within this century. This includes several small Nordic countries, and most tribes in Africa. They will disappear along with their languages, cultures, religions, heros and history. It’s so sad to see how vigourously an entire people seek such a dead end termination while they could embrace a multi-cultural continent with openness and humbleness. Vive le Québec libre!

During the weekend trip, I went to 3 places:

1. South Eastern Hundred Herbs Garden [中南百草园]
2. Tian Xia Yin Keng [天下银坑]
3. Hidden Dragon Waterfalls [藏龙百瀑].

The first place isn’t so interesting to visit, except maybe for corporate annual celebration or team building. The second place is actually quite small, but it hosts 4 movie shooting attractions. The one that interested me most is the movie site of The Banquet [夜宴]. I had to climb on a special spot to take an overview shot of that “house”, but it was worth the trouble, I’m quite happy about that.

The third place is actually nice, small mountain with waterfalls of various sizes and shapes at various height. But for someone who has seen many times the world’s biggest waterfalls, the Niagara Falls at Canada, I wouldn’t say that I was impressed by this one, at all. Once I arrived on the top, the view is actually quite interesting, a faraway green mountain chain with a small road between them. That road actually has a very fancy name, just like many touristic sites at China, it’s called Nine Dragons Street [大溪九龙街].

Overall, I was very impressed by the scale, density and omnipresence of bamboo everywhere in Anji. The bamboo are so large that I cannot encircle it with both palms together. Unfortunately many bamboo are engraved with tourist names on them, while others are marked in black pen with their date so that the farmers can cut them off eventually and sell off for making furniture or bamboo plywood. So it was not easy to take pretty photo of them…

Click here to see the full album.

The last activity was about the 3rd Imported Auto Expo at Shanghai. Free ticket was provided by IBM Club for this half day activity that turned out taking my whole day away because of the transportation unefficiency. The ticket included transportation from People’s Square to the show room located at Jiading district, not too far from the Shanghai car racing circuit that hosts the F1 and the A1GP annually. Instead of providing long distance tour bus that has more seats, they were using regular bus that has fewer seats because those bus were optimized for short distance transport and allowed more people to stand and easier to move around, but then they didn’t allow anyone to stand up, so each bus ended up carrying very few people.

3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai

The car show has nothing special to be mentioned, it’s quite small compare to any auto show, there wasn’t much fancy cars, just 2 Ferrari, 2 Maserati, a cheap Lamborghini, a pretty Jaguar, and a boring Rolls-Royce. The rest are the ordinary cars like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Cadillac, Subaru, Volkswagen, Hummer, and surprisingly Harley-Davidson which was getting quite some traffic that day! So, consequently, all my attention has been put into the car models, which looked much better than the actual cars…

3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai
3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai	3rd Imported Car Expo 2008 at Shanghai

Click here for to see the full album.

Fast forward a year and a half later, waking up at 7am every morning, arriving to the subway station right underneath my apartment buidling around 7:50, the subway is normally packed shoulder-to-shoulder, unless the next train is the 8 wagons model instead of 6, standing in the train is fine but it’s a bit hard to read anything when someone’s back almost touches your nose… Arriving at the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park station 40 minutes later, there’s a shuttle bus to carry employees to IBM office, otherwise a 15 minutes walk is as convenient too. My cubicle at the new IBM office building is quite spaceous even by modern North America standard (not the 80s’ dual occupation office room), with good meeting room facilities like network, wireless and permanent projector almost at every corner of the office building. Going to lunch usually around 11:30 at the next building with random colleagues of various teams, the food isn’t bad, but can’t be qualified as good neither… But it cost less than 2$ bucks most of time! High-end coffee shops are mushrooming at every corner of Shanghai these days, the dominant players being US-based Starbucks and Japanese-based Coffee Beans and Tea Leaf. Such a coffee costs 3 times the price of my lunch at office, but still it’s constantly full packed without any empty seat during weekend!

My work day has been quite busy since April, usually spending almost the whole morning responding to emails, afternoons are always filled with 1 or 2 meetings, sometime 3, and then it’s 6:30pm before I realize it. Then Mary would message me asking the time of my arrival to home, which is usually 7:30pm these days, taking the same fully packed but fast and convenient train. Arriving home is always a moment of joy for me, undress, sit down and the diner is already on the table, hot, smell good, hungry, bingo! Can’t complaint about that!

In case you’re still wondering what TIC means by now, it’s actually an acronym coined by a friend’s german friend for This Is China. Whenever he sees something weird to his western eyes, he would say “Of course, TIC!” That actually happens to me more than few times, ranging from insignificant things like server serving red wine in a water cup entirely filled or eating birthday cake in a disposable cup with chopsticks; to ironic things like a adult-oriented night club opening in front of the city’s public policy school and selling adult sex toys exposed at most public pharmacies visibly at the entrance; to the very surprising things like gangsters proposing to people to pass the driving exam for 100$ bucks openly in front of the police station (traffic laws are under police’s juridiction), while at the exam desk a piece of paper taped on the wall saying that it’s illegal to pass exam in another person’s behalf. What can I say, TIC!

I’m glad that the Beijing Olympics games are over now, it’s been such a persistent propaganda over the past 4 years to remind citizens to behave in front of foreign visitors. I’m actually very proud of the success of this event as much as the records of Chinese athletes. With 51 gold medals and 100 total, nobody will ever doubt Chinese people’s ability in any sport from now on. But more importantly, this event has served to open up the eyes and minds of millions of westerners who have been seriously deprived of fair coverage of modern China. More than anyone else, western news outlets have been lying and covering up modern China to their readers for many decades, choosing instead to show a backward negative image of China to boost their own moral. TV reports have shown that most western foreigners were amazed by how they were warmly welcomed and served by the young Olympics volunteers and ordinary citizens. They will return to their homeland to pass the message that China is not what their corrupt news agencies try to project. There are certainly many fundamental problems remained in this country, like any other country, and we’re working very hard on improving it without actually killing everybody else outside of our border who do not buy into our vision! We do not need to bad-mouth anyone else to drive public opinion to support any policy. We do not make friend with despot and brutal dictator regimes in order to destroy common ennemies and then turn the gun back to the friends to destroy them in turn, this is called systemic betrayal and this is not a sustainable foreign policy for a superpower……..

Friends at my hometown invariably ask when I’m going to return there for good, I really don’t have an answer now, but certainly not before 2010. Life isn’t too bad here, so far. I still have plenty of things to learn and see, because This is China.