Shenyang. Jun 2014 In all the neighbourhood night street markets, you can always see a biscuit stall. I didn't try too many Chinese biscuits during my ten years in China mainly because I am not a biscuit guy. But my observation is that they are big on quantity and size compared to the supermarket ones,... Continue Reading →
Speed and efficiency at a small Chinese trophy shop
Oct 2014. Shenyang I once had to get some trophies for a business game I was organising for the office. Normally this was purchased by the office but this time the quantities were low and so we decided to organise it ourselves. I went downtown with my German colleague to the trophy stores. The process... Continue Reading →
My love for the kitchen started in China
Nov 2014. Shenyang There was never a strong necessity for me to cook in my Singaporean life. That changed when I moved to Shanghai in 2009. Then when I moved to Shenyang in 2014, cooking really became a necessity. So I started cooking more. On some weekends, I would invite friends over, cooked the curries... Continue Reading →
Cold winter nights when I ordered the wrong food
Sep 2014. Shenyang When I first came to China in 2009, I lived the expatriate life in Shanghai, visiting restaurants catered for foreigners. When I joined BMW and moved to Shenyang in 2014, I lived like a local. That's when I saw daily life in China in a different light. There were many cold winter... Continue Reading →
Change management workshops are hard work
Sep 2014. Beijing Bringing people together to find solutions to cope with change is a huge part of my job and workshops are a very effective tool to achieve that. Organising workshops is therefore a regular part of my work. For this workshop, I pulled out a dozen senior managers for half-a-day from their desks... Continue Reading →
A rare picture with the CEO
Sep 2014. Beijing At that time I was working for the BMW Group and was working on a large scale process optimisation program as an organisational change manager, a career I am still in but in Australia now. My stakeholders were mostly in the BMW plants in Shenyang but there was also a small group... Continue Reading →
12 things you can’t do in a train in China
Sep 2014. Shenyang No smoking. No inflammable objects. No poisonous materials. No radioactive materials. No vendors. No begging. No commercial goods. No loitering. No pets. A public notice in a Shenyang train station. No different from Singapore, where we have as many of these dos and don'ts. Plus one more. No durians. You might thing... Continue Reading →
Lunch in a local university in China
Sep 2014. Shenyang One weekend I followed my neighbours to visit their son at a local university called Shenyang Normal University. We walked around the campus and I was surprised to see that it was like a self-contained small town inside the campus. We then had lunch in the canteen and there was this instant... Continue Reading →
Ten years in China changed me
Sep 2014. Shenyang No, I didn't become a Chinese just because I lived in China for ten years. I don't think that happens even if I had stayed there for twenty years. But what did happen is that I had developed a good sense of understanding and respect for the Chinese people and their ways... Continue Reading →
The mountain of a thousand lotuses
Seop 2014. Anshan The highest point in Qian Shan is 708 meters. It has 999 peaks looking like lotuses looking up to the skies and thus the name Qian which means thousand peaks and shan means mountain. The tallest hill in Singapore where I was born was Bukit Timah which is 163m high (bukit is... Continue Reading →