Shang You Tian Tang, Xia You Su Hang

Wednesday evening and I’ve just returned from a music session with Davide Bertolone. He is the guy with whom I’m recording songs. So far we have laid down three basic tracks for a first demo. Which I expect to be finished within a few weeks. With this demo we can form a band together and do some gigs. Tomorrow night I will also play in a local club, called Shelter where I will improvise together with a DJ and some other musicians. It will be my first improvisation concert and I totally unprepared (but how can you prepare for improvisation – I ask myself). So musically all is well …

The last two weeks have been so busy and full that I don’t really know where I should start my story. Maybe I could start with my nice trip of two weeks ago to Suzhou. This is a city about an hour from Shanghai with 6 million residents. I went to Suzhou to visit the Siemens factory on Monday morning. Next week we will visit this factory with “The New Manager”-trip. Because I’ve never been to Suzhou I decided to make into all super small ‘holiday’ with Angie. We left Shanghai on Sunday afternoon and returned to Shanghai on Monday evening. Suzhou together with Hangzhou is famous for the Chinese saying: Shang you Tian Tang, Xia you Su Hang, which means “There is a paradise in the sky, but on the world there is Suzhou and Hangzhou. And I must say Suzhou is definitely a nice town. It is famous for its beautiful classical gardens. We went to two of those, and it was really something nice and special. The first one was a little small, but almost deserted – this is something one will hardly experience in China. In was so nice, it felt to be in ancient times in such a nice garden without hundreds of people. A great difference with the noisy busy modern big city everyday life I'm used to now here.

At home the house is full with Esther staying over as our guest. Esther is working for a tv-show and makes long day – leaves the house at 7h and returns at 22h – so we hardly see here. Angie and I have now been living together now for over a month, without fights. And I think we can keep it like that. The time when I lived alone in this house seem long gone and I must say that I’m happy with that.

My work for De Baak is going quite good. The group of The New Manager will be here a little more than a week … so always many last moment details to deal with. But I am looking forward to experience it. Further found some new potential clients for the collaboration with CBC – we’re working on it, and I hope we can sell some trainings. Earning a little bit of money is never wrong. The concept for the entrepreneurship program with the Consulate is growing and growing. De Baak in the Netherlands is also into this development, so after the trip I can push this project to realization (hopefully of course, there are still enough problems that need to be solved, but the energy is good/positive). Harry Starren, my CEO, is planning a visit to Shanghai. A good thing!

So all is on a nice track… The coming two weeks will be totally packed, after that it will just be normally busy, I guess (don’t know). However, I’ll go to Thailand with Stefan for 1,5 weeks by the end of April ----- that is super great!! I feel I deserve a nice little holiday!