A FEW WEEKS AGO I READ WITH INTEREST an editorial regarding people leaving South Africa and the varied opinions this was attracting – especially the negative ones. Now I do not even want to get into the debate about the reasons people do leave as these are varied and certainly very specific and I can attest to the fact that it is not an easy decision to make. The only thing I will say is that to call these people “traitors” is not only absurd it certainly highlights the narrow mindedness and ignorance which accompany such nonsensical utterances.
I wonder if anyone even stops to think how difficult it is to leave a country in which you grew up, where your entire family and support base will remain, whilst you have to make the move to a foreign country, where everything is different and where you will start again, from the beginning. I can only share with you our personal experiences and I can tell you it is damn tough.
I come from a very traditional close knit family. When I was still a child the entire family used to congregate on Sunday’s at my grandparents’ house, which was an event in itself. It would total 40 people with aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. This tradition even continued when I started my own family, until we moved away to Cape Town. But the distance between Cape Town and Johannesburg didn’t stop us from visiting or the family visiting us and support or advice was only a phone call or even plane ride away if we needed it.
Then we moved away to China and at first it was an incredible adventure. Advice was still only a phone call away but we had to create a new support base and luckily we could find this in the expat communities. When you move to a place like China most foreigners there will stick together because we are all in the same boat. It is also not a move you make permanently – or at least for 99% of people it isn’t, but there are some people we met and became close friends with, who have now lived there for more than 10 years. The adventure and excitement make up for how difficult things can be, but it certainly doesn’t make things easier.
And then there was the move to the Netherlands. I must admit that we were totally and utterly unprepared for how difficult this would be. China at least was set-up to deal with foreigners coming to work and temporarily live there and as I said the expat communities provided unbelievable support for “newbies”. The Netherlands however was a totally different experience all together.
The European Union had recently tightened all its regulations with regards to knowledge and migrant workers, not only from EU countries but especially from countries outside of the EU. You will by now have read about our administration nightmares and in the end it took more than 7 months for us to finalise this process. During this time of course we had to settle and begin a new life and again, in the beginning it was an adventure, but pretty quickly reality started to set in and you began to understand how difficult it is to leave everything you know behind and start all over again (for the 3rd time in as many years).
Here there are no real expat communities to talk about and you are forced (and rightly so) to integrate with the local communities where you live. Integration is not something which just happens, you have to work on it and in the first year it is a constant process and it really starts with the little things.
This is not South Africa and thus all the shops and the products used are totally foreign. What do you do if you can’t find many of the ingredients you used to use in the recipes for dinners? How do you suddenly change the eating habits and preferences of your family? For my genetic rugby playing sins, I have shoulders which force me to wear shirts starting at size 50, what do you do when the largest sizes in the shops are 45’s and trousers are made for people with skinny legs, not someone who used to cycle 40km’s per day?
My job is not a 9 to 5 office job and thus every week I am in a plane on my way to a different office in a different country in Europe. What do I do when my wife calls me complaining that the electricity in certain sections of the house does not work and you then discover there is no such thing as a main switchboard but that we have three different boards, all working with fuses which look like globes and you cannot discern over the phone which one to change? Or you discover suddenly there is an interruption in your gas supply and the people on the other end of the phone cannot speak English. Or you have to buy new furniture and you suddenly find out delivery is not tomorrow, but 5 months from now (unless you buy from IKEA), or even worse, you need a car but this has a delivery period of 6 months or more…
We cannot simply pick-up the phone and call my parents to pop around and help, even with small things like baby-sitting. I cannot even ask my dad or one of my friends to watch my family when I travel, to assist if things go wrong in the house or if they need any help. Nope, you have to start all over again with nothing to fall back on.
These all sound like little inconsequential things and they are, if you are living in a country where you have grown up and everyone understands how things work and your family and friends support network is a simple car-ride away. Believe me they become HUGE when these little things start adding up and you can very quickly fall into a pattern of negativity where nothing is as great as the country in which you were born.
There is of course always an upside and mine is that I have discovered what an amazing family I have and how quickly we band together to face all of these “mundane & inconsequential” aspects of life. We have a can do attitude and although there are constant challenges, we understand that this is the price one has to pay. Sadly we have also met “expats” who have literally given up and who cannot adapt.
It has now been one year since we have moved here and I think we are beginning to settle quite well. We love it where we live, the people (once you get to know them), the environment, the town and now that we are getting to know the shops and how things work, life has become much easier. We have even now begun to look for a house to buy, and boy is this a process and a half, perhaps I will give you some insights into this in the future.
Bottom line is that it is an exceptionally difficult thing to leave the country in which you were born and to leave behind everything and everyone you know. This is not a decision which is taken lightly and it can either totally ruin one’s family or if you are willing to do it with a positive can-do attitude it can really strengthen it beyond your wildest dreams.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Monday, 16 June 2008
Shaking off the winter blues
SPRING IS IN THE AIR and for the last two and a half weeks we have had some of the most divine weather, sunny and 28 degrees. It has truly been a dream and a welcome break from the gloomy cold cloudy winter skies. But this is Holland – so if there is one thing we know it is that it will not last!
We have been taking full advantage of the lovely weather of course and the fact that there has been a couple of public holidays over this period has made it even better for spending some great quality time with the family. Of course the first thing we did was to bring out the gas braai (yes the one we brought with us all the way from Beijing). It is illegal to light any fires here in the Netherlands and of course should you wish to, you would need to get permission from the Gemeente (Town Council) and all of your immediate neighbours. Gas braai’s are totally ok, and of course we don’t need to have a license to braai as I see is now the case with you guys in SA. What the hell is that all about?
We hadn’t had a proper braai for more than 18 months so for the next 7 days we had one every evening. The sun only sets at about 10pm, so we milked the conditions for all it was worth. It was amazing to see the transformation of my family’s mood as I started our first real braai in the Netherlands and it then hit me how gloomy we had all been during the winter months. For the last 9 months we had lived in overcast, cold and wet conditions – day in and day out, and although we were used to not seeing the sun due to the pollution in Beijing, this was not something we had experienced before.
We had heard about the winter blues before, but we thought this was nothing but a myth, until of course we realized we were living it in reality. I had also read some very interesting articles recently about “sleepy middle Europe” which spoke about whole towns actually going into hibernation in the middle of winter and the authors were in fact blaming this and the socialistic way of live for the developed parts of Europe’s poor growth. The articles spoke of towns in the North-East of France either migrating during winter or simply closing the towns down, with its inhabitants literally going into hibernation and sleeping most of their days away.
Now it is not cold enough for that to happen here in the Netherlands, but believe me the winter is cold, wet and dark most of the time. I now understand why energy lamps are such popular items in most shops – with people in fact having them prescribed by their GP’s to combat the effect of the long and cold winters here. I also understand why people are so keen on taking their holidays and getting out (en masse) across most of Europe to escape to places such as Spain and Greece.
I have never really thought about not working on a public holiday or of not taking a long weekend away and I was truly amazed to see how religiously people in Europe took these and then made sure they were somewhere where the sun was shining. I was also very quick to condemn these same people and thinking that the developed world truly deserves their slow pace of growth if people had these kinds of attitudes.
Now I am beginning to understand for the first time how close minded I have been. In fact I must admit that due to the fact that I spend so little time at home and am away most of the time travelling to different countries, I have been selfish in not understanding how the weather of all things could so seriously affect my family. Life is very easy here, except for the weather and I can now fully appreciate why the Dutch moan so much about it. I used to say they have nothing to complain about and thus can only moan about the weather (and the level of taxes of course), but I am beginning to change my mind in this regard.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a cliché I know, but in this case it is absolutely true. People here are religious about escaping to the sun when the opportunity presents itself, not because they are lazy, but because it is in fact essential. Coming from South Africa you never even give this a second thought, until of course you suddenly no longer have it.
We have been taking full advantage of the lovely weather of course and the fact that there has been a couple of public holidays over this period has made it even better for spending some great quality time with the family. Of course the first thing we did was to bring out the gas braai (yes the one we brought with us all the way from Beijing). It is illegal to light any fires here in the Netherlands and of course should you wish to, you would need to get permission from the Gemeente (Town Council) and all of your immediate neighbours. Gas braai’s are totally ok, and of course we don’t need to have a license to braai as I see is now the case with you guys in SA. What the hell is that all about?
We hadn’t had a proper braai for more than 18 months so for the next 7 days we had one every evening. The sun only sets at about 10pm, so we milked the conditions for all it was worth. It was amazing to see the transformation of my family’s mood as I started our first real braai in the Netherlands and it then hit me how gloomy we had all been during the winter months. For the last 9 months we had lived in overcast, cold and wet conditions – day in and day out, and although we were used to not seeing the sun due to the pollution in Beijing, this was not something we had experienced before.
We had heard about the winter blues before, but we thought this was nothing but a myth, until of course we realized we were living it in reality. I had also read some very interesting articles recently about “sleepy middle Europe” which spoke about whole towns actually going into hibernation in the middle of winter and the authors were in fact blaming this and the socialistic way of live for the developed parts of Europe’s poor growth. The articles spoke of towns in the North-East of France either migrating during winter or simply closing the towns down, with its inhabitants literally going into hibernation and sleeping most of their days away.
Now it is not cold enough for that to happen here in the Netherlands, but believe me the winter is cold, wet and dark most of the time. I now understand why energy lamps are such popular items in most shops – with people in fact having them prescribed by their GP’s to combat the effect of the long and cold winters here. I also understand why people are so keen on taking their holidays and getting out (en masse) across most of Europe to escape to places such as Spain and Greece.
I have never really thought about not working on a public holiday or of not taking a long weekend away and I was truly amazed to see how religiously people in Europe took these and then made sure they were somewhere where the sun was shining. I was also very quick to condemn these same people and thinking that the developed world truly deserves their slow pace of growth if people had these kinds of attitudes.
Now I am beginning to understand for the first time how close minded I have been. In fact I must admit that due to the fact that I spend so little time at home and am away most of the time travelling to different countries, I have been selfish in not understanding how the weather of all things could so seriously affect my family. Life is very easy here, except for the weather and I can now fully appreciate why the Dutch moan so much about it. I used to say they have nothing to complain about and thus can only moan about the weather (and the level of taxes of course), but I am beginning to change my mind in this regard.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a cliché I know, but in this case it is absolutely true. People here are religious about escaping to the sun when the opportunity presents itself, not because they are lazy, but because it is in fact essential. Coming from South Africa you never even give this a second thought, until of course you suddenly no longer have it.
Eastern Nostalgia
AFTER NOT BEING BACK IN THE EAST for nearly 8 months I had the opportunity to travel back to Hong Kong and Beijing again. Hong Kong was the same-old-same-old, but Beijing was just something out of a different world again and yes, I supposedly did live there for a year not so long ago…
First of all, I arrived at the newly built terminal which opened just 3 days before my arrival and WOW! The new airport is right next to the old one and covers more than 1 million square meters, making it larger than the Pentagon. Immigration was smooth, with friendly border guards greeting you in English and no real waiting at all. We had to take a train to the arrivals hall from where we landed but as I walked into the baggage hall, there my bags were, neatly rotating on the carousel and then the walk through customs was a breeze! It is not even comparable to the old terminal, which although also large and efficient, it just a drop in the ocean vs. the new Terminal 3.
If I may digress just for a second, just a week before the new Terminal 5 opened at Heathrow and what an absolute shambles that has been and continues to be. We actually watched the opening here on Sky and it certainly looks beautiful and spacious, but I think that is the only one small comparison which can be made. You will have all by now read the hundreds of news reports about the falling apart of the baggage handling systems and the PR disaster which has followed since. Some of my colleagues spent the entire week in Beijing without their baggage, and some have returned home still not knowing when they will ever receive these again. The latest is of course that BA has sent more than 20,000 bags to Italy by road freight and there they will be sorted and then couriered to customers’ place of residence. Have you ever heard of anything as ridiculous as this?! Of course every customer is now praying that their bags don’t get couriered back to them via Heathrow…
For the UK this has been a PR disaster, for BA and its reliance on business passengers this will still prove to be absolutely devastating as thousands of business travelers start avoiding using London as a hub into Europe.
Now, if this had to happen in China you can believe that a couple of officials in charge of the new airport would have been summarily shot. Terrible I know… All I can say is the new terminal had 3 successful test runs before the official opening and they have had no glitches at all thus far. Flying out is even smoother and man, let me not even begin to talk about the shopping!
Beijing itself has undergone quite a transformational change before the Olympics is about to hit it in August. Many of the construction projects are now complete. The train from the new terminal into the center of Beijing is not running yet, but the tracks are complete and this should be operational very soon. The buildings which were half complete when we left are now receiving their finishing touches and man these are just spectacular. The new Westin Hotel close to our offices in Chaoyang is just out of this world, not to even mention the new CCTV building, which displays some of the boldest architecture the world has ever seen. The standard systems for engineering gravity and lateral loads in buildings didn't apply to this building, which is formed by two leaning towers; each bent 90 degrees at the top and bottom to form a continuous loop. And then of course there is the Olympic stadium with its outer design looking like a bird’s nest. Trust the Chinese to really push the boundaries of architecture and design.
The only problem for me was that they have still not solved the pollution problem. I arrived in a deep cloud of smog and it only really cleared the next day when there was quite a lot of wind blowing for most of the day. The authorities are experimenting with alternate number plate driving, i.e. those ending with odd numbers on one day and those with even number on the next. They are also removing as many government vehicles as possible. We know the factories will be closed and no construction will occur during this period, but whether this will solve the pollution for the 2 weeks in August remains debatable.
I spent nearly a week back in Beijing and it was oddly nostalgic. I got to visit many of the shops we used to hang out in and saw some of my old friends again. There was an old familiarity in coming back to a place where we had once lived, but also a strange feeling that if I had to come back in 6 months again that even more would be changed. The progress is great for a new developing country but also slightly sad to know that soon this place will be as unfamiliar as any new city I will be visiting in the future.
First of all, I arrived at the newly built terminal which opened just 3 days before my arrival and WOW! The new airport is right next to the old one and covers more than 1 million square meters, making it larger than the Pentagon. Immigration was smooth, with friendly border guards greeting you in English and no real waiting at all. We had to take a train to the arrivals hall from where we landed but as I walked into the baggage hall, there my bags were, neatly rotating on the carousel and then the walk through customs was a breeze! It is not even comparable to the old terminal, which although also large and efficient, it just a drop in the ocean vs. the new Terminal 3.
If I may digress just for a second, just a week before the new Terminal 5 opened at Heathrow and what an absolute shambles that has been and continues to be. We actually watched the opening here on Sky and it certainly looks beautiful and spacious, but I think that is the only one small comparison which can be made. You will have all by now read the hundreds of news reports about the falling apart of the baggage handling systems and the PR disaster which has followed since. Some of my colleagues spent the entire week in Beijing without their baggage, and some have returned home still not knowing when they will ever receive these again. The latest is of course that BA has sent more than 20,000 bags to Italy by road freight and there they will be sorted and then couriered to customers’ place of residence. Have you ever heard of anything as ridiculous as this?! Of course every customer is now praying that their bags don’t get couriered back to them via Heathrow…
For the UK this has been a PR disaster, for BA and its reliance on business passengers this will still prove to be absolutely devastating as thousands of business travelers start avoiding using London as a hub into Europe.
Now, if this had to happen in China you can believe that a couple of officials in charge of the new airport would have been summarily shot. Terrible I know… All I can say is the new terminal had 3 successful test runs before the official opening and they have had no glitches at all thus far. Flying out is even smoother and man, let me not even begin to talk about the shopping!
Beijing itself has undergone quite a transformational change before the Olympics is about to hit it in August. Many of the construction projects are now complete. The train from the new terminal into the center of Beijing is not running yet, but the tracks are complete and this should be operational very soon. The buildings which were half complete when we left are now receiving their finishing touches and man these are just spectacular. The new Westin Hotel close to our offices in Chaoyang is just out of this world, not to even mention the new CCTV building, which displays some of the boldest architecture the world has ever seen. The standard systems for engineering gravity and lateral loads in buildings didn't apply to this building, which is formed by two leaning towers; each bent 90 degrees at the top and bottom to form a continuous loop. And then of course there is the Olympic stadium with its outer design looking like a bird’s nest. Trust the Chinese to really push the boundaries of architecture and design.
The only problem for me was that they have still not solved the pollution problem. I arrived in a deep cloud of smog and it only really cleared the next day when there was quite a lot of wind blowing for most of the day. The authorities are experimenting with alternate number plate driving, i.e. those ending with odd numbers on one day and those with even number on the next. They are also removing as many government vehicles as possible. We know the factories will be closed and no construction will occur during this period, but whether this will solve the pollution for the 2 weeks in August remains debatable.
I spent nearly a week back in Beijing and it was oddly nostalgic. I got to visit many of the shops we used to hang out in and saw some of my old friends again. There was an old familiarity in coming back to a place where we had once lived, but also a strange feeling that if I had to come back in 6 months again that even more would be changed. The progress is great for a new developing country but also slightly sad to know that soon this place will be as unfamiliar as any new city I will be visiting in the future.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Like sand through the hourglass, so is Europe
GROWING UP IN SOUTH AFRICA I LEARNT THE history of how South Africa was founded as a trading post by the Dutch, how it was taken over by the British in 1795, the Great Trek, the Boer Wars and of course the history and evolution of the political, social and economic landscapes since 1910.
My European history lessons were mostly confined to the two World Wars and the Cold War, all neatly summarised. Oh, there were bits on the dark and middle ages, and the Renaissance, but it never got down to the detail, like the evolution of the Greek and Roman empires and the formation of the United Kingdom. The social, political and economic nuances were entirely left out.
Now, travelling and working in Europe, I have found my passion for history awakened, not to mention the fact that understanding this continent is now a business imperative considering the influence history has on the present.
Since we arrived in the Netherlands I have tried to educate myself about politics within the European Union and around its edges. What I’ve found is a soap opera, something like the Bold and the Beautiful, except more outrageously unbelievable.
Not that I’m a political analyst, mind you, but it is hard not to reach that conclusion.
Consider: Western Europe is the domain of Germany, Britain and France. Germany is ruled by a fragile coalition established when Angela Merkel took over. Her predecessors were ousted because their economic reforms were too hard-line capitalist. Merkel supported those reforms, but had a leftist, more socialist outlook on how they should work and how far they should go. The reality is that Germany desperately needs to reform a stagnating economy struggling under a social burden. But the new coalition is under increasing pressure from the conservatives who blame everything – crime, slow growth, social problems and cultural decline – on either immigrants or the European Union or both.
The UK, by contrast, is boring despite the superficial drama. Pity Gordon Brown, who doesn’t have the spin and grin that Tony Blair commanded. Since his “new government” under his “new leadership” took over it has had to contend with Allistair Campbell criticizing it on the handling of floods, the handling of Northern Rock and the handling of confidential citizen data. That wouldn’t have been a problem if there was an iota of ideological difference between Messrs Brown and Campbell. The most interesting real debate is on how to handle a culture of teenage binge drinking. Even the new leader of the Liberal Democrats is being called a stunt double to Campbell.
In France, Nicolas Sarkozy won a hard-fought election on a platform that France desperately needs to reform both its economy and a social system that, like the rest of the government, is an overstaffed and inefficient bureaucratic nightmare. Before the election I didn’t even know that France had legislated a 35-hour working week (about half of what us real people pull) and actively discouraged overtime. Or that the core message in textbooks for secondary and tertiary education is that capitalism is legalised theft, preventable only when the state runs all industry on a non-profit basis. No wonder the commentators predicted that Sarkozy, though popular, would have a hard time effecting change. And they were right; witness the transport workers’ strike and the students protesting against being asked for money to study at university. When he tries to touch that bureaucracy the real fun will start. But at least his divorce and immediate second marriage (to a beautiful model, no less) adds a bit of flair missing from the proceedings elsewhere.
That’s just the internal issues of the three majors, and ignores such volatile places as Italy, or Eastern Europe with its fear of Russia (but its love of Russian gas) and its hatred of the West (but its love of Western money).
What do all of these have in common? I’d argue it is this: there is lots of drama and excitement and to-ing and fro-ing of actors, yet the more things change the more they stay the same. Just like any good soapie.
My European history lessons were mostly confined to the two World Wars and the Cold War, all neatly summarised. Oh, there were bits on the dark and middle ages, and the Renaissance, but it never got down to the detail, like the evolution of the Greek and Roman empires and the formation of the United Kingdom. The social, political and economic nuances were entirely left out.
Now, travelling and working in Europe, I have found my passion for history awakened, not to mention the fact that understanding this continent is now a business imperative considering the influence history has on the present.
Since we arrived in the Netherlands I have tried to educate myself about politics within the European Union and around its edges. What I’ve found is a soap opera, something like the Bold and the Beautiful, except more outrageously unbelievable.
Not that I’m a political analyst, mind you, but it is hard not to reach that conclusion.
Consider: Western Europe is the domain of Germany, Britain and France. Germany is ruled by a fragile coalition established when Angela Merkel took over. Her predecessors were ousted because their economic reforms were too hard-line capitalist. Merkel supported those reforms, but had a leftist, more socialist outlook on how they should work and how far they should go. The reality is that Germany desperately needs to reform a stagnating economy struggling under a social burden. But the new coalition is under increasing pressure from the conservatives who blame everything – crime, slow growth, social problems and cultural decline – on either immigrants or the European Union or both.
The UK, by contrast, is boring despite the superficial drama. Pity Gordon Brown, who doesn’t have the spin and grin that Tony Blair commanded. Since his “new government” under his “new leadership” took over it has had to contend with Allistair Campbell criticizing it on the handling of floods, the handling of Northern Rock and the handling of confidential citizen data. That wouldn’t have been a problem if there was an iota of ideological difference between Messrs Brown and Campbell. The most interesting real debate is on how to handle a culture of teenage binge drinking. Even the new leader of the Liberal Democrats is being called a stunt double to Campbell.
In France, Nicolas Sarkozy won a hard-fought election on a platform that France desperately needs to reform both its economy and a social system that, like the rest of the government, is an overstaffed and inefficient bureaucratic nightmare. Before the election I didn’t even know that France had legislated a 35-hour working week (about half of what us real people pull) and actively discouraged overtime. Or that the core message in textbooks for secondary and tertiary education is that capitalism is legalised theft, preventable only when the state runs all industry on a non-profit basis. No wonder the commentators predicted that Sarkozy, though popular, would have a hard time effecting change. And they were right; witness the transport workers’ strike and the students protesting against being asked for money to study at university. When he tries to touch that bureaucracy the real fun will start. But at least his divorce and immediate second marriage (to a beautiful model, no less) adds a bit of flair missing from the proceedings elsewhere.
That’s just the internal issues of the three majors, and ignores such volatile places as Italy, or Eastern Europe with its fear of Russia (but its love of Russian gas) and its hatred of the West (but its love of Western money).
What do all of these have in common? I’d argue it is this: there is lots of drama and excitement and to-ing and fro-ing of actors, yet the more things change the more they stay the same. Just like any good soapie.
Cross-cultural Europe
SEVEN MONTHS ON AND WE'RE SETTLING DOWN nicely in the Netherlands. The kids are happy in school, the wife has her own car and life is assuming a semblance of normality.
Normality, in this case, also means I can realistically set a target of spending only 25 to thirty weeks this year travelling, and most of that travel will be in short hops. Moscow is only three hours and forty minutes away from home now. That also means I get to spend more time in the countries I visit – and I’m starting to see that, deep down, they’re not all that different from home.
For example: I was sitting in a presentation in Warsaw recently, where a business was bragging about the growth in a particular line. In one of the slides the numbers had been reversed, so it looked like there had actually been a decrease. The presenters looked at each other, smiled, and one said: “We apologise but it seems as if there is a ‘Czech’ problem in the numbers.”
With the Polish accent, we thought the word was “check”, as in “Damn, we forgot to check the slides”. Only during drinks after the presentation did we learn it had been a jibe at people from the Czech Republic. I still don’t know why, exactly. The best explanation offered had something to do with the way you spell in Czech, but that smells like a diplomatic retreat.
Similarly, I was sitting in Kiev in Ukraine when some heavy furniture had to be rearranged to accommodate more people in the room. A female employee chirped to her colleague that this was a job requiring “a Polish solution”, which I later found out refers to the physical strength of Polish men. Which is apt, I guess, when you consider the official ranking of the strongest men in the world: the two top spots are held by Poles.
Then there is the cultural debate between the Ukrainians and the Russians. Don’t ever even think of bringing up the whole Ukraine-is-the-cradle-of-Russia thing; that’s my advice. Or even within countries; don’t try to dispute that people in Warsaw are business types, that Krakow is the home of party animals or that Poznan residents aren’t actually German.
My approach is to sit back and ask questions but never offer any thoughts on the matter. That way I can learn without putting my foot in my mouth, as I would surely do, and risk important business relationships.
All this shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess. No matter where you go, human nature is still human nature.
Normality, in this case, also means I can realistically set a target of spending only 25 to thirty weeks this year travelling, and most of that travel will be in short hops. Moscow is only three hours and forty minutes away from home now. That also means I get to spend more time in the countries I visit – and I’m starting to see that, deep down, they’re not all that different from home.
For example: I was sitting in a presentation in Warsaw recently, where a business was bragging about the growth in a particular line. In one of the slides the numbers had been reversed, so it looked like there had actually been a decrease. The presenters looked at each other, smiled, and one said: “We apologise but it seems as if there is a ‘Czech’ problem in the numbers.”
With the Polish accent, we thought the word was “check”, as in “Damn, we forgot to check the slides”. Only during drinks after the presentation did we learn it had been a jibe at people from the Czech Republic. I still don’t know why, exactly. The best explanation offered had something to do with the way you spell in Czech, but that smells like a diplomatic retreat.
Similarly, I was sitting in Kiev in Ukraine when some heavy furniture had to be rearranged to accommodate more people in the room. A female employee chirped to her colleague that this was a job requiring “a Polish solution”, which I later found out refers to the physical strength of Polish men. Which is apt, I guess, when you consider the official ranking of the strongest men in the world: the two top spots are held by Poles.
Then there is the cultural debate between the Ukrainians and the Russians. Don’t ever even think of bringing up the whole Ukraine-is-the-cradle-of-Russia thing; that’s my advice. Or even within countries; don’t try to dispute that people in Warsaw are business types, that Krakow is the home of party animals or that Poznan residents aren’t actually German.
My approach is to sit back and ask questions but never offer any thoughts on the matter. That way I can learn without putting my foot in my mouth, as I would surely do, and risk important business relationships.
All this shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess. No matter where you go, human nature is still human nature.
Playing the homeboy tourist...
NOW THAT WE OFFICIALLY RESIDE IN THE Netherlands, my family and I returned to South Africa over the holiday season as near foreigners, more European than African you could say. If we were real foreigners it may well have been our last trip.
Yes, I know saying anything bad about the country gets you branded an unpatriotic traitor these days; I’ve been exposed to the prevailing culture of not daring to criticise. But somebody has to talk straight, and it may as well be me.
Our problems came at the two points where most people’s impressions of a trip are formed: coming in and going out.
The rental car office is the last place you’d expect trouble at an airport, but that is where it started. The “super extreme insurance cover” we’d opted for was no longer available, I was told. Neither was the lower excess rate we had chosen at the cost of a higher daily rental. The higher rental would stay, though.
Fine, nobody wants to start a holiday stressed out, so we proceeded to the half-hour task of inspecting our (expensive but under-insured) chariot. And off we went. Only to return ten minutes later.
We had barely made it onto the highway before, bang! The rubber strip around the windscreen was suddenly flapping in the wind, barely attached to the car – a car with 3 000 kilometres on the clock.
Back at the rental place, things quickly went wrong. “How could you let this happen,” was the opening gambit from the service consultant. Then I was told there was no replacement car in the class I had booked, only a lesser car at the same price or a better car at a higher rate. We drove off in a higher-class car at the original rate, eventually, but not before I quite thoroughly lost my cool. Thank you Hertz.
The holiday itself – the beaches and sunshine and mountains and family and stuff – went well. The load shedding wasn’t fun, neither was the shortage of Coke Light, but such is life.
Trying to get back home is an experience that will stay with me, though – in nightmares, for a long time.
You might have heard of the KLM flight that had to return to OR Tambo Airport because of “technical difficulties”. Trust me, you don’t know the half of it.
By the time we arrived at the airport, just after 10pm, the terminals were closed for business. Without food or retail outlets to amuse waiting passengers, the business lounge was akin to a sardine can. And just as dark, once load shedding kicked in.
“Daddy, what happens if the power goes out while we are on the runway,” my ten-year-old daughter asked. I made reassuring noises while worrying about the same thing.
There were more mundane problems, though. No working information boards to check departure time or gates, for example.
Just after midnight we made it onto the plane, only to be told there was no fixed departure time because baggage could not be loaded without working conveyer belts and conveyer belts require electricity. One and a half hours later we were in the air. An hour after that we were back on the ground – and that is where the real fun started.
It took two and a half hours to get our baggage back, because there were no baggage handlers and no working conveyer belts. I shouldn’t complain, though; we were among the forty lucky passengers who did actually regain possession of most of their bags at the first attempt.
We were also among the 19 lucky passengers to get a room at the hotel across from the terminals. Three single rooms for four people. But, hey, that didn’t seem too bad when we saw the 300 poor sods lined up for taxis (there being no buses at that time of the morning) to take them to hotels further afield.
The next day we were sent from pillar to post in search of our few missing bags – to no avail. Again we were lucky, though; we made it onto an Air France flight that night, among just ten original KLM passengers who didn’t have to spend another day waiting for a flight out. But we did have to wait an extra two hours because conveyer belts were once again on the blink.
In Amsterdam, it was straight to the baggage handling office – another bag having gone missing during the new flight. It took a week to turn up.
The worst wasn’t being in airport limbo, or being abused by ground staff. The worst was talking to fellow victims, who all had variations of the same story. “It’s a beautiful country, but I don’t want to go through this again. I don’t think I’ll be back.”
Systems and processes, guys. Don’t wait until December 2009 to get them in place. Start now. Or us Europeans won’t be back for more.
Yes, I know saying anything bad about the country gets you branded an unpatriotic traitor these days; I’ve been exposed to the prevailing culture of not daring to criticise. But somebody has to talk straight, and it may as well be me.
Our problems came at the two points where most people’s impressions of a trip are formed: coming in and going out.
The rental car office is the last place you’d expect trouble at an airport, but that is where it started. The “super extreme insurance cover” we’d opted for was no longer available, I was told. Neither was the lower excess rate we had chosen at the cost of a higher daily rental. The higher rental would stay, though.
Fine, nobody wants to start a holiday stressed out, so we proceeded to the half-hour task of inspecting our (expensive but under-insured) chariot. And off we went. Only to return ten minutes later.
We had barely made it onto the highway before, bang! The rubber strip around the windscreen was suddenly flapping in the wind, barely attached to the car – a car with 3 000 kilometres on the clock.
Back at the rental place, things quickly went wrong. “How could you let this happen,” was the opening gambit from the service consultant. Then I was told there was no replacement car in the class I had booked, only a lesser car at the same price or a better car at a higher rate. We drove off in a higher-class car at the original rate, eventually, but not before I quite thoroughly lost my cool. Thank you Hertz.
The holiday itself – the beaches and sunshine and mountains and family and stuff – went well. The load shedding wasn’t fun, neither was the shortage of Coke Light, but such is life.
Trying to get back home is an experience that will stay with me, though – in nightmares, for a long time.
You might have heard of the KLM flight that had to return to OR Tambo Airport because of “technical difficulties”. Trust me, you don’t know the half of it.
By the time we arrived at the airport, just after 10pm, the terminals were closed for business. Without food or retail outlets to amuse waiting passengers, the business lounge was akin to a sardine can. And just as dark, once load shedding kicked in.
“Daddy, what happens if the power goes out while we are on the runway,” my ten-year-old daughter asked. I made reassuring noises while worrying about the same thing.
There were more mundane problems, though. No working information boards to check departure time or gates, for example.
Just after midnight we made it onto the plane, only to be told there was no fixed departure time because baggage could not be loaded without working conveyer belts and conveyer belts require electricity. One and a half hours later we were in the air. An hour after that we were back on the ground – and that is where the real fun started.
It took two and a half hours to get our baggage back, because there were no baggage handlers and no working conveyer belts. I shouldn’t complain, though; we were among the forty lucky passengers who did actually regain possession of most of their bags at the first attempt.
We were also among the 19 lucky passengers to get a room at the hotel across from the terminals. Three single rooms for four people. But, hey, that didn’t seem too bad when we saw the 300 poor sods lined up for taxis (there being no buses at that time of the morning) to take them to hotels further afield.
The next day we were sent from pillar to post in search of our few missing bags – to no avail. Again we were lucky, though; we made it onto an Air France flight that night, among just ten original KLM passengers who didn’t have to spend another day waiting for a flight out. But we did have to wait an extra two hours because conveyer belts were once again on the blink.
In Amsterdam, it was straight to the baggage handling office – another bag having gone missing during the new flight. It took a week to turn up.
The worst wasn’t being in airport limbo, or being abused by ground staff. The worst was talking to fellow victims, who all had variations of the same story. “It’s a beautiful country, but I don’t want to go through this again. I don’t think I’ll be back.”
Systems and processes, guys. Don’t wait until December 2009 to get them in place. Start now. Or us Europeans won’t be back for more.
Planes, Airports & Hotels
I TRAVEL MORE THAN MOST, I THINK. ACCORDING to my calculation I spent 120 of the last 156 weeks (since 2004) away from home – much of it on planes. So I’m qualified to share my list of best and worst airlines, airports and hotels. Perhaps I can save you some trouble.
What has happened since the days when we were taught that the only polite way to join a queue was from the back? In Asia, the concept has never existed, but lately everyone in the world seems to think themselves above something as tawdry as waiting in line. In airports, anyway. At ticket counters, passport control or security stations they join from the side, or suddenly discover a new best friend near the front, or just walk straight past 60 other people to slip through. Nothing kills goodwill towards mankind quite like waiting for 45 minutes to be strip-searched and then watching some bozo cruise straight past you.
But I digress.
The worst airline in the world is India Air, especially on the route to New Delhi. I’m told it has improved recently, but because I now strictly fl y Air Malaysia I wouldn’t know. India Air was exceptionally dirty, the seats were small and broken and it felt like sitting on bare metal – in business class. On my last flight the entertainment system (overhead movie projectors, naturally) was broken, so we spent five hours staring at each other while trying to block out the odour of spicy Sichuan noodles and red-hot chicken curry. Never again.
The second worst airline in the world is SAA. Perhaps not on all routes, but between Johannesburg and Hong Kong there is nothing to match it. In a record one-hour and 15 minutes you are served drinks, dinner and desert, and then the lights go out. For the next ten hours you dare not disturb an attendant – all of whom are getting some much needed sleep, as we gathered from the look of sleepy-eyed disgust any request was met with. On three consecutive flights I had seats that could not recline and had a broken entertainment system. No sleep, no distraction. Never again.
By contrast, the best airlines out there are Singapore and Emirates. The planes are immaculate, the service is astonishing, the food is unrivalled and the entertainment proves that there is such a thing as too much choice.
The worst airport in the world is New Delhi. Your passport gets checked at least 15 times, the business lounge is a joke and even though there is water everywhere there is not a drop to drink if your stomach is Western.
But New Delhi is somewhat out of the way. In the “frequented” category there is nothing to rival Heathrow. There you need to set aside a minimum of three hours to catch a connecting flight or suffer the consequences. Don’t expect your baggage to arrive; by my calculations your chances are around forty percent. Security is worse than even in some of the former Soviet states. I’m not holding my breath for the fabled Terminal 5 to open because I already use the London City Airport exclusively.
The best airport in the world is a tie between Hong Kong, Singapore and Schipol. Everything is efficient and convenience and just generally trouble free. A special mention must also go to Eastern European states like the Ukraine, which has one of the best business lounges in Europe.
The worst hotel, sadly, is in my favourite city, Shanghai. The first night I stayed in the RuTai, the shower popped out of the wall just as I had myself entirely covered with soap. I opened my eyes to find the bath I was standing in was filled with wall tiles. The next night I returned to my new room to find the entire floor flooded by a toilet that had literally exploded. Breakfast consists of spinach, broccoli and blue eggs. Thanks, but no thanks.
The best hotels are the Conrad in Hong Kong and the Arrarat in Moscow. Everything is impeccable, from the bathrooms to the high speed (and free) internet connection. The staff can’t conceive of any guest request as troublesome or difficult.
As you fall prey to pathetic service and horrible infrastructure in your own travels, though, remember to look on the bright side. There is no point to travelling if you don’t come back with stories to tell. And stories of good fortune are never as entertaining as ones of plague and disaster. The bad experiences invariably give you better bang for your buck – it’s just damned hard to realise this at the time.
What has happened since the days when we were taught that the only polite way to join a queue was from the back? In Asia, the concept has never existed, but lately everyone in the world seems to think themselves above something as tawdry as waiting in line. In airports, anyway. At ticket counters, passport control or security stations they join from the side, or suddenly discover a new best friend near the front, or just walk straight past 60 other people to slip through. Nothing kills goodwill towards mankind quite like waiting for 45 minutes to be strip-searched and then watching some bozo cruise straight past you.
But I digress.
The worst airline in the world is India Air, especially on the route to New Delhi. I’m told it has improved recently, but because I now strictly fl y Air Malaysia I wouldn’t know. India Air was exceptionally dirty, the seats were small and broken and it felt like sitting on bare metal – in business class. On my last flight the entertainment system (overhead movie projectors, naturally) was broken, so we spent five hours staring at each other while trying to block out the odour of spicy Sichuan noodles and red-hot chicken curry. Never again.
The second worst airline in the world is SAA. Perhaps not on all routes, but between Johannesburg and Hong Kong there is nothing to match it. In a record one-hour and 15 minutes you are served drinks, dinner and desert, and then the lights go out. For the next ten hours you dare not disturb an attendant – all of whom are getting some much needed sleep, as we gathered from the look of sleepy-eyed disgust any request was met with. On three consecutive flights I had seats that could not recline and had a broken entertainment system. No sleep, no distraction. Never again.
By contrast, the best airlines out there are Singapore and Emirates. The planes are immaculate, the service is astonishing, the food is unrivalled and the entertainment proves that there is such a thing as too much choice.
The worst airport in the world is New Delhi. Your passport gets checked at least 15 times, the business lounge is a joke and even though there is water everywhere there is not a drop to drink if your stomach is Western.
But New Delhi is somewhat out of the way. In the “frequented” category there is nothing to rival Heathrow. There you need to set aside a minimum of three hours to catch a connecting flight or suffer the consequences. Don’t expect your baggage to arrive; by my calculations your chances are around forty percent. Security is worse than even in some of the former Soviet states. I’m not holding my breath for the fabled Terminal 5 to open because I already use the London City Airport exclusively.
The best airport in the world is a tie between Hong Kong, Singapore and Schipol. Everything is efficient and convenience and just generally trouble free. A special mention must also go to Eastern European states like the Ukraine, which has one of the best business lounges in Europe.
The worst hotel, sadly, is in my favourite city, Shanghai. The first night I stayed in the RuTai, the shower popped out of the wall just as I had myself entirely covered with soap. I opened my eyes to find the bath I was standing in was filled with wall tiles. The next night I returned to my new room to find the entire floor flooded by a toilet that had literally exploded. Breakfast consists of spinach, broccoli and blue eggs. Thanks, but no thanks.
The best hotels are the Conrad in Hong Kong and the Arrarat in Moscow. Everything is impeccable, from the bathrooms to the high speed (and free) internet connection. The staff can’t conceive of any guest request as troublesome or difficult.
As you fall prey to pathetic service and horrible infrastructure in your own travels, though, remember to look on the bright side. There is no point to travelling if you don’t come back with stories to tell. And stories of good fortune are never as entertaining as ones of plague and disaster. The bad experiences invariably give you better bang for your buck – it’s just damned hard to realise this at the time.
Where common courtesy is alive and well...
HOW DOES ONE INTEGRATE INTO A COMPLETELY new society, once you’ve decided that you love it and want to go to that kind of trouble? I’m not sure, but I’m going to have to learn. It looks like my family has taken to the Netherlands in a big way. And I can’t say I’m immune to its charms myself.
It’s been only a couple of weeks, but the family loves the environment and, more importantly, the people here. It is very different from what we’re used to, and from what we’ve experienced, that is saying something. Once we found it easier to fit into Cape Town than we did Johannesburg, so stark did we consider the differences between those cities. But that was before we became globetrotters.
When we first moved to Shanghai it was tough – a new language and culture – but it was also an adventure. We knew we would never settle there, so there was little pressure to conform. What we learned we learned in order to broaden our horizons, not out of necessity. Granted, the difference is small, but it is important.
Beijing was an extension of the same. It was so different from Shanghai that we had to start all over again, but it wasn’t too much of a trial. Especially not for me, I guess, given that I was on the road for 44 weeks out of 52.
Now we find ourselves in a country of which our homeland was once a small colony, a trading post at the outskirts of the world. That, we thought, would give us some commonality, some shared history and customs and whatnot; but we didn’t really know what to expect. We just knew it would be a change.
And a change it was. Take, for example, my favourite thing in the universe: bureaucracy. In the Netherlands, everything is regulated – and I say this as somebody who tangled with the Chinese authorities regularly. To take a tree out of the garden you need the permission of the local council (called “Die Gemeente”, which is pretty funny if you know Afrikaans) in the form of a “Kapvergunning” (literally, permission to fell).
My wife and I had to have our marriage “audited” so that the Gemeente could be absolutely, positively sure we were actually legally married. That nearly got sticky when it emerged that my wife shares my surname. You see, according to custom here, she is supposed to have kept her maiden name on all legal documents.
The value system, on the other hand, harks back to the best memories of our childhood. The other day we had to visit the local GP to register and for a quick family check-up, because it would be unthinkable (not to mention unwise) not to. As we walked into the waiting room with about ten other people in it, we got funny looks, but didn’t realise why. Not until the next visitor opened the door and loudly greeted everybody with a hearty “Goeie Morge”, which was returned by everyone – except us, who weren’t quick on the uptake.
Men open doors for women, cars wait patiently for bicycles to pass first, waiters are friendly, senior citizens are treated with respect and family values are held in high esteem. It takes some getting used to, but it isn’t exactly unpleasant.
I guess simple good manners don’t need to fall by the wayside even as the world moves at breakneck speed. Our new home is proof of this. This, above all, is why we want to make this our home; not just another stop on the slow-mo round-the-world adventure journey we once considered ourselves to be on. So much so that, sitting in the rather beautiful centre of Prague, I feel quite homesick, and I’m not thinking of sunny South Africa.
It’s been only a couple of weeks, but the family loves the environment and, more importantly, the people here. It is very different from what we’re used to, and from what we’ve experienced, that is saying something. Once we found it easier to fit into Cape Town than we did Johannesburg, so stark did we consider the differences between those cities. But that was before we became globetrotters.
When we first moved to Shanghai it was tough – a new language and culture – but it was also an adventure. We knew we would never settle there, so there was little pressure to conform. What we learned we learned in order to broaden our horizons, not out of necessity. Granted, the difference is small, but it is important.
Beijing was an extension of the same. It was so different from Shanghai that we had to start all over again, but it wasn’t too much of a trial. Especially not for me, I guess, given that I was on the road for 44 weeks out of 52.
Now we find ourselves in a country of which our homeland was once a small colony, a trading post at the outskirts of the world. That, we thought, would give us some commonality, some shared history and customs and whatnot; but we didn’t really know what to expect. We just knew it would be a change.
And a change it was. Take, for example, my favourite thing in the universe: bureaucracy. In the Netherlands, everything is regulated – and I say this as somebody who tangled with the Chinese authorities regularly. To take a tree out of the garden you need the permission of the local council (called “Die Gemeente”, which is pretty funny if you know Afrikaans) in the form of a “Kapvergunning” (literally, permission to fell).
My wife and I had to have our marriage “audited” so that the Gemeente could be absolutely, positively sure we were actually legally married. That nearly got sticky when it emerged that my wife shares my surname. You see, according to custom here, she is supposed to have kept her maiden name on all legal documents.
The value system, on the other hand, harks back to the best memories of our childhood. The other day we had to visit the local GP to register and for a quick family check-up, because it would be unthinkable (not to mention unwise) not to. As we walked into the waiting room with about ten other people in it, we got funny looks, but didn’t realise why. Not until the next visitor opened the door and loudly greeted everybody with a hearty “Goeie Morge”, which was returned by everyone – except us, who weren’t quick on the uptake.
Men open doors for women, cars wait patiently for bicycles to pass first, waiters are friendly, senior citizens are treated with respect and family values are held in high esteem. It takes some getting used to, but it isn’t exactly unpleasant.
I guess simple good manners don’t need to fall by the wayside even as the world moves at breakneck speed. Our new home is proof of this. This, above all, is why we want to make this our home; not just another stop on the slow-mo round-the-world adventure journey we once considered ourselves to be on. So much so that, sitting in the rather beautiful centre of Prague, I feel quite homesick, and I’m not thinking of sunny South Africa.
Going Dutch
WE HAVE BEEN LIVING IN THE NETHERLANDS officially for thirty days (even though we aren’t residents yet and I haven’t spent much time at home), so I consider myself qualified to start comparing it with Beijing and Shanghai, where the family was based before.
The move itself did not go smoothly, despite the fact that my wife is a born project manager. Three weeks in, though, and you’d have thought we’d been living here all our lives. The house, at least, is livable. And compared to the other expat families around here that puts us way ahead of the curve.
We have located all the essentials: shops, sport clubs, restaurants, doctors, dentists, schools, council offices and garbage dumps. Now we’re in the process of integrating into our little village and starting to discover its charms and peculiarities.
Hilversum might not be small in South African terms, but it really is a little village. On Mondays the shops don’t open before one. On Saturdays they close at four. On Sundays nothing, but nothing, is open.
So far that has been the biggest adjustment. We came from a city with humongous malls open 24/7/365. Not that this constraint is necessarily a bad thing. It will help us slow our pace a little and live life the way we should here, with weekends being devoted to family time.
Technically we reside on the outskirts of town, but we are close enough to everything to have traded in our mountain bikes for the real Dutch deal, what they call Oupa and Ouma bicycles. They really are more comfortable for the 15-minute commute through a forest to the centre of our village.
The lifestyle is seductive, and very different to that in China. An airfield is a five-minute walk from the house and gliding enthusiasts congregate there every Sunday. You can spend all day just watching gliders being towed into the air and sweeping around hypnotically.
Behind our house is a forest nature reserve to which we have free access. It’s like having a botanical garden for a backyard and it lends itself to walks. And there are a couple of brilliant little restaurants within easy walking or biking distance; we are still working our way through them.
The main entertainment, though, are the festivals, of which there seems to be an example every second week. Coming up is the Zomer festival, even though we are just entering autumn. Perhaps it is a celebration of the passing of summer? That would fit, because these people will use any excuse to block off the centre of town, erect some tents and throw a street party with live music everywhere.
The public transport system is a dream. Fifteen minutes by bicycle puts us at the train station and from there it is a short hop to Amsterdam – where you can find open shops on a Sunday in case of emergency. But it also gives us access to the rest of the country.
Right now my heart is set on visiting Zwolle, near the German border, to see one of two surviving “witch scales”. These instruments were used to weigh women, and those that didn’t meet specifications could be burned alive. Clearly extended broom usage has long-term side effects in terms of your relationship with gravity.
We have found the Dutch to be laid-back and exceptionally friendly people, and it helps that we can communicate. Everyone is keen to speak English, but our native Afrikaans comes in handy nonetheless. Right until German and French words creep into the conversation, which is where we all lose the conversational thread. We’ve decided everybody will learn Dutch, the kids at school and the wife and I through a tutor. We think it’s important if we are to fully integrate.
And we do want to integrate because, hopefully, we will stick around for longer than we did in China. I suppose it’s ironic then that I’m writing this from a freezing Warsaw.
The move itself did not go smoothly, despite the fact that my wife is a born project manager. Three weeks in, though, and you’d have thought we’d been living here all our lives. The house, at least, is livable. And compared to the other expat families around here that puts us way ahead of the curve.
We have located all the essentials: shops, sport clubs, restaurants, doctors, dentists, schools, council offices and garbage dumps. Now we’re in the process of integrating into our little village and starting to discover its charms and peculiarities.
Hilversum might not be small in South African terms, but it really is a little village. On Mondays the shops don’t open before one. On Saturdays they close at four. On Sundays nothing, but nothing, is open.
So far that has been the biggest adjustment. We came from a city with humongous malls open 24/7/365. Not that this constraint is necessarily a bad thing. It will help us slow our pace a little and live life the way we should here, with weekends being devoted to family time.
Technically we reside on the outskirts of town, but we are close enough to everything to have traded in our mountain bikes for the real Dutch deal, what they call Oupa and Ouma bicycles. They really are more comfortable for the 15-minute commute through a forest to the centre of our village.
The lifestyle is seductive, and very different to that in China. An airfield is a five-minute walk from the house and gliding enthusiasts congregate there every Sunday. You can spend all day just watching gliders being towed into the air and sweeping around hypnotically.
Behind our house is a forest nature reserve to which we have free access. It’s like having a botanical garden for a backyard and it lends itself to walks. And there are a couple of brilliant little restaurants within easy walking or biking distance; we are still working our way through them.
The main entertainment, though, are the festivals, of which there seems to be an example every second week. Coming up is the Zomer festival, even though we are just entering autumn. Perhaps it is a celebration of the passing of summer? That would fit, because these people will use any excuse to block off the centre of town, erect some tents and throw a street party with live music everywhere.
The public transport system is a dream. Fifteen minutes by bicycle puts us at the train station and from there it is a short hop to Amsterdam – where you can find open shops on a Sunday in case of emergency. But it also gives us access to the rest of the country.
Right now my heart is set on visiting Zwolle, near the German border, to see one of two surviving “witch scales”. These instruments were used to weigh women, and those that didn’t meet specifications could be burned alive. Clearly extended broom usage has long-term side effects in terms of your relationship with gravity.
We have found the Dutch to be laid-back and exceptionally friendly people, and it helps that we can communicate. Everyone is keen to speak English, but our native Afrikaans comes in handy nonetheless. Right until German and French words creep into the conversation, which is where we all lose the conversational thread. We’ve decided everybody will learn Dutch, the kids at school and the wife and I through a tutor. We think it’s important if we are to fully integrate.
And we do want to integrate because, hopefully, we will stick around for longer than we did in China. I suppose it’s ironic then that I’m writing this from a freezing Warsaw.
First world furniture fracas
IT WAS AN ILL OMEN WHEN OUR FLIGHT TO Europe was mysteriously cancelled for “logistical reasons”. But otherwise the move to Holland was on track. After two months of limbo and living out of suitcases, we would be sleeping in our own beds again. Or so we thought.
Here was the plan. Arrive on Thursday, have the house in livable condition by Monday and sort out the details from there onwards. Sure.
At 8am on Friday morning, two guys pitched up in a car, apparently part of the assembly crew. The shipping container into which they were supposed to assemble finally arrived at 9am, which wouldn’t have been too bad if it didn’t come with a total crew of two. This for a load that took eight guys more than two days to pack in China. Factor in that the truck couldn’t actually make it onto the property (an unforeseen difficulty) and we now had four people to do the job of twice that many while also carting all our material possessions fifty metres up a driveway.
But hey, this is the first world, where labour is expensive but labour-reducing equipment is ubiquitous. By 2pm we had a small truck added to the team. Now everything had to come out of the container, onto the truck, up the driveway, down from the truck and into the house. Things were getting more than a little chaotic, especially as the sun started setting and everything was dumped in a complete, unorganised mess. We would pay for that later.
As the day drew to a close, we were kindly informed that nobody from the removal company would be on site the next day because everybody had to pitch in on another, particularly large, move. This, despite our weeks of careful planning and scheduling. To say we retired to our hotel in a less than happy mood would be an understatement.
On Saturday we learned that, yes, it could indeed get worse. The sub-contractors tasked with re-assembling the furnishings (the kids’ beds, the computer desks, the wardrobes) faced a huge pile of almost-matching parts that had been strewn haphazardly about the place. On top of that, the Chinese movers had neglected to send through the re-assembly plans. Our assemblers were experts at the IKEA way of doing things, but little else. It took them one day to assemble the shell of one wardrobe – and nothing else. We spent the first night in our new house sleeping on mattresses on the floor, ever less enamoured of our first first-world living experience.
I kicked up a stink like you’ve never seen. New experts arrived and my wife taught them how to sort parts and figure where they might go. By Day Six we were where we should have been on Day Three, and wiser for the experience.
To be fair, many things went right. The kids had a great orientation at the school. Our visit to the immigration department took 15 minutes, and an hour later the entire family had social security numbers issued by the Leiden tax office. I can’t quite get my internet connection configured yet, but when it is up and running I’ll have a connection five times as fast as anything I could get in South Africa, without any download cap.
Next time, though, if I had the choice, I’d rather have the Chinese bureaucracy than the Dutch logistical skills.
Here was the plan. Arrive on Thursday, have the house in livable condition by Monday and sort out the details from there onwards. Sure.
At 8am on Friday morning, two guys pitched up in a car, apparently part of the assembly crew. The shipping container into which they were supposed to assemble finally arrived at 9am, which wouldn’t have been too bad if it didn’t come with a total crew of two. This for a load that took eight guys more than two days to pack in China. Factor in that the truck couldn’t actually make it onto the property (an unforeseen difficulty) and we now had four people to do the job of twice that many while also carting all our material possessions fifty metres up a driveway.
But hey, this is the first world, where labour is expensive but labour-reducing equipment is ubiquitous. By 2pm we had a small truck added to the team. Now everything had to come out of the container, onto the truck, up the driveway, down from the truck and into the house. Things were getting more than a little chaotic, especially as the sun started setting and everything was dumped in a complete, unorganised mess. We would pay for that later.
As the day drew to a close, we were kindly informed that nobody from the removal company would be on site the next day because everybody had to pitch in on another, particularly large, move. This, despite our weeks of careful planning and scheduling. To say we retired to our hotel in a less than happy mood would be an understatement.
On Saturday we learned that, yes, it could indeed get worse. The sub-contractors tasked with re-assembling the furnishings (the kids’ beds, the computer desks, the wardrobes) faced a huge pile of almost-matching parts that had been strewn haphazardly about the place. On top of that, the Chinese movers had neglected to send through the re-assembly plans. Our assemblers were experts at the IKEA way of doing things, but little else. It took them one day to assemble the shell of one wardrobe – and nothing else. We spent the first night in our new house sleeping on mattresses on the floor, ever less enamoured of our first first-world living experience.
I kicked up a stink like you’ve never seen. New experts arrived and my wife taught them how to sort parts and figure where they might go. By Day Six we were where we should have been on Day Three, and wiser for the experience.
To be fair, many things went right. The kids had a great orientation at the school. Our visit to the immigration department took 15 minutes, and an hour later the entire family had social security numbers issued by the Leiden tax office. I can’t quite get my internet connection configured yet, but when it is up and running I’ll have a connection five times as fast as anything I could get in South Africa, without any download cap.
Next time, though, if I had the choice, I’d rather have the Chinese bureaucracy than the Dutch logistical skills.
European travails
THEY SAY THE THREE MOST STRESSFUL THINGS you can go through are divorce, death in the family and moving house. I can’t speak for the first two, but there is a qualifier missing from the third. The most stressful thing you can do is move house to the First World.
My family has relocated seven times now. The last one was a treat: Shanghai to Beijing. Sure, it doesn’t cross a national boundary, but it may as well have. Everything from work permits to health insurance had to be cancelled in the one and redone in the other, thanks to all the provincial regulations.
But of course, with my luck, no sooner had we settled into Beijing than work took me to Europe instead; Moscow through London is now my beat. So this time the wife and kids are trotting off to the Netherlands. We are the very model of a modern globalised family. And we’re starting to realise how stressful and expensive that can be. Globalisation may be great and labour may be mobile, but it isn’t half as easy as they (probably the same they that came up with the stress list) make it out to be.
The least of it was de-registering everything in China – and that has left me not just greyer around the top, but with substantially less to turn grey. The stress, the effort, and the expense, however, come with living in limbo.
We absolutely had to be out of China by the last week of June, because that was when our permits ran out. The same permits that had to be de-registered even though they are expiring and could not be renewed. No, I don’t know either, but clearly the bureaucrats have their reasons even if no mortal can fathom them.
Yet we can’t actually move into the Netherlands yet, because the bureaucrats there insist that you may not set foot in their country during the residence application process – which takes three months if you are lucky.
We couldn’t start the application process early, because fi rst we had to know that the kids were accepted by the schools they are to attend, and second we had to fi nd a house in the beautiful Hilversum, just outside Amsterdam. School applications could only be processed from the middle of April and all the details could only be settled by mid-May. That left us with just less than six weeks to cut our paper ties with China; and only then could we ask the Netherlands to let us in.
This presented a conundrum. We were welcome in neither China nor the Netherlands. We couldn’t return to South Africa, or I would have had to either abandon the family or spend just about every waking (and many sleeping) hour on some form of aircraft.
So, when the school year ended in mid-June, we packed the kids off to Cape Town to, ahem, spend the holidays with my parents. The wife and I went to Brussels, where we now have a small apartment that serves as home base. I can get where I need to be, and the wife can organise everything in the country next door – the one she isn’t allowed to set foot in.
Things were starting to get a little tense towards the middle of July, when I could mercifully go on leave and reunite the family in the fairest Cape.
We were hoping to get into the Netherlands by the end of July, giving us two weeks before the school year starts. But delays have started mounting again, and we’ll now be lucky to make it a week before that. So, here we go again, arranging temporary accommodation and transport, making sure our cardboard-packed lives can stay in storage in Rotterdam. It’s not the moving house that causes the stress, I’m starting to think, but the endless time you spend not being settled anywhere at all.
It is also a rather expensive process, in more ways than one. You want to talk about carbon footprint? I don’t even want to begin to calculate how much fuel we’ve burned on this miniature odyssey.
All just to move to the civilised world. I sure hope it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
My family has relocated seven times now. The last one was a treat: Shanghai to Beijing. Sure, it doesn’t cross a national boundary, but it may as well have. Everything from work permits to health insurance had to be cancelled in the one and redone in the other, thanks to all the provincial regulations.
But of course, with my luck, no sooner had we settled into Beijing than work took me to Europe instead; Moscow through London is now my beat. So this time the wife and kids are trotting off to the Netherlands. We are the very model of a modern globalised family. And we’re starting to realise how stressful and expensive that can be. Globalisation may be great and labour may be mobile, but it isn’t half as easy as they (probably the same they that came up with the stress list) make it out to be.
The least of it was de-registering everything in China – and that has left me not just greyer around the top, but with substantially less to turn grey. The stress, the effort, and the expense, however, come with living in limbo.
We absolutely had to be out of China by the last week of June, because that was when our permits ran out. The same permits that had to be de-registered even though they are expiring and could not be renewed. No, I don’t know either, but clearly the bureaucrats have their reasons even if no mortal can fathom them.
Yet we can’t actually move into the Netherlands yet, because the bureaucrats there insist that you may not set foot in their country during the residence application process – which takes three months if you are lucky.
We couldn’t start the application process early, because fi rst we had to know that the kids were accepted by the schools they are to attend, and second we had to fi nd a house in the beautiful Hilversum, just outside Amsterdam. School applications could only be processed from the middle of April and all the details could only be settled by mid-May. That left us with just less than six weeks to cut our paper ties with China; and only then could we ask the Netherlands to let us in.
This presented a conundrum. We were welcome in neither China nor the Netherlands. We couldn’t return to South Africa, or I would have had to either abandon the family or spend just about every waking (and many sleeping) hour on some form of aircraft.
So, when the school year ended in mid-June, we packed the kids off to Cape Town to, ahem, spend the holidays with my parents. The wife and I went to Brussels, where we now have a small apartment that serves as home base. I can get where I need to be, and the wife can organise everything in the country next door – the one she isn’t allowed to set foot in.
Things were starting to get a little tense towards the middle of July, when I could mercifully go on leave and reunite the family in the fairest Cape.
We were hoping to get into the Netherlands by the end of July, giving us two weeks before the school year starts. But delays have started mounting again, and we’ll now be lucky to make it a week before that. So, here we go again, arranging temporary accommodation and transport, making sure our cardboard-packed lives can stay in storage in Rotterdam. It’s not the moving house that causes the stress, I’m starting to think, but the endless time you spend not being settled anywhere at all.
It is also a rather expensive process, in more ways than one. You want to talk about carbon footprint? I don’t even want to begin to calculate how much fuel we’ve burned on this miniature odyssey.
All just to move to the civilised world. I sure hope it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
Everyone else is doing it...
AS FAR AS I KNOW MY, FAMILY still lives somewhere in Beijing.
I do a bit of travelling these days. In February I joined an airline loyalty scheme and in less than four months racked up 189 000 miles – not counting those on the other airlines I occasionally use. The last time I saw my wife she expressed concern when I started looking for the volume buttons on the arm chair at home.
Most of my business is in the Northern Hemisphere these days, and I’m impressed.
Moscow strikes me as a vibrant and bustling city, where you can see the tremendous pace of development. It’s a tough place to do business as a foreigner (and expensive, at $700 a night for a hotel room), but you can’t not be there.
The other former Soviet bloc countries you have to look at individually. In Kiev, in the Ukraine, the biggest and most beautiful building is still that of the Ministry of Security. The city centre is beautiful – more so even than that of Moscow – but its edges are dilapidated and the infrastructure is crappy. Politically, I’ll wait and see. Things are better since the Orange Revolution, but the existence of a pro-Western president and a pro-Russian prime minister does not make me comfortable. Tellingly, members of the younger generation are starting to talk in Ukrainian and sneer at their parents, who mostly use Russian.
Poland still shows the legacy of Soviet misrule, but the process of joining the European community is already paying dividends. With freedom of movement through Western Europe, there are now some two million Polish immigrants working as cheap labour in the likes of Germany and the Netherlands, and at least some of their earnings flow back home.
I remember when I first came to realize what makes the Poles tick. I was wandering the streets of Warsaw one evening, amazed at how quiet the city was, even for a Sunday. Suddenly, at nine, the doors to the many churches opened and people streamed onto the streets. It’s no accident that the previous Pope was Polish.
Western Europe also continues to surprise me. I know it is supposed to be one large socialist state, creaking under the weight of its own inertia, but on the internet front I’ve seen some of the most amazing developments. In Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands I’ve seen what can happen when people really embrace technology.
In fact, across much of the Northern Hemisphere I’ve seen both developed and developing economies ready to kick into a higher gear, mostly because of new internet developments and their integration into everyday business. More than that though, I’ve been impressed by the energy and drive of the people I see and meet. Combine the two, and good things are guaranteed to happen.
But I wouldn’t recommend Helsinki, which must be the most boring place I’ve ever visited. Over a business dinner, my hosts told me the mayor had organised a campaign around Friday afternoon tea, just to get people out of their houses so they could see what the neighbours looked like.
Another place I don’t find particularly exciting is, unfortunately, South Africa. Not because of the energy of the people, but because they don’t have the internet infrastructure that is driving so much development elsewhere. It’s tough to lament how far your own country lags the world’s frontrunners. But maybe now that communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri has promised to speed up liberalisation our internet will finally flourish.
Now that would be really interesting!
I do a bit of travelling these days. In February I joined an airline loyalty scheme and in less than four months racked up 189 000 miles – not counting those on the other airlines I occasionally use. The last time I saw my wife she expressed concern when I started looking for the volume buttons on the arm chair at home.
Most of my business is in the Northern Hemisphere these days, and I’m impressed.
Moscow strikes me as a vibrant and bustling city, where you can see the tremendous pace of development. It’s a tough place to do business as a foreigner (and expensive, at $700 a night for a hotel room), but you can’t not be there.
The other former Soviet bloc countries you have to look at individually. In Kiev, in the Ukraine, the biggest and most beautiful building is still that of the Ministry of Security. The city centre is beautiful – more so even than that of Moscow – but its edges are dilapidated and the infrastructure is crappy. Politically, I’ll wait and see. Things are better since the Orange Revolution, but the existence of a pro-Western president and a pro-Russian prime minister does not make me comfortable. Tellingly, members of the younger generation are starting to talk in Ukrainian and sneer at their parents, who mostly use Russian.
Poland still shows the legacy of Soviet misrule, but the process of joining the European community is already paying dividends. With freedom of movement through Western Europe, there are now some two million Polish immigrants working as cheap labour in the likes of Germany and the Netherlands, and at least some of their earnings flow back home.
I remember when I first came to realize what makes the Poles tick. I was wandering the streets of Warsaw one evening, amazed at how quiet the city was, even for a Sunday. Suddenly, at nine, the doors to the many churches opened and people streamed onto the streets. It’s no accident that the previous Pope was Polish.
Western Europe also continues to surprise me. I know it is supposed to be one large socialist state, creaking under the weight of its own inertia, but on the internet front I’ve seen some of the most amazing developments. In Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands I’ve seen what can happen when people really embrace technology.
In fact, across much of the Northern Hemisphere I’ve seen both developed and developing economies ready to kick into a higher gear, mostly because of new internet developments and their integration into everyday business. More than that though, I’ve been impressed by the energy and drive of the people I see and meet. Combine the two, and good things are guaranteed to happen.
But I wouldn’t recommend Helsinki, which must be the most boring place I’ve ever visited. Over a business dinner, my hosts told me the mayor had organised a campaign around Friday afternoon tea, just to get people out of their houses so they could see what the neighbours looked like.
Another place I don’t find particularly exciting is, unfortunately, South Africa. Not because of the energy of the people, but because they don’t have the internet infrastructure that is driving so much development elsewhere. It’s tough to lament how far your own country lags the world’s frontrunners. But maybe now that communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri has promised to speed up liberalisation our internet will finally flourish.
Now that would be really interesting!
Know your tsotsi
I HAVE BEEN TRAVELLING THE WORLD FOR ALMOST two decades now. That has given me ample opportunity to complain about airlines, hotels, rude shopkeepers, useless waiters and, worst of all, embassy people tasked with handling visas.
One thing I’ve never had reason to complain much about is crime, because in all these years nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me. The first thing I do in a new city is walk around gawking like a typical tourist and generally presenting a soft target, and yet I haven’t been mugged, robbed, kidnapped or run over by a bus. But there’s a first time for everything.
Ah, Buenos Aires. It’s a great mix between old and new and a fantastic city for a stroll at the height of summer, if you are from South Africa anyway.
I arrived on a Friday and hit the streets with a colleague for the habitual city-walk right after breakfast on Saturday. The birds were singing, the weather was fine – and there wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets. Only later did we realise that, here, dinner starts at nine and the entertainment kicks off at midnight. The people we had expected to be thronging those boulevards were all still sleeping off the night before.
But, all the better, because it gave us the freedom to dawdle as we checked out the Obelisk, a cathedral or two and the Pink Palace, where Evita Peron famously addressed the crowds. Then there was a stroll down the “French Riviera of South America” and coffee with a view of trophy yachts with trophy wives (OK, they might not have been wives) on board.
It was on the walk back, with shopping on our minds, that they got me.
There was a splash, and suddenly my face and shirt back were wet. I looked down and there were blobs of dirty grey cement everywhere. Clearly an invisible worker on top of a nearby building had managed to hit me squarely, the incompetent fool. Like any good tourist, I stood there fuming about the brand new trousers he had ruined and trying to figure out what to do – while my blissfully unaware colleague continued down the street, head tilted back to look at the pretty buildings.
A nice old lady materialised and handed me a couple of tissues. She produced a bottle of water and started helping me clean up. As her husband, a genial chap in his sixties, strolled up, she told me to bend over so she could pour water over my head and wash my face. Her husband, bless him, jumped right in with some vigorous tissue wiping of his own.
Five minutes later, things were as good as they were going to get, and I caught up with my colleague to tell him about the strange accident and the nice old couple who sprang to my rescue.
Back to the shopping, but, just as we were about to enter a shop, two young guys in jeans and t-shirts approached us. Now I know a tsotsi when I see one, and I wasn’t going to be the next tourist on the menu. They tried flashing some kind of ID documents, but I was having none of it: shields up, phasers on stun. As they left I patted myself on the back.
Then they returned, this time with two uniformed policemen, to confirm that they were plain-clothed detectives. Now somewhat more co-operative, I took their advice and checked my wallet. Safe and sound, yes sir. Then I checked for the $500 (US, not funny-money) that had been in there. Had being the operative word.
The cops had noticed the grey spots still on the back of my shirt and they were looking out for victims of this new con. As you might have guessed, somebody walks behind you and squirts you, using a syringe or a water bottle. It could be cement, or something that resembles bird droppings. Then the rest of the team cleans you out.
Okay, so my wallet was in a back pocket; but it was buttoned up. That cane-carrying old man must have had nimble fingers and the skills to go with them.
I am now a lot more suspicious of old people, but I’m not nearly as outraged as many of the people I have told this story to. After all, I had a great time in Buenos Aires and I have an entertaining new story to tell, all without any physical harm.
Maybe it’s because I come from South Africa but, shucks, I’m glad to have made a contribution to the Argentinean economy.
One thing I’ve never had reason to complain much about is crime, because in all these years nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me. The first thing I do in a new city is walk around gawking like a typical tourist and generally presenting a soft target, and yet I haven’t been mugged, robbed, kidnapped or run over by a bus. But there’s a first time for everything.
Ah, Buenos Aires. It’s a great mix between old and new and a fantastic city for a stroll at the height of summer, if you are from South Africa anyway.
I arrived on a Friday and hit the streets with a colleague for the habitual city-walk right after breakfast on Saturday. The birds were singing, the weather was fine – and there wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets. Only later did we realise that, here, dinner starts at nine and the entertainment kicks off at midnight. The people we had expected to be thronging those boulevards were all still sleeping off the night before.
But, all the better, because it gave us the freedom to dawdle as we checked out the Obelisk, a cathedral or two and the Pink Palace, where Evita Peron famously addressed the crowds. Then there was a stroll down the “French Riviera of South America” and coffee with a view of trophy yachts with trophy wives (OK, they might not have been wives) on board.
It was on the walk back, with shopping on our minds, that they got me.
There was a splash, and suddenly my face and shirt back were wet. I looked down and there were blobs of dirty grey cement everywhere. Clearly an invisible worker on top of a nearby building had managed to hit me squarely, the incompetent fool. Like any good tourist, I stood there fuming about the brand new trousers he had ruined and trying to figure out what to do – while my blissfully unaware colleague continued down the street, head tilted back to look at the pretty buildings.
A nice old lady materialised and handed me a couple of tissues. She produced a bottle of water and started helping me clean up. As her husband, a genial chap in his sixties, strolled up, she told me to bend over so she could pour water over my head and wash my face. Her husband, bless him, jumped right in with some vigorous tissue wiping of his own.
Five minutes later, things were as good as they were going to get, and I caught up with my colleague to tell him about the strange accident and the nice old couple who sprang to my rescue.
Back to the shopping, but, just as we were about to enter a shop, two young guys in jeans and t-shirts approached us. Now I know a tsotsi when I see one, and I wasn’t going to be the next tourist on the menu. They tried flashing some kind of ID documents, but I was having none of it: shields up, phasers on stun. As they left I patted myself on the back.
Then they returned, this time with two uniformed policemen, to confirm that they were plain-clothed detectives. Now somewhat more co-operative, I took their advice and checked my wallet. Safe and sound, yes sir. Then I checked for the $500 (US, not funny-money) that had been in there. Had being the operative word.
The cops had noticed the grey spots still on the back of my shirt and they were looking out for victims of this new con. As you might have guessed, somebody walks behind you and squirts you, using a syringe or a water bottle. It could be cement, or something that resembles bird droppings. Then the rest of the team cleans you out.
Okay, so my wallet was in a back pocket; but it was buttoned up. That cane-carrying old man must have had nimble fingers and the skills to go with them.
I am now a lot more suspicious of old people, but I’m not nearly as outraged as many of the people I have told this story to. After all, I had a great time in Buenos Aires and I have an entertaining new story to tell, all without any physical harm.
Maybe it’s because I come from South Africa but, shucks, I’m glad to have made a contribution to the Argentinean economy.
Embassy Games
IT'S FUN BEING AN EXPAT BUSINESSMAN only until your children get thrown into a hell-hole Chinese jail for the heinous crime of not having the right papers. Well, theoretically speaking.
Every Monday morning my daughter has to present to her class an interesting fact she has researched. It is known as WIDKT (which the kids manage, somehow, to pronounce phonetically), or “Wow, I didn’t Know that” and they usually start off by asking a startling question.
So, to follow the format: did you know that, when you are the minor child of a South African passport holder, the day you turn 16 your passport immediately expires, even if it nominally has an expiry date in 2009?
Here are the facts: you cannot apply for an adult passport without presenting a South African identity document. You cannot apply for an ID before you turn 16, and then you can only do it by physically presenting yourself to an office in South Africa. Then you have to wait six months – at an outside estimate – for your ID book to arrive. Then, and only then, can you apply for an adult passport, which will take another six months to process if the gods of bureaucracy are feeling benign.
Oh, and you can’t apply for a temporary, emergency passport without being in possession of a valid ID either.
Therefore, let’s say you are the child of an expat in, for example, Beijing. On your sixteenth birthday you become an illegal alien and subject to all the judicial remedies that implies – to wit arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. On your following birthday you could turn legal again, if the wheels are all turning smoothly.
Luckily a responsible expat parent would know all of this by instinct and would apply for all the necessary documents on or before the child’s fifteenth birthday, as the gracious and friendly staff at the South African embassy here informed me.
Being a naive, unworldly businessman, I’ve always thought embassies exist to establish diplomatic relations between two countries, relations that can flower into mutually beneficial trade, and to then protect the rights of and assist citizens who find themselves in a foreign country.
It has dawned on me that, instead, embassies exist primarily to make my life hell. This has been a hard lesson learnt only by spending subjective centuries, mostly in visa queues, at various embassies.
It’s not just the inefficiency, but the multifarious and often creative ways that different countries have found to inflict torture on me. The variety has led me to believe there is a secret event – along the lines of an intra-embassy Olympics – where career diplomats are rated on the average psychological damage they inflict on visitors.
I won’t name the countries involved, for fear of one day being stopped at a border post for a “personal interview” involving latex gloves, but here are some examples of the different visa systems.
Embassy A requires you to make an appointment, usually six to eight weeks in advance. When you receive a reference number, date and time, you are told to arrive exactly five minutes before that scheduled appointment. That, however, is a cruel joke, because all that happens at the appointed time is that your identity is checked and you are allowed into an outer-inner sanctum, where you may queue with 300 other duped applicants in the initial admin line. Then you have to enter the fingerprint queue, then the initial processing queue, then the personal interview queue. The interview consists of a two-minute interrogation, after which you are told to return in five days to collect your passport. Which may or may not have a visa in it.
Embassy B, by contrast, only processes visa applications on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 09:00 and 11:00. Only one person may enter the embassy at a time; so, after standing in line from 07:00 (and not a moment later if you actually want to make it into the building), a very scary security guard calls you in. He escorts you to a chair where you can examine your reflection in a one-way mirror-window while a voice from a box asks you countless questions. Five days later you are allowed to return (at 07:00) and queue again for your passport, which may or may not contain a visa. If, on either day, you don’t make it inside by the stroke of 11:00, tough.
The one embassy I will name is that of the Russian Federation. I entered that offshoot of the Kremlin at 09:00 to apply for a one-year, multiple-entry visa. I was out at 09:30 for a coffee around the corner and back at 11:00 to collect my passport, visa and all.
So, let’s see, would I rather do business in Country A? or Country B? or perhaps Russia? Back to those WIDKT facts. After further intensive, even feverish research, and with help from some nice folk in South Africa, it emerges that I’m not totally lacking in paternal instincts. Everything I was told by the local embassy was true, except the bit about the passport that suddenly becomes invalid.
There was some celebration around the family dinner table that night, let me tell you.
Until we realised that, some day, we would have to deal with another embassy.
Every Monday morning my daughter has to present to her class an interesting fact she has researched. It is known as WIDKT (which the kids manage, somehow, to pronounce phonetically), or “Wow, I didn’t Know that” and they usually start off by asking a startling question.
So, to follow the format: did you know that, when you are the minor child of a South African passport holder, the day you turn 16 your passport immediately expires, even if it nominally has an expiry date in 2009?
Here are the facts: you cannot apply for an adult passport without presenting a South African identity document. You cannot apply for an ID before you turn 16, and then you can only do it by physically presenting yourself to an office in South Africa. Then you have to wait six months – at an outside estimate – for your ID book to arrive. Then, and only then, can you apply for an adult passport, which will take another six months to process if the gods of bureaucracy are feeling benign.
Oh, and you can’t apply for a temporary, emergency passport without being in possession of a valid ID either.
Therefore, let’s say you are the child of an expat in, for example, Beijing. On your sixteenth birthday you become an illegal alien and subject to all the judicial remedies that implies – to wit arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. On your following birthday you could turn legal again, if the wheels are all turning smoothly.
Luckily a responsible expat parent would know all of this by instinct and would apply for all the necessary documents on or before the child’s fifteenth birthday, as the gracious and friendly staff at the South African embassy here informed me.
Being a naive, unworldly businessman, I’ve always thought embassies exist to establish diplomatic relations between two countries, relations that can flower into mutually beneficial trade, and to then protect the rights of and assist citizens who find themselves in a foreign country.
It has dawned on me that, instead, embassies exist primarily to make my life hell. This has been a hard lesson learnt only by spending subjective centuries, mostly in visa queues, at various embassies.
It’s not just the inefficiency, but the multifarious and often creative ways that different countries have found to inflict torture on me. The variety has led me to believe there is a secret event – along the lines of an intra-embassy Olympics – where career diplomats are rated on the average psychological damage they inflict on visitors.
I won’t name the countries involved, for fear of one day being stopped at a border post for a “personal interview” involving latex gloves, but here are some examples of the different visa systems.
Embassy A requires you to make an appointment, usually six to eight weeks in advance. When you receive a reference number, date and time, you are told to arrive exactly five minutes before that scheduled appointment. That, however, is a cruel joke, because all that happens at the appointed time is that your identity is checked and you are allowed into an outer-inner sanctum, where you may queue with 300 other duped applicants in the initial admin line. Then you have to enter the fingerprint queue, then the initial processing queue, then the personal interview queue. The interview consists of a two-minute interrogation, after which you are told to return in five days to collect your passport. Which may or may not have a visa in it.
Embassy B, by contrast, only processes visa applications on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 09:00 and 11:00. Only one person may enter the embassy at a time; so, after standing in line from 07:00 (and not a moment later if you actually want to make it into the building), a very scary security guard calls you in. He escorts you to a chair where you can examine your reflection in a one-way mirror-window while a voice from a box asks you countless questions. Five days later you are allowed to return (at 07:00) and queue again for your passport, which may or may not contain a visa. If, on either day, you don’t make it inside by the stroke of 11:00, tough.
The one embassy I will name is that of the Russian Federation. I entered that offshoot of the Kremlin at 09:00 to apply for a one-year, multiple-entry visa. I was out at 09:30 for a coffee around the corner and back at 11:00 to collect my passport, visa and all.
So, let’s see, would I rather do business in Country A? or Country B? or perhaps Russia? Back to those WIDKT facts. After further intensive, even feverish research, and with help from some nice folk in South Africa, it emerges that I’m not totally lacking in paternal instincts. Everything I was told by the local embassy was true, except the bit about the passport that suddenly becomes invalid.
There was some celebration around the family dinner table that night, let me tell you.
Until we realised that, some day, we would have to deal with another embassy.
Making peace with the long term...
HAVE BEEN IN CHINA FOR JUST LESS THAN THREE YEARS NOW AND FIND THAT ONE OF the benefits is meeting a lot of interesting expats. The only drawback is that you lose friends just as quickly as you make them, because the community is a very mobile one.
One of the friends (we’ll call him Steven) I made when I was still a newbie here recently told me he was on his way back home. This was because he’d been moved to a new project, he said. So we talked about the family and the new project and had a couple of drinks. After which he confessed he had, in fact, requested the move.
That is not at all unusual, of course, but it was his reason that caught me off guard. Simply put, he was "gatvol".
It was the bureaucracy, mostly. He felt he had poured his heart and soul into China for the last six years, but for every step forward there were two steps back. The frustration finally got to him.
Steven’s group operates in a highly regulated industry, even more heavily regulated than the media sector. It is painstaking work to build anything of substance. Steven had made progress and the medium-term prospects were looking good. However, as often happens, new regulations were recently put forward that would push everything into the long-term, so the group would not see the rather more immediate gains they were hoping for. This was the last straw, as far as Steven was concerned.
New business development can be like that here: ebb and flow. It is something you can easily observe, but understanding it is another matter; though I do have some theories of my own.
My best insight into the Chinese way came over tea with an elderly Chinese gentlemen who speaks exceptional English. His view was simple. The Chinese, he said to me, never worry about the here and now. Everything is done to benefit the next generation, and sometimes the generation after that. Short-term setbacks and frustrations are inconsequential.
In the real world, things are a little more complex, of course. Young Chinese are much like young people everywhere in their concern with the now, specifically the material now. But when it comes to the bigger economic picture the old man has a point. The world’s longest continuous compound aggregated economic growth in history does not come about by accident. China’s economy didn’t just start growing 20 years ago; the planning to achieve it started 30 years ago.
The Chinese government is single-minded in its drive to create something for future generations to enjoy. That strikes you after you’ve been here for a while and have run head first into the frustrating consequences of that single-mindedness. But it is also something I admire deeply.
The Chinese government has a specific timetable to which it works in every industry sector. This is not open to negotiation. There is definitely no kow-towing to any company or interest group; just ask the American government. As a result you have, in the execution of these plans, an occasional testing of the waters, followed by a pulling back. Hence the frustrations we have come to know so well.
Legislation and regulations are promulgated to allow certain business activities and developments. People like us jump on those opportunities, but we run the risk of the regulations being tightened up just as our operations get going.
That doesn’t make it any different to a lot of games. Big game fishing, for instance. Those with the patience and the focus catch the really big fish.
One of the friends (we’ll call him Steven) I made when I was still a newbie here recently told me he was on his way back home. This was because he’d been moved to a new project, he said. So we talked about the family and the new project and had a couple of drinks. After which he confessed he had, in fact, requested the move.
That is not at all unusual, of course, but it was his reason that caught me off guard. Simply put, he was "gatvol".
It was the bureaucracy, mostly. He felt he had poured his heart and soul into China for the last six years, but for every step forward there were two steps back. The frustration finally got to him.
Steven’s group operates in a highly regulated industry, even more heavily regulated than the media sector. It is painstaking work to build anything of substance. Steven had made progress and the medium-term prospects were looking good. However, as often happens, new regulations were recently put forward that would push everything into the long-term, so the group would not see the rather more immediate gains they were hoping for. This was the last straw, as far as Steven was concerned.
New business development can be like that here: ebb and flow. It is something you can easily observe, but understanding it is another matter; though I do have some theories of my own.
My best insight into the Chinese way came over tea with an elderly Chinese gentlemen who speaks exceptional English. His view was simple. The Chinese, he said to me, never worry about the here and now. Everything is done to benefit the next generation, and sometimes the generation after that. Short-term setbacks and frustrations are inconsequential.
In the real world, things are a little more complex, of course. Young Chinese are much like young people everywhere in their concern with the now, specifically the material now. But when it comes to the bigger economic picture the old man has a point. The world’s longest continuous compound aggregated economic growth in history does not come about by accident. China’s economy didn’t just start growing 20 years ago; the planning to achieve it started 30 years ago.
The Chinese government is single-minded in its drive to create something for future generations to enjoy. That strikes you after you’ve been here for a while and have run head first into the frustrating consequences of that single-mindedness. But it is also something I admire deeply.
The Chinese government has a specific timetable to which it works in every industry sector. This is not open to negotiation. There is definitely no kow-towing to any company or interest group; just ask the American government. As a result you have, in the execution of these plans, an occasional testing of the waters, followed by a pulling back. Hence the frustrations we have come to know so well.
Legislation and regulations are promulgated to allow certain business activities and developments. People like us jump on those opportunities, but we run the risk of the regulations being tightened up just as our operations get going.
That doesn’t make it any different to a lot of games. Big game fishing, for instance. Those with the patience and the focus catch the really big fish.
The Other Communists
DIE "ROOI GEVAAR". THESE DAYS YOU’D HAVE THOUGHT that refers to China, with its huge population and economic boom. But South Africa’s old apartheid government was far more worried about the source of all things pro-communism, pro-black people and therefore anti-Christian. I remember when we first got television in South Africa in the mid-seventies and we could, for the first time, see televised pictures from the enormous nuclear super power that was the Soviet Union. Those tanks and ballistic missile carriers filing through Red Square, along with the soldiers marching in perfect ranks, made a real impression on me. It was a magnificent display of power.
Today, I find myself walking on Red Square and standing before Lenin’s tomb (where stood the generals saluted by those marching troops) and I experienced a strong sense of reality dislocation. First I, who grew up with the looming "rooi gevaar", relocate to a country with a communist government. Now I find myself standing in the very place that made communism the most feared political ideology in the world.
Secretly, I have always wanted to visit Moscow, a place with enormous history and cultural traditions. That book by George Orwell – required reading in my day – fuelled my desire to try and understand it all first hand.
Luckily I am here in summer, when the weather is perfect for long outdoor walks. There is nothing like exploring a new city on foot to really get a feel for it. Observing the people and their mannerisms from a corner cafe and trying to guess at their mood is my favourite way of exploring. The city is strikingly beautiful although, once you have moved through the main points of interest such as Red Square and the Kremlin, you find yourself in side streets that could as well be in Paris or Amsterdam. Though the streets are full of people, it is eerily quiet, something I have not yet been able to work out and that still surprises.
In most developing economies, I have found, there are some absolute differences between generations. In China young people are not saddled with historic baggage and are very entrepreneurial and generally positive about the future. The same is true of Russia, but here the generation gap is even more stark.
The older people (my age and up) have the hardships of the past etched on their faces; even more so in their eyes, which sometimes seem stone dead. The younger people are full of life and ready to conquer the world in their designer clothes, very unlike their parents, who seem still to be wearing outfits they bought in the seventies. This younger generation seems well educated and confident in the belief that Russia will soon be the largest economy in Europe. The entrepreneurs among them are highly driven and innovative, but they give you a feeling of being hardened veterans. It is difficult to describe it precisely, but it is as if they have absolute belief in their ability to attain their vision.
That may be their defining characteristic. Something you see here that I haven’t experienced in other developing countries is the rigid determination of entrepreneurs. They are not easily swayed and never seem impressed or intimidated. Small talk just gets in the way, and they take some time to adjust to situations where such chatter is necessary in the course of courteous business.
Russia remains far behind China in terms of development; but if you take into account that the entire economy was wiped out in 1998, the recovery has been remarkable. China started its reforms in the seventies, so it has a 20-year lead in infrastructure development.
It is clear to me, though, that Russia will see enormous economic growth and that we could, indeed, see it become one of the biggest economies in Europe in our lifetime still.
Moving in China
MY SOUTH AFRICAN MANAGEMENT TEAM WAS KEEN TO see the back of me when I first moved to China, I reckon. I was always pushing them to live by the rule that change is the only constant.
Now I’m getting a taste of my own medicine. My family and I are preparing to move again, and even though we’ll be staying in the same country it doesn’t feel like it. Moving from Shanghai to Beijing, you see, is just about as much work as changing continents.
We need to de-register everything in Shanghai – stuff like work permits – because we need documented proof to that effect before we can reapply in Beijing. Don’t think you can just transfer the paperwork. No way. Everything works just as if we had never lived in China at all.
It also doesn’t help that you need marriage and birth certificates for each step. Not the usual abridged certificates or copies, but the full, original and unabridged documents that you have to beg and plead for from South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs. Which I had to do all over again after misfiling (my wife insists on saying “lost”) the ones I had. So to apply for residents’ permits for Beijing I have to apply for paperwork from South Africa.
Yet we really look forward to the change, not least of all because we think Beijing is a far more family orientated city than hustling bustling Shanghai. Shanghai attracts the yuppies and is consequently built for entertainment, with restaurants, bars and nightclubs all over the place. By the last count, there were enough western-style restaurants to allow you to eat out every night of the week for five years and never visit the same establishment twice.
Beijing is more like Cape Town, a city we know and love. The pace is slower and the people are friendlier. Rules are more likely to be obeyed here, at the heart of the political establishment. So there is a possibility I might be able to drive my own car again. The place brims with museums and temples and you can pop over to see the Great Wall on a day trip. By the way, if you do visit the wall, try to go to a section called Mutienyu rather than to the tourist traps like Badaling. The former is much more scenic.
Beijing should keep the family happy. The kids will be in the same school this time around, as opposed to the British and American schools they respectively went to in Shanghai. And the wife can’t wait to get there, which bodes well.
And me? I bore easily. Bring on change, I say.
Papers please...
MY WIFE SUSPECTS I HAVE obsessive-compulsive disorder because of my travelling. Not the fact that I travel so much, but because of the routine I stick to.
She’s just jealous I’m so well organised. Everything is always neatly packed. I am always on time for check-in and always go to the same places and do the same things before a flight; depending on the airport, of course.
Actually, those words do make me seem slightly obsessive. Perhaps. Just a bit.
Where I do get obsessive and not a little paranoid is at airport security checkpoints, and especially identity checks. Each time I get to a passport desk I become convinced I will be pulled out of line and, at best, thrown into an interrogation room. I mean, what if they don’t recognise me from my passport photo? I’m not particularly pretty, but that photo is ugly as hell. What if they mistake me for someone with a dodgy record? I’ve been around; I know what can happen when technology goes bad.
My response is an innocent smile to cover the panic. But then I start to worry about looking too innocent and being picked up on suspicion of hiding something.
In China you are subject to an identity check before each flight. Even internal ones. There’s no way you get on a plane from Shanghai to Beijing without a full security check, which includes a passport check in the case of foreigners.
I travel between these cities every week, and I have my routine down pat. I know, for instance, the flight will always be delayed; the only question is how long.
What I did not know, and what none of my Chinese colleagues knew, was that the only valid form of identification is a passport. No exceptions.
As luck would have it, my new passport and the old one entirely filled with stamps (including my residence permit) were both at the Indian consulate for a visa application just as I needed to be in Beijing. Not a problem, I was told, my work permit would work just as well.
Paranoia assuaged, I pitched early for the flight as usual. Airline check-in staffers were happy with the work permit. I strolled to the usual coffee shop and had the usual strong cup and one cigarette. Ten minutes before departure, I sauntered to the security checkpoint. So far, so good.
The first time the security officer demanded my passport I tried to explain myself and show him my work permit. The second time I handed over my South African ID book. There was no third attempt. A senior officer appeared out of nowhere, pulled me out of the line and disappeared with all my documents.
There I stood, worst fears realised, being stared at by a crowd of fellow passengers who seemed to size me for the gallows. Once separated from the herd, one becomes aware that a crowd and a mob are much the same thing. Cell phones aren’t allowed in the security area, but I had to get in touch with friendlier people. As I was explaining the situation to my assistant, the senior security dude reappeared. I could see he was irritated I was on a phone, so I handed it over to him as meekly as possible. For the next five minutes, he and my assistant had a shouting match. Then he turned, handed me phone and papers and marched me out of the airport, without further word.
Flustered, I phoned my assistant again. “No passport, no entry,” she said. And no negotiation.
Suddenly I remembered my temporary passport at home. I got the assistant to call the travel agent to change the ticket and phoned the company driver to get him over to the house. I phoned my wife, who leapt from the bath to search for the damn thing. She hardly had time to put on clothes before the driver arrived.
After the flurry of excitement, I had a temporary passport and a new boarding pass. But I was paranoid about passing though security again, where the same surly officer was still on duty. How would I explain the miraculous appearance of a passport on such short notice? One that was supposed to be at an embassy?
I gave myself a stern talking-to and scurried through in a different queue, with no hint of an innocent smile. If the Chinese had been using behaviour profiling, I’d have had explaining to do. I made it to Beijing after the obligatory flight delay. I also made it to all hastily rescheduled meetings and ended the day at night. But, instead of falling into bed, I found myself in a hotel lobby trying to explain why I had neither visa nor residence permit in my passport.
Cue that innocent smile...
She’s just jealous I’m so well organised. Everything is always neatly packed. I am always on time for check-in and always go to the same places and do the same things before a flight; depending on the airport, of course.
Actually, those words do make me seem slightly obsessive. Perhaps. Just a bit.
Where I do get obsessive and not a little paranoid is at airport security checkpoints, and especially identity checks. Each time I get to a passport desk I become convinced I will be pulled out of line and, at best, thrown into an interrogation room. I mean, what if they don’t recognise me from my passport photo? I’m not particularly pretty, but that photo is ugly as hell. What if they mistake me for someone with a dodgy record? I’ve been around; I know what can happen when technology goes bad.
My response is an innocent smile to cover the panic. But then I start to worry about looking too innocent and being picked up on suspicion of hiding something.
In China you are subject to an identity check before each flight. Even internal ones. There’s no way you get on a plane from Shanghai to Beijing without a full security check, which includes a passport check in the case of foreigners.
I travel between these cities every week, and I have my routine down pat. I know, for instance, the flight will always be delayed; the only question is how long.
What I did not know, and what none of my Chinese colleagues knew, was that the only valid form of identification is a passport. No exceptions.
As luck would have it, my new passport and the old one entirely filled with stamps (including my residence permit) were both at the Indian consulate for a visa application just as I needed to be in Beijing. Not a problem, I was told, my work permit would work just as well.
Paranoia assuaged, I pitched early for the flight as usual. Airline check-in staffers were happy with the work permit. I strolled to the usual coffee shop and had the usual strong cup and one cigarette. Ten minutes before departure, I sauntered to the security checkpoint. So far, so good.
The first time the security officer demanded my passport I tried to explain myself and show him my work permit. The second time I handed over my South African ID book. There was no third attempt. A senior officer appeared out of nowhere, pulled me out of the line and disappeared with all my documents.
There I stood, worst fears realised, being stared at by a crowd of fellow passengers who seemed to size me for the gallows. Once separated from the herd, one becomes aware that a crowd and a mob are much the same thing. Cell phones aren’t allowed in the security area, but I had to get in touch with friendlier people. As I was explaining the situation to my assistant, the senior security dude reappeared. I could see he was irritated I was on a phone, so I handed it over to him as meekly as possible. For the next five minutes, he and my assistant had a shouting match. Then he turned, handed me phone and papers and marched me out of the airport, without further word.
Flustered, I phoned my assistant again. “No passport, no entry,” she said. And no negotiation.
Suddenly I remembered my temporary passport at home. I got the assistant to call the travel agent to change the ticket and phoned the company driver to get him over to the house. I phoned my wife, who leapt from the bath to search for the damn thing. She hardly had time to put on clothes before the driver arrived.
After the flurry of excitement, I had a temporary passport and a new boarding pass. But I was paranoid about passing though security again, where the same surly officer was still on duty. How would I explain the miraculous appearance of a passport on such short notice? One that was supposed to be at an embassy?
I gave myself a stern talking-to and scurried through in a different queue, with no hint of an innocent smile. If the Chinese had been using behaviour profiling, I’d have had explaining to do. I made it to Beijing after the obligatory flight delay. I also made it to all hastily rescheduled meetings and ended the day at night. But, instead of falling into bed, I found myself in a hotel lobby trying to explain why I had neither visa nor residence permit in my passport.
Cue that innocent smile...
Central Planning in Cyberspace
I HAVE JUST RETURNED FROM CHONGQING, a city in the southwest of China that covers an area of 82 000 square kilometres and has an official population of 32 million people (unofficially it stands at 37 million). Think in terms of South Africa’s population squeezed into a relatively small area and you won’t be too surprised that it looks like Shanghai on steroids.
During this visit I found myself in the Urban City Planning Exhibition Center, a three-storey, high-tech building dedicated to planning the future evolution of the municipality. There are exhibits showing how the city has developed over the centuries. The 3D scale model that shows every street and every building is impressive enough, but an explanation of the amount of planning that goes into development takes the cake. It is meticulous, and also a great example of how you need to balance a tremendous number of factors to make the future urban environment both successful and sustainable.
All of which got me thinking about the internet. It’s tough being a geek. I’ve been working in the internet industry since it started to commercialise in 1994, and that has given me the opportunity to experience the breakneck evolution of a new social fabric.
Online things don’t only happen faster, the extremes are also exaggerated. I’ve heard a great many people predict the fall of the old economy and the rise of a new one, only to hear those same folk predict the commercial demise of the whole internet thing. There were mini-bubbles, yes, but there were also nuclear bombs that made up nicely for any half measures.
Me, I’ve always believed sustainable business is built over time and on a model that evolves as the environment changes. Which is all nice and rational, but doesn’t always fly in a world where expectations are set on a quarterly basis by analysts in foreign markets.
China has given us its fair share of unique and innovative business models, along with the usual whacky and unsustainable ones. But most impressive has been how quickly entrepreneurs here have learnt not to repeat the mistakes of the trailblazers.
Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating – or rather in the results, when they are delivered, or not. That is where planning and patience have their reward. But, as regular readers know by now, around here it is all about harmonious balance, which is why vigilance and nimbleness is usually married to those virtues. That helps in an industry where even a ridiculously successful business model can be made redundant in an exceptionally short space of time.
In China, the internet space is at least as juicy as anywhere else, except younger. In the UK, internet advertising is now into double digits; in China it stands at five percent, but you won’t believe the expected growth trajectory.
And, like anywhere else, the shift to online life is causing tremendous shifts in social behaviour. The latest world trend is social networking, but in China that has been a high-growth area for more than five years. There are obvious (if sometimes strained) parallels between online growth and urbanisation. Except I can’t find an online equivalent of Chongqing’s Urban City Planning Exhibition Center, not even when it comes to planning within a single business.
It almost makes you long for the comfort of central planning...
During this visit I found myself in the Urban City Planning Exhibition Center, a three-storey, high-tech building dedicated to planning the future evolution of the municipality. There are exhibits showing how the city has developed over the centuries. The 3D scale model that shows every street and every building is impressive enough, but an explanation of the amount of planning that goes into development takes the cake. It is meticulous, and also a great example of how you need to balance a tremendous number of factors to make the future urban environment both successful and sustainable.
All of which got me thinking about the internet. It’s tough being a geek. I’ve been working in the internet industry since it started to commercialise in 1994, and that has given me the opportunity to experience the breakneck evolution of a new social fabric.
Online things don’t only happen faster, the extremes are also exaggerated. I’ve heard a great many people predict the fall of the old economy and the rise of a new one, only to hear those same folk predict the commercial demise of the whole internet thing. There were mini-bubbles, yes, but there were also nuclear bombs that made up nicely for any half measures.
Me, I’ve always believed sustainable business is built over time and on a model that evolves as the environment changes. Which is all nice and rational, but doesn’t always fly in a world where expectations are set on a quarterly basis by analysts in foreign markets.
China has given us its fair share of unique and innovative business models, along with the usual whacky and unsustainable ones. But most impressive has been how quickly entrepreneurs here have learnt not to repeat the mistakes of the trailblazers.
Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating – or rather in the results, when they are delivered, or not. That is where planning and patience have their reward. But, as regular readers know by now, around here it is all about harmonious balance, which is why vigilance and nimbleness is usually married to those virtues. That helps in an industry where even a ridiculously successful business model can be made redundant in an exceptionally short space of time.
In China, the internet space is at least as juicy as anywhere else, except younger. In the UK, internet advertising is now into double digits; in China it stands at five percent, but you won’t believe the expected growth trajectory.
And, like anywhere else, the shift to online life is causing tremendous shifts in social behaviour. The latest world trend is social networking, but in China that has been a high-growth area for more than five years. There are obvious (if sometimes strained) parallels between online growth and urbanisation. Except I can’t find an online equivalent of Chongqing’s Urban City Planning Exhibition Center, not even when it comes to planning within a single business.
It almost makes you long for the comfort of central planning...
Yes can mean yes...or no...or maybe
“KILLING THE CHICKEN TO SCARE THE MONKEY” IS A VERY OLD Chinese proverb, which roughly translates as doing a small thing can have larger consequence down the line.
Chinese proverbs get even more confusing than that, but understanding them is important if you want to do business here. Just as it is important to understand other nuances of speech, which translate more directly.
“Yes, I understand” or “Yes, we will do” usually don’t mean what you might think they mean. They could just mean that, on some small level, there is a tiny bit of agreement. More often than not, phrases like this are used to appease, or to ensure there is no loss of face – the imperative in just about any conversation.
The difference between actual agreement and the words you’d think indicate agreement is slight, and you need to pick up the smallest clues and make a calculated guess. Even then, the clues are different between cities and regions, as I have learnt in moving from Shanghai to Beijing. In Shanghai, business can move quickly, at breakneck speed even, if the numbers make sense. In Beijing, everything is dependent on what a vast number of “contacts” in government think will work; and, even if they all agree, the process takes time. That might be an over generalisation, but it is a good rule to work by.
Sometimes all of this can make for funny situations, especially if you find yourself entangled with representatives of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as recently happened to me. It was funny, but also offered an opportunity to engage in some armchair psychoanalysis. The group leader was from Beijing, the person responsible for marketing and sales from Guangzhou and the numbers guy from Shanghai (let’s call them B, G and S). Under discussion was the implementation of a new business development project, which would assist in diversification of their revenue streams. G was presenting and was exceptionally enthusiastic and driven; he was just about drooling at the prospect. S was positive but reserved, because he was looking at everything via the numbers. As for B … let’s just say that B showed no discernible emotion. Not because that is his nature, I fancy, but because he was too busy scrolling through a mental list of government “contacts” to whom everything would have to be presented before, in his mind at least, anything could happen.
The tricky thing is that nobody can offend anyone else, and nobody can lose face during the process. So a three-hour debate is peppered with “maybe” – there is never a direct “yes” or “no”. The real answers lie in the way the “maybes” are phrased and the context in which they are used.
Because B was the leader, “maybe” meant the new idea needed to be tested against a filtered list of senior contacts, which would mean further refinement before execution. G and S might not have agreed, but that is the way it was going to be.
If G were the leader, the idea would have been half way to implementation, even if S had reservations about finances. S would have to find a different model to make the numbers work, and B would be worried about objections from his contacts – but would not directly say so.
This is a mild example.
Sure, anywhere else in the world you’d expect the marketer to push ahead while the financial type took a cautious approach and the government liaison fretted about the impact. Here, however, all this drama can have a substantial impact on the end product. Don’t let Western prejudice set you thinking about experienced or inexperienced management. We aren’t talking about hamstrung procedure here, but rather about finding the middle ground in the most harmonious way, stepping on as few toes as possible along the way.
Once you understand that, and manage to tell a “yes-maybe” from a “no-maybe” you are on your way to figuring out how things work in China. But, believe me, it is a constant learning process, even for the locals.
Chinese proverbs get even more confusing than that, but understanding them is important if you want to do business here. Just as it is important to understand other nuances of speech, which translate more directly.
“Yes, I understand” or “Yes, we will do” usually don’t mean what you might think they mean. They could just mean that, on some small level, there is a tiny bit of agreement. More often than not, phrases like this are used to appease, or to ensure there is no loss of face – the imperative in just about any conversation.
The difference between actual agreement and the words you’d think indicate agreement is slight, and you need to pick up the smallest clues and make a calculated guess. Even then, the clues are different between cities and regions, as I have learnt in moving from Shanghai to Beijing. In Shanghai, business can move quickly, at breakneck speed even, if the numbers make sense. In Beijing, everything is dependent on what a vast number of “contacts” in government think will work; and, even if they all agree, the process takes time. That might be an over generalisation, but it is a good rule to work by.
Sometimes all of this can make for funny situations, especially if you find yourself entangled with representatives of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as recently happened to me. It was funny, but also offered an opportunity to engage in some armchair psychoanalysis. The group leader was from Beijing, the person responsible for marketing and sales from Guangzhou and the numbers guy from Shanghai (let’s call them B, G and S). Under discussion was the implementation of a new business development project, which would assist in diversification of their revenue streams. G was presenting and was exceptionally enthusiastic and driven; he was just about drooling at the prospect. S was positive but reserved, because he was looking at everything via the numbers. As for B … let’s just say that B showed no discernible emotion. Not because that is his nature, I fancy, but because he was too busy scrolling through a mental list of government “contacts” to whom everything would have to be presented before, in his mind at least, anything could happen.
The tricky thing is that nobody can offend anyone else, and nobody can lose face during the process. So a three-hour debate is peppered with “maybe” – there is never a direct “yes” or “no”. The real answers lie in the way the “maybes” are phrased and the context in which they are used.
Because B was the leader, “maybe” meant the new idea needed to be tested against a filtered list of senior contacts, which would mean further refinement before execution. G and S might not have agreed, but that is the way it was going to be.
If G were the leader, the idea would have been half way to implementation, even if S had reservations about finances. S would have to find a different model to make the numbers work, and B would be worried about objections from his contacts – but would not directly say so.
This is a mild example.
Sure, anywhere else in the world you’d expect the marketer to push ahead while the financial type took a cautious approach and the government liaison fretted about the impact. Here, however, all this drama can have a substantial impact on the end product. Don’t let Western prejudice set you thinking about experienced or inexperienced management. We aren’t talking about hamstrung procedure here, but rather about finding the middle ground in the most harmonious way, stepping on as few toes as possible along the way.
Once you understand that, and manage to tell a “yes-maybe” from a “no-maybe” you are on your way to figuring out how things work in China. But, believe me, it is a constant learning process, even for the locals.
Why China?
IT CAN BE ACCOMPANIED WITH A BEMUSED LOOK OR A DISBELIEVING grin, but the question doesn’t change. “Why China?” I am constantly asked, especially on my forays back home.
I understand the question, but the bemusement is puzzling. After all, where else is there?
In late 2003, I started research into business opportunities elsewhere in the world, mainly looking at developing countries. The main targets were the usual suspects: Brazil, Russia, India and China. My own interest in the Far East, and the fact that Naspers had already been there for some time, made the latter a clear favourite. Rightly, as it turned out.
In early 2004 I came to China to investigate first-hand, and I was astounded. Even after all the desk research I was amazed by the development. Where were all the bicycles and quaint triangular straw hats? Where were the ancient street markets, and why wasn’t anybody dressed in grey Mao-style pyjamas? I had fallen prey to preconceived ideas, much like those uninformed tourists who expect to see lions roaming the streets of Johannesburg. In my defence, I wasn’t the only one.
What I found was a gigantic, vibrant city, with skyscrapers as far as the eye could see, traffic jams beyond the worst nightmares of South Africans and people so fashionably dressed they wouldn’t be out of place in the better parts of New York. I found enthusiastic capitalism and an entrepreneurial spirit reminiscent of the US in the fifties. I found people with friendly smiles and open minds, willing to learn and teach. In short, I had found what I was looking for.
Nor was it only Shanghai. Beijing looks like Manhattan would, if you trebled the number of skyscrapers. Shenzhen is a hive of activity, Guangzhou is throbbing with life. Each city is culturally different, but each shouts progress and vibrancy. What really caught my heart was that all of this flies in the face of many, many problems. Example: every city and province imposes its own bureaucracy on business, in sometimes bizarre ways that often stretch all the way back to Confucius. There are problems that will probably never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. But these issues cannot do much to slow down the pace of progress. The juggernaut is unstoppable, and the Dragon is but a teenager.
China is almost the direct opposite of the creaking social welfare state that is Europe. It has more energy than North America could handle. By truly embracing technology and education as the cornerstones of the economy, the Chinese are creating an environment no business person can help but love. Which may be why personal reasons, not business ones, are so often cited as the stumbling block for expatriate workers.
As regular readers will know, this is not the easiest place to live in and it can be tough on a family used to the Western way of life. Nothing is familiar, and you can feel like you’re on an emotional roller coaster. Even basic survival can be trying. One day I’m buying Kiwi milk for R17 a litre, the next day it comes from Australia and suddenly costs R30.
And yet, despite the adversity and frustrations, we love being here. The kids get the kind of worldly education that money can’t buy. The wife and I get to experience things you can hardly imagine. It is intensely rewarding.
But, above all, we get to live in a place that is writing much of the history of the world right now. One day we’ll be able to walk down a beach, pushing our strollers and oxygen bottles, and say: “We were a part of it . . .”
I understand the question, but the bemusement is puzzling. After all, where else is there?
In late 2003, I started research into business opportunities elsewhere in the world, mainly looking at developing countries. The main targets were the usual suspects: Brazil, Russia, India and China. My own interest in the Far East, and the fact that Naspers had already been there for some time, made the latter a clear favourite. Rightly, as it turned out.
In early 2004 I came to China to investigate first-hand, and I was astounded. Even after all the desk research I was amazed by the development. Where were all the bicycles and quaint triangular straw hats? Where were the ancient street markets, and why wasn’t anybody dressed in grey Mao-style pyjamas? I had fallen prey to preconceived ideas, much like those uninformed tourists who expect to see lions roaming the streets of Johannesburg. In my defence, I wasn’t the only one.
What I found was a gigantic, vibrant city, with skyscrapers as far as the eye could see, traffic jams beyond the worst nightmares of South Africans and people so fashionably dressed they wouldn’t be out of place in the better parts of New York. I found enthusiastic capitalism and an entrepreneurial spirit reminiscent of the US in the fifties. I found people with friendly smiles and open minds, willing to learn and teach. In short, I had found what I was looking for.
Nor was it only Shanghai. Beijing looks like Manhattan would, if you trebled the number of skyscrapers. Shenzhen is a hive of activity, Guangzhou is throbbing with life. Each city is culturally different, but each shouts progress and vibrancy. What really caught my heart was that all of this flies in the face of many, many problems. Example: every city and province imposes its own bureaucracy on business, in sometimes bizarre ways that often stretch all the way back to Confucius. There are problems that will probably never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. But these issues cannot do much to slow down the pace of progress. The juggernaut is unstoppable, and the Dragon is but a teenager.
China is almost the direct opposite of the creaking social welfare state that is Europe. It has more energy than North America could handle. By truly embracing technology and education as the cornerstones of the economy, the Chinese are creating an environment no business person can help but love. Which may be why personal reasons, not business ones, are so often cited as the stumbling block for expatriate workers.
As regular readers will know, this is not the easiest place to live in and it can be tough on a family used to the Western way of life. Nothing is familiar, and you can feel like you’re on an emotional roller coaster. Even basic survival can be trying. One day I’m buying Kiwi milk for R17 a litre, the next day it comes from Australia and suddenly costs R30.
And yet, despite the adversity and frustrations, we love being here. The kids get the kind of worldly education that money can’t buy. The wife and I get to experience things you can hardly imagine. It is intensely rewarding.
But, above all, we get to live in a place that is writing much of the history of the world right now. One day we’ll be able to walk down a beach, pushing our strollers and oxygen bottles, and say: “We were a part of it . . .”
Shanghai
THE FAMILY AND I WERE BACK HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, catching our collective breath and catching up with friends and family. Predictable dinner party questions (“What’s Shanghai like?”, “What do you miss about South Africa?”) have given me an opportunity to draw comparisons after several months of living in China.
Most obvious to me now is the priceless and absolute freedom we have come to enjoy in Shanghai. I never see my daughter over weekends, because she simply bicycles off to go play with her friends. She is eight. My 14-year old son catches taxis into town. Back in South Africa, we have to rein both of them in, which is difficult on all of us.
On the other side of the coin, it was bloody marvellous to be back home and have the freedom to drive. In Shanghai, we are utterly reliant on our driver to take us around; to our eyes the traffic is nothing but chaos. You cannot get anywhere in less than an hour. I’ll take Jo’burg rush hour any day.
But the thing we miss most in Shanghai is – and I know this sounds crazy – the humble public toilet. When you gotta go you gotta go, but when you gotta go and you are in, say, Xiengang Market, you have a problem. That’s unless you’re happy to join in a communal squat over a long trough, which is a hard sell for the wife. Here’s a tip: find a hotel, any hotel. They are quite used to foreigners popping in to relieve pressures of nature.
As unpatriotic as it may be, those are my only major gripes with this city. When you finally get where you are going, and locate the nearest real toilet, it is on to the live shows, historic towns and indoor skiing.
And the shopping. Never mind a communist legacy; there has been big money in Shanghai for long enough to ensure you can find any brand imaginable – on top of all the underground markets and weird and wonderful oddities you might never have imagined.
Around the corner from my office downtown there is a beautiful lingerie shop called the Easy Shop. My wife and I were in hysterics the first time we saw it, on the assumption that this was an unfortunate reference to the morals of women who shop there. But it’s no mistake, as I found out from my assistant. The name is actually a typical Chinese double entendre: not only is it easy for a woman to buy the skimpy lingerie and get it on, but it is just as easy for a man to take off again.
Shanghai is exciting and challenging and very different, and I can’t honestly say we feel homesick. Heck, we even have our own Spur.
Most obvious to me now is the priceless and absolute freedom we have come to enjoy in Shanghai. I never see my daughter over weekends, because she simply bicycles off to go play with her friends. She is eight. My 14-year old son catches taxis into town. Back in South Africa, we have to rein both of them in, which is difficult on all of us.
On the other side of the coin, it was bloody marvellous to be back home and have the freedom to drive. In Shanghai, we are utterly reliant on our driver to take us around; to our eyes the traffic is nothing but chaos. You cannot get anywhere in less than an hour. I’ll take Jo’burg rush hour any day.
But the thing we miss most in Shanghai is – and I know this sounds crazy – the humble public toilet. When you gotta go you gotta go, but when you gotta go and you are in, say, Xiengang Market, you have a problem. That’s unless you’re happy to join in a communal squat over a long trough, which is a hard sell for the wife. Here’s a tip: find a hotel, any hotel. They are quite used to foreigners popping in to relieve pressures of nature.
As unpatriotic as it may be, those are my only major gripes with this city. When you finally get where you are going, and locate the nearest real toilet, it is on to the live shows, historic towns and indoor skiing.
And the shopping. Never mind a communist legacy; there has been big money in Shanghai for long enough to ensure you can find any brand imaginable – on top of all the underground markets and weird and wonderful oddities you might never have imagined.
Around the corner from my office downtown there is a beautiful lingerie shop called the Easy Shop. My wife and I were in hysterics the first time we saw it, on the assumption that this was an unfortunate reference to the morals of women who shop there. But it’s no mistake, as I found out from my assistant. The name is actually a typical Chinese double entendre: not only is it easy for a woman to buy the skimpy lingerie and get it on, but it is just as easy for a man to take off again.
Shanghai is exciting and challenging and very different, and I can’t honestly say we feel homesick. Heck, we even have our own Spur.
Show me some attitude
LIVING IN SHANGHAI IS LIKE being in the middle of a continuous improvement project, a never ending cycle of change, a constant seeking after something better. It presents a stark contrast to what we have been used to.
After nearly four months in Shanghai, my family is starting to settle down nicely. Not that the emotional roller coaster has come to a stop, but there is the beginning of an inkling of a hint of normality in our lives.
I consider my family to be quite adventurous, but the kids keep astounding me. They’ve taken to life in Shanghai to an extent I would never have believed and are willing to try anything and everything. Within a week they were both eating with chopsticks and trying different Chinese dishes, some of which I wouldn’t even look at. The experimentation has not been without consequence and on occasions they have struck disaster. Taxi to the restaurant: 10 yuan. Six course meal for four: 280 yuan. Expression on my son’s face when he learnt his desert had been jelly fish mixed with jello and watermelon: priceless, of course.
The mishaps have not dissuaded them from adventure. Not yet. But my kids are not insane. It’s just their approach to life, their attitude, that makes them stuff ghastly looking things into their mouths.
And so my children, by doing what children do, have taught me something about China.In China, people adopt a very particular approach to new challenges. They just know there is always a different way, a better way, a more efficient way forward. The prevailing attitude is that every problem presents a larger opportunity, an opportunity to perform better than before. This obviously has a spillover effect in business.
Take our quest for linen. After spending nearly a whole day with the catalogue we found something almost right, but in the wrong style. And the shop doesn’t have the size we require. Problem? What problem? They had it made in the style and size we required, had it delivered in ten days and sent someone to come and make the bed. Hell, I still got a 20 percent discount.
I am not saying every worker in the economy has an unbelievably, absurdly positive can-do approach. As anywhere, you find negative people. But, on the whole, I have found most people exceptionally energetic, with a drive to continuously improve. That can make an amazing difference.
For the foreigner, this trait can be handily exploited. The positive Chinese love an improvement project, and an under-educated foreigner (with a language barrier to boot) presents a treat. Come here to learn and you will be taught.
Shanghai is a fusion of cultures with business principles borrowed from all over the map. People here, expats and locals alike, continue to adapt to new things and actually get quite excited about keeping up as the economy evolves around them. This still astonishes me each day.
The people of China, and especially those of Shanghai, understand the value of the positive. And how can they not? It is helping to rapidly turn their country into a financial superpower...
After nearly four months in Shanghai, my family is starting to settle down nicely. Not that the emotional roller coaster has come to a stop, but there is the beginning of an inkling of a hint of normality in our lives.
I consider my family to be quite adventurous, but the kids keep astounding me. They’ve taken to life in Shanghai to an extent I would never have believed and are willing to try anything and everything. Within a week they were both eating with chopsticks and trying different Chinese dishes, some of which I wouldn’t even look at. The experimentation has not been without consequence and on occasions they have struck disaster. Taxi to the restaurant: 10 yuan. Six course meal for four: 280 yuan. Expression on my son’s face when he learnt his desert had been jelly fish mixed with jello and watermelon: priceless, of course.
The mishaps have not dissuaded them from adventure. Not yet. But my kids are not insane. It’s just their approach to life, their attitude, that makes them stuff ghastly looking things into their mouths.
And so my children, by doing what children do, have taught me something about China.In China, people adopt a very particular approach to new challenges. They just know there is always a different way, a better way, a more efficient way forward. The prevailing attitude is that every problem presents a larger opportunity, an opportunity to perform better than before. This obviously has a spillover effect in business.
Take our quest for linen. After spending nearly a whole day with the catalogue we found something almost right, but in the wrong style. And the shop doesn’t have the size we require. Problem? What problem? They had it made in the style and size we required, had it delivered in ten days and sent someone to come and make the bed. Hell, I still got a 20 percent discount.
I am not saying every worker in the economy has an unbelievably, absurdly positive can-do approach. As anywhere, you find negative people. But, on the whole, I have found most people exceptionally energetic, with a drive to continuously improve. That can make an amazing difference.
For the foreigner, this trait can be handily exploited. The positive Chinese love an improvement project, and an under-educated foreigner (with a language barrier to boot) presents a treat. Come here to learn and you will be taught.
Shanghai is a fusion of cultures with business principles borrowed from all over the map. People here, expats and locals alike, continue to adapt to new things and actually get quite excited about keeping up as the economy evolves around them. This still astonishes me each day.
The people of China, and especially those of Shanghai, understand the value of the positive. And how can they not? It is helping to rapidly turn their country into a financial superpower...
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