Melbourne. Jul 2023 For my two weeks' trip to China, I was flying in the China Southern Airlines. Both China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines fly to Australia. China Eastern is Shanghai-based whilst China Southern is Beijing-based. Both are excellent airlines and I have flown with them numerous times for both domestic travel in... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
Aug 2014. Shenyang. The normal trains in China are called the Z, T, K and L series trains and the high-speed trains are called the D series trains. For long distance overnight trips, people book the sleeper class. There are three types of sleepers: hard sleeper, soft sleeper and deluxe sleeper. Hard sleeper is the... Continue Reading →
Beijing. Feb 2011 This is a bra advertisement and I believe I took this photo in the Beijing airport. Actually China is quite a conservative country. A lot of things are not said or done outwardly as its culturally taboo. For example, you don't often see advertisements or hear commercials in the television about undergarments... Continue Reading →
On the second night, we went to a Malaysian place for dinner and I had "chilli kang kong", one of my favourite dishes from back home in Singapore. It's basically a stir-fried water spinach dish with sauces and spices. If its cooked with shrimp paste and lots red chillies, even greater. "Kang kong" is a... Continue Reading →
For RMB 400-600 (USD60-90) per night, you would not believe the buffet spread I saw the next day morning in Holiday Inn - Central Plaza Beijing. It was unbelievable. There was a large spread of warm food, a cereal station with every cereal you ever want in your life, 6 different types of fruit juices,... Continue Reading →
Beijing. Feb 2011 We visited a North Indian restaurant called "Taj Pavilion" in Chinatown in Beijing for dinner on the first day of our visit. It was comfort food and also my birthday dinner with my family. I normally have spicy lamp or chicken biryani whenever I go to an Indian restaurant anywhere in the... Continue Reading →
Beijing. Feb 2011 It is common to see a huge gateway structure at the entrances of Chinatowns in many cities around the world such as Melbourne, Chicago, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, London etc. Similarly there was a massive structure when we entered Chinatown in Beijing. For the average foreigner's eyes, it looked a modern extension of... Continue Reading →
Singapore is the only country in the world outside China that has a majority Chinese population (76% as of 2020) and even then it has a place called "Chinatown". I could understand this as Singapore was a British colony from 1819 to the 1950s and there were certain places the ethnic communities historically lived and... Continue Reading →