Shanghai China Snippets

A sure way of getting a zero percent chance of ever starting a language exchange must be this classified.

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I spotted this advertisement of China Telecom in one of the expat magazines.

Grace must be a lovely girl and I’m sure if I would have met up with here the first time I entered China life would have been very different.

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Imagine being a cabbie in Shanghai. You make long days, one day on, one day off and your salary has decreased over the last 10 years.

You also just survived the “spit sack” campaign that was intended to urge you to leave your phlegm in there instead of the street.

And now you’re ordered to stop yawning and eating snacks while on the job. Someone in the local government must have some beef with you it seems.

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We have bought an apartment and originally I planned to write down the process. Catshanghai has done already an excellent job in describing the process.

The only thing I like to add is that fees for real estate agents are negotiable. Officially they are 1% of the purchase price paid by the buyer and the seller respectively. As the internal motto of one of the agents we visited is, “Nothing better than a sale”, we discovered they are more than willing to drop the 1% from the sellers side to lower the purchase price.

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For a change I was listening to the Chinese news. Well to be honest, my wife was watching and I was playing the computer as I heard something about IP.

I said something smart or at least tried, “Nice, another propaganda item about how China is fiercely protecting Intellectual Property” but I was wrong.. again:).

In their monopolistic wisdom China Telecom has decided to, yes, increase the prices of international IP phone calls. China Unicom and China Mobile apparently preceded them (I missed that part as I don’t listen too much to the Chinese news:) and in a non-competitive sector you’ll follow suit if you have another chance at more profit.

I always thought the whole idea behind IP telephony is/was that it would make communication cheaper. I guess raising the prices is a Chinafied interpretation.

I don’t know with how much the prices will go up. It will definitely be less airtime for my 30 kuai ip card with a value of 100 kuai.

Some stats about the Olympic Games in Beijing

• 28 Olympic programs, 302 sub-categories
• 302 gold medals
• 10,500 athletes are expecte to participate
• 21,880 torchbearers will run 137,000 km over 130 days
• The National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) covers an area of 258,000 sq. meters
• The Bird’s Nest has 91,000 seats
• The surface of the National Aquatics Center is covered by 1,437 pieces of transparant material
• The highest price for the opening ceremony tickets is 5000 Renminbi, the lowest is 200 Renminbi
• Beijing expects 550,000 international visitors and 2.4 million domestic spectators
• Over 800 star-class hotels and 4,000 hostels will provide about 420,000 overprized rooms

If you have an established domicile in China you can try to get a ticket on the offical Beijing Olympics website. Phase 1 has ended but in October 2007 there is a new chance.

Source Cityweekend August 2-15 2007

I was cleaning up old magazines and ran into an issue of SH Magazine. On the last page of each issue there is small column called, “How to”.

Sometimes this column is slightly useful, many times it’s cynical. The one I read was funny for the last reason.

How to .. Open a restaurant in Shanghai

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