Rebuilding Shanghai for the World Expo – Help, noise everywhere!

I’m writing this form a coffee bar close to my house. I’ve escaped my house, which has been turned in to a complete chaos, since the last few days. A huge renovation in my housing block has started and will last for three months - aaaargh! The outside of the house will be done, but also inside will be the necessary changes. Next to that our nextdoor neighbors (two nice American guys) have moved. The new Chinese couple that will live there is now completly rebuilding the apartment (which makes the noise surrounding us even worse). As you can read I'm not happy with this, especially because I have been working from home mostly since I’m here. Thank god, I made some deals now with other people/organisations that I use their offices once a week – so together with the coffee bar, appointments outside I try to limit my time at home. Further Eddie is moving out (he was a great neighbor), something I start to think about moving out myself too. However all the hassle of moving houses (including finding one) also doesn’t seem very appealing to me.

Also when I’m outside the amount of construction workers seem to double each week. Every street is open, houses are renovated everywhere, subway lines are build etc. etc. I guess next year Shanghai will be totally ready to welcome the world, but it seems there are a lot of last minute changes to be made – what to do? Just hope to get used to the noise and other disturbances.

My work is going ok, but find myself to have many different projects whit no quick deadlines, so I am working on all these things the same time, and that is sometimes not easy. Further I'm looking out to create clear agreements with a company/organization with which to integrate my activities for ‘de Baak’, else we will have to set up our own ‘real’ office here and that will definitely costs a significant amount of money and time. So the strategy is to link my activities to an existing company here. I’m talking with multiple possible candidates and no clear decisions have been made. I have to start to hurry a little, because on the 16th of August I will fly back to Holland and than it has to be arranged. Next to all this long term activities I made an outline for a Chinese group that want to visit the Netherlands in the fall of 2009, and finally also made a next step with the Entrepreneurship-program (maybe a content overview and timetable). I need to communicate more and more with the Baak in the Netherlands which is good, but also I find long distance communication sometimes difficult. Keep it together and slowly progressing (Shanghai wasn’t builds in a day – it goes fast, but everything takes time).

Musically I gave my last shows with the current band formation, one last show was last Sunday (in Jz again). However yesterday we played at Mario’s (new Sax-player) birthday party (he has definitely the most beautiful apartment I ever entered in Shangai (expect for the Consuls home maybe, which was also amazingly nice). It was a nice party and with the people staying we are quite determined to keep the playing level up high. And last week I also sing some songs with Angie at home (she has a beautiful voice). She just got a new job for a company selling classes on Chinese language and culture… we try to speak Chinese three days a week now, but this is difficult to maintain, because even though all the studying hours, I keep missing out a lot.

The summer has totally started and it's bloody hot!