Chinese wine

It still takes a bit of searching to find the righ groceries around here. When it comes to Chinese food, Shiqi has of course no problem to find the things she likes. It's the good western food which is not easy to find sometimes. Today, I must have drunk the worst wine of my life. As an experiment, we bought a Chinese brand (Grand Dragon), which in fact is a so called 'China Top Brand'. Sadly though, the taste was appalling. We'd probably better stick to the imported wine selection of the Metro. The Chilean wines there are not bad, and quite affordable as well.

Chinese English names

In China, many people have a second, English, name. This name is often given by a their school teacher or by themselves. It is interesting and sometimes funny to see which names are chosen. In my company there are Chinese Christians who have given themselves names of important biblical figures, and people who have chosen a name that sounds similar to their family name. Also, some colleagues took the opportunity to call themselves after a famous. And of course, many just chose a name they liked for no particular reason. Actually, I always felt a bit awkward about these English names; the only real name you have is the one given by your parents to my opinion. But besides that, so far so good, no problem.
It becomes complicated, however, if people suddenly change their English name. Really, this happens! This week, a colleague of mine left the company, and later informed me that she had changed her English name, because the one she used in our company was only chosen out of convenience, since her previous name was too common here. Now, she changed her name back again.
I hope, this doesn't happen too often. It would make talking about people really difficult: you never know who you are talking about.

Fines online

In Fuzhou, it is very easy to find out quickly whether there are any traffic fines to be paid. You only need to surf to a web page of the fuzhou traffic police, fill out the license plate number of your car, and voila, an overview of all your tickets for speed driving, wrong parking, etc. appears.

The most interesting thing about this website, however, is that you can get this information for all cars you have the license plate number of!! I can think of a number of situations, where this information might come in handy, and not necessarily for the person. I am curious how long this service remains unchanged. I'd better not publish my license plate number on this site.

Funny signs

For most people who have visited China, it is known that it is worthwhile to pay attention to the signs and warnings, especially when an English text is displayed. I already included some pictures in a previous post .

This week, I was on a short business trip to Yangzhou, a relatively small city, not far away from Nanjing. We were visiting the production site of a supplier there. The pride of the supplier was his newly built R&D center. There, in one of the test areas, I saw this, at first site rather disturbing sign. Until a colleague translated the Chinese text for me: "Please turn on the fan during testing".

Advent in Fuzhou

Yesterday, on 1 December, the Shangrila hotel in Fuzhou started the advent period with a small celebration. Being the best hotel in town, with good western food, the Shangrila is one of the favourite hangouts for foreigners in Fuzhou. Also most of my colleagues are regular guests of the dining facilities in the Shangrila, so they all went there to join the event. And as we are still in the phase during which we have to try everything Fuzhou has to offer, we also went.

The lobby of the grand hotel was decorated beautifully, with a gigantic snow man (most have been at least five meters tall), and lots of other Christmas decoration. There was a choir that sing Christmas songs, hors d'oeuvres to eat, and philippino girls who took over the singing from the choir after a few minutes. Fuzhou TV was invited as well, of course, to guarantee the necessary publicity. All in all, a nicely orgnised event. But not the one for us, because with Mylène and no place to sit down for a while, it was a bit inconvenient.

Mylène did get to meet Santa Claus. But it was not a happy encounter for her; Mylène was afraid and started crying when Santa came too close. What she did enjoy was the abundance of attention from the Chinese guests. So in the end, Mylène did have a good time.