Happy Tiger Year!

“Rooaarrr”, welcome in the year of the Tiger! I am spending the New Years with Angie’s family in Guizhou, and celebrate it in the totally like the Chinese. The Chinese way of spending the New Years differs at some points from the European way. Today is the first day of the New Year and yesterday was the BIG Niansanshi (translated ‘Year30’) – the last day of the old year – the year of the Ox. The core of Niansanshi is based around 'eating' and 'spending time with the family'. After waking up we went to Angie’s Yeye and Nainai (grandparents from fathers side). We spend the day together making dumplings and preparing more food for the dinner. The TV was on in the background with a Chinese action movie. The plan was to start eating at 16pm, so you can also have dinner with the other family LaoYe and LaoLao (mothers side) a second time on that day.
All the cooking with over 20 dishes was took more time than plannend and we started our first big meal at 17.30h. Before you start to eat you set off the Chinese fireworks, in front of your door. Since most people are eating around the same time, it turned out to be quite a 'noisy', but definitely a pleasant and delicious meal, with cheering (drinking the Chinese hard liquour Baijiu) to the New Year and wishing each other fortune and good health in the year to come. There was a big bowl of Dumpling – and in one of them was a coin hidden. The one finding the coin got RMB 200,- of the the Uncle of Angie (it was his turn this year). It wasn’t me this year – I ate quite some dumpling, but no luck. The tradition goes that eating many dumpling on New Year eve is good for your fortune in the coming year (so I will need to be a little more patient).

After the first meal we went over to the other family. We definitely ate too much already and arrived too late to do the second ´real´ meal. Angie still ate some little snacks – I wasn’t able to eat more at all. We started to play Majiang I joined the game in the beginning, but after one hour the uncles and aunts were ready to play for ´real´ (money) with the advanced rules (I had to give my chair away). The TV was broadcasting the Chinese Big New Years evening gala on the background, but everybody concentrated on the game, while talking and laughing. When the clock hit 12 hours the noise outside was huge – never heard so much noisy fireworks at once. However, inside there was no special 12-o´clock moment as we are used to in Holland, everybody just continued to play Majiang. At 0.30h we went home and were ready for bed, no big party in the evening and in Anshun are no bars. It was a nice experience yesterday, and today the streets are all very quiet, the New Years holiday has begun, time to stay home or spend time with the family outside. That’s what we did today. We went one of the longest suspension Bridges in Asia – the brand new Balinghe Bridge, opened in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_bridge_spans). We were not the only ones. Hundreds of families came out to experiences one of these human wonders – definitely something too be ´proud´ of.

Personally I am definitely well integrated again in the Chinese life. Work is going well (many, many projects and things running – wont go into it now), the language is slowly improving (this was a good week), started following a Jazz Theory class at the JZ every Saturday morning, and had a very nice house-warming party in my new place (everybody is really enthusiastic about the place – me too). Further I´ve decide to start Twittering a lot more this year: http://twitter.com/basovertoom.

A Dutch Winter Break in the Office

Just returned back to Shanghai after my Winter time in the Netherlands. The last three weeks I’ve been rather busy, as always when I am back in the Netherlands. It is like living under a constant deadline, because you cannot delay things that much. I must say I like to be back, but it is exhausting and my work in Shanghai gets also delayed, which means from tomorrow onwards I will start again here to gets things ready in time. My most important jobs for the coming period are another New-Manager trip in March and the Dutch Entrepreneurship Week from 8-15 of May. For the first job I can relay on my previous experience, the latter one is more excited and difficult, because it is new. However during my days in the Netherlands I found time to work on this, and met up with a few potential Dutch participants for the program, I am still busy with the marketing and need to continue this to come to the sufficient number of ten companies. However a good development in this is that I've convinced the TU Delft to join the Dutch Chinese Entrepreneurship Week in May and they will come with a group of incubators and students. If everything works out the way I hope it will it be a very special legendry program at the start of the Shanghai EXPO. Since we’re in the 2010, the EXPO-year.

My time at the Baak was well spend and I was especially happy to attend two very great events in which I personally played an nice role. Firstly the international conference “Meet the World” at the Baak in Noordwijk. A nice event followed by a energising New Year reception. I gave a workshop during the conference on “Leading in China”. It was totally interactive, without using a PowerPoint-presentation. And new way for me, and it went surprisingly well.

The second event was the Big Improvement Day (http://www.bigimprovementday.nl/) for which I was the Project coordinator of the Baak, since we were one of the organising partners. It was a day full of inspiring speeches, people and ideas. I can recommend all people next year to come. The speaker who made most impact on my was Miles Hilton Barber (http://www.mileshilton-barber.com/). He is a blind man, that became an adventurer (flying, mountain climbing, ocean diving, etc). His message, start to Dream, commit to these dreams, make a plan to realize them, and keep on going. It sounds so simple, and actually it is than simply. At least that how I experienced it myself, when I wanted to move to China. But it is great to hear it so clearly in such an inspirational speech. Next to this I was inspired by Leen Zevenberg talking about ‘Survival of the happiest’ (http://www.leenzevenberg.nl/), Yesim Candan, that launched a new political party called “1” (http://www.yesimcandan.com/) and some young entrepreneurs with booming businesses at an age when I was still at university. Harry Starren was the ‘host’ of the day, he did a very good job, impressive again!

Back I Shanghai I have mostly slept. Exhausted and jet-legged. However this afternoon I went to the JZ-School. I made it to become the ‘Student of the Month’ and an online interview was posted in the New Letter of January (www.jz-school.com/schoolpost/201001.htm). Tonight I will have a party and tomorrow we will really get started, there is a lot on the To-do list, as always.