Back to Germany

After little over a week of being in China, I am now on my way back to Germany again. Shiqi already went back last Saturday, but I had to stay a few days more (to make the business trip its money's worth, I guess ;-)). Needless to say I am looking forward to seeing our Mylène again, very much. Sadly, this was only a test for what is still to come: from the beginning of October, I will have to miss my two lady's for a month or two. I am not looking forward to that.

At the moment I am writing this, I am sitting in a Hong Kong airport lounge, because the weather made that I missed my connecting flight to Frankfurt. Another typhoon is heading for the Chinese south eastern coast again. Yes ... that's characteristic for the area we are going to move to.

Apart from heavy weather every now and then, there is not that much to experience anymore on intercontinental flights. It does not matter that much any more, whether you fly to California for example or to China. So, you have to focus on details to spot the differences. On the flight from Fuzhou to Hong Kong a inflight TV program caught my attention. They were showing a top 10. "So what?" you might think; there are 1.001 top 10s on TV every day. This one was different, though. It was showing the 10 most pittyful men that were seen on the screen. Examples included Leonardo di Caprio in the movie Titanic, or Johnny Depp in the movie Edward scissor hands. As this list was approaching number 1, I almost lost interest. Until number 2 appeared. Guess who that was? No movie star! No, it was our own Marco van Basten!! Reason being the pittyful ending of his much promising career. Never expected to see him o in this top 10, on the plane, on the way from Fuzhou to Hong Kong. Number 1 of the top 10 of most pityful men, was some Japanese cartoon figure. I did not catch the point exactly why he was the number 1, but it must have had something to do with those typical big, sad, tear-filling eyes of the Japanese cartoon hero.
Anyway, I felt it was a pretty interesting top 10 after all.

Apart from that, nothing else to report from Hong Kong.
... I did kill another half hour waiting time :-)

Streets of Fuzhou

Got the chance to walk around a bit through the streets of Fuzhou's shopping area Dong Jie Kou. Beside the globally present well-known brand names, I found it remarkable how many Chinese local brand shops there are. This is good, as the prices in these shops are much lower than in those of the established names.

Another big difference to Germany is the amount of people on the streets on this regular Sunday ... not surprisingly, though. It seems that the Chinese have adopted the Dutch "koopzondag" (haha).

Here are some impressions.

First impressions of Fuzhou

During the past five days, Shiqi and I have been able to get our first impressions of our new home, the city of Fuzhou in Southeast China.
And I am glad to be able to say that this first impression has been a positive one. Of course, I already visited the city on a few business trips before. But as a future residence, you look at a city with different eyes.

We visited the house we are most likely going to live in, checked out our neighbourhood, visited kindergartens, the military hospital, some good restaurants, some shops, and met quite a few people already. Shiqi care of many "practical things" (how great it is that she talks Chinese!!) while I had the chance to spend the first few days in the office, to also get a first impression there.

I included a few pictures here.

The house











Military hospital











Kindergarten








Delicious food









More can be found here.

The house is more than big enough, and looks very nice as well ... at least from a distance. When you take a closer look, it is quite clear that the quality standard here is not as high as we are used to in Europe. This is rather symptomatic for China, to my opinion. Optics is often paid more attention to than quality. The packaging usually looks beautiful, but the details are often neglected. No doubt we are going to notice the consequences of this, when we live here. So, more about that later, I predict.

Yet, we are confident that we will be able to have quite a comfortable life here in Fuzhou. And we are looking forward to it!!