The gate to Chiang Mai University

It’s now morning of day two in Chiang Mai and the tour of town has already been great.

After checking into the 3-Sis Guesthouse and getting myself fed and cleaned up yesterday, I headed over to the CMU campus for a walk down memory lane. Some things have changed, some things haven’t  now you can get there in your own personal tuk-tuk, but they still try to overcharge silly farangs.  “Whaddya mean 100 baht because of the traffic jam?? Can’t you see that I speak Thai and am clearly not new around here??”

The area around the campus has developed quite a bit, but some landmarks like the Chiang Mai Orchid on Huay Kaew Road are still there.  The campus looks different in a lot of ways, but the Faculty of Humanities building is still pretty much the same.  The students still wear the same white and blue uniforms and crowd around some posh coffee shops while the old canteen sits more or less abandoned. This dining at the fancy Western-style places may explain the increased size of some of the students

Yesterday was graduation day at CMU so I got to see all the students parading around in their gowns and posing with the new cars that mom and dad had bought them.  (I guess the Honda 50 is no longer the vehicle of choice).  Hope you enjoy the pictures and feel free to comment.

Last night I had dinner with Ked (Somsiri), who was in the group of Thai students who hosted us in 1983, and we had a long talk over curry and vegetables while we gossiped about all the folks who went on the trip with us and who had a crush on who way back when.  Ked is now living in my old home town of Rochester, MN, but it seems like both of us would like to retire to Chiang Mai one of these days.  (I guess that I should start practicing my Thai again).

Chiang Mai itself has changed a lot. 25 years ago this was a mostly agricultural city where you could see truckloads of hilltribe people rolling into town to trade their handicrafts and crops for necessities.  Now those same people man the cash registers in their villages while busloads of tourists “trek” to the hilltribe villages to buy trinkets.  The streets in the inner part of the city have been re-paved with concrete paving stones to give the town that ancient city/Disneyland feel.

But it’s still a charming place to vacation.  The temples seem more beautiful than ever, the people are polite, and the sky gleams in a color of blue that big city Shanghai residents rarely see. Guess I had better grab my sunscreen).

Today I will be going up to the top of Doi Suthep, and later pass through the Night Bazaar.  I promise to take more pictures and hope you will enjoy travelling with me.

Related posts:

1. Moving On

Weren't there more monks back in '83?

It’s almost 8:00 pm on my second day in the 25 year anniversary Thai party and I’m on the overnight express train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok.

Back in 1983 this train ride was the start of a new section of our trip through Asia. After travelling through Japan, Hong Kong, China, and Bangkok, and spending a month at Soochow University in Taipei studying Chinese art, we were going to actually go somewhere and stay for a while.  Our trip to Chiang Mai would set us down at Chiang Mai University for three months where we would study Buddhism, history and Thai language, but more importantly live with Thai families and be teamed up with a group of Thai students.  And the train to Chiang Mai, where we were greeted by this Thai team (ooh! That one looks cute!) marked the beginning of this venture.

And it’s the same train as it was back then. The seats have been recovered, and its in good shape, but it’s the same vehicle, and it still takes 14 hours from station to station. In that same twenty five years, the train ride from Shanghai to Beijing (which we also did in 1983) has decreased from somewhere over 24 hours to less than 12. I’m not sure if that tells us more about how bad the trains were in China, or how little the trains have changed in Thailand.

Going through the Hua Lamphong train station in Bangkok is still amazing. The mixture of foreign tourists, farmers headed home to their villages and middle-class Thais on holiday is frosting for the experience of transiting through this 100 year-old Italian-style structure. Even the bathrooms were pretty clean.

The train pulls out of the station around 7:40 pm, only five minutes late and not too bad considering that few folks started boarding before 7:30. On the train on this Thursday night nearly everyone (except me) is a student. There’s a group of American students in a group at the head of the cabin. “You mean the seats fold down into beds?” “This is the first time I’ve rode on a train.” There’s a flock of Thai university students at the other end of the cabin gossiping about their friends and giggling about clothes and cars. In the middle of the car, surrounded by a few empty seats is one middle-aged farang with gray hair who keeps taking pictures of everything – but it’s not his first time on a train.

Vendors are passing through selling overpriced beer and snacks. Eighty baht for a Singha beer. And it’s not even the large bottle! The next car up is the dining car, but you can have your meal brought to you too. They’ll set up a little table between the seats, bring out the food and you’re good to go. Just be careful spooning out the curry as you pass through the curves.

We’ll be pulling into Chiang Mai around 9:30 am tomorrow so there should be some good chances to check out the northern Thai countryside in Lamphun and Lampang under the early morning light.

I’ll give you the run-down on my one day in Bangkok, but there’s not that much to tell.  (Anyway, I think we only spent about three days there back in 1983. After a late night of beers with my brother and his wife at the Bamboo Bar at the Oriental Hotel, my major accomplishment of the day was to make it downstairs for the complementary breakfast before the restaurant closed at 10:00 am.

Compared to 25 years ago, there is not much to recognise in Bangkok other than the temples. The city has sprouted skyscrapers and more traffic jams. And the little Chinese corner stores are being rapidly replaced with 7-Elevens – there’s one about every other block on Sukhumvit Road.

Having taken many friends on the Bangkok tour over the years, I gave a miss to the sightseeing at Wat Phra Keo (Temple of the Emerald Buddha), Wat Po and Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn), and decided to have a three beer lunch with one of my former staff and go for a two-hour massage. This vacation stuff can be so stressful!

I have some photos of the fun so far and will upload those to my flickr page and put in a photo gallery with this post.

Hope you enjoy this trip through time and space and see you again soon here on Mingtiandi.

Related posts:

1. The Morning Ride
2. Setting Back the Clock to Thai Time

Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport Replaced The Old Don Muang In 2006

It’s been a year since my last trip to Thailand, and things have changed.  Last year, I left in the middle of an economic boom and a natural disaster (the biggest blizzards to hit China in a century).  The airports were heaving with masses of frenzied travellers. Desperate to get on the planes, but no planes were flying.

Now, on 21 January 2009, the airport is blissfully quiet for travellers, while chaos surges through the world travel business.  As a consumer it feels fine.  No wait at immigration, only one person ahead of me at the airline check-in counter, and my choice of just about any seat on the plane.  Now if only China Eastern would lower their airfares.

I’m travelling from my home in downtown Shanghai to visit Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Koh Lipe (an island in the Andaman sea) in Thailand.  This trip is my annual relaxation trip (as opposed to my annual visit to Minnesota, which qualifies more as a family relationship maintenance and shoe replacement visit), but this year the trip has a more special meaning too.

For the first time since the year 2000, I will be going back to the university where I studied in Chiang Mai during the 1983-84 academic year.  For me, this was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Thailand, not to mention being a lot of fun.  It also did a bit to transform me from a typical teenage know-it-all, to someone who was ready to start learning more about how the world works. Before that trip in 1983, I had never actually heard of Thailand – that’s how dark the planet was that I was living on.

Today I’m flying out of Shanghai’s Pudong airport, direct to Bangkok, and will be meeting up with my older brother Pete, who is enjoying the last day of his own Thai holiday with his wife Tara.  I will be meeting up with them for drinks at the Oriental Hotel on the banks of the Chao Phraya this evening.  The Oriental is one of Asia’s greatest hotels (Jean-George was the chef at the Normandy Grill there a few years back) and a landmark spot in Bangkok.

Tomorrow will be time for meeting some friends in Bangkok before getting on the night train to Chiang Mai tomorrow evening (the 22nd).

I can only hope that the rest of the trip is as relaxing as this transit through the Shanghai airport.

Related posts:

1. Another Day Another Airport
2. Flight Delays At Pudong Airport
3. Back in Town and Back to Building Companies

It must be contagious.  I’m not from here – I’ve only lived here six years, but I seem to have already caught this Shanghai snobbiness.  Once you leave Shanghai you drop off the edge of the earth. The only good thing about going to other places in China is how good it feels to come home to Shanghai.  People from other places all wish they could live in Shanghai.

However, after my two day jaunt to Changzhou, I’m happy to say I had some pleasant surprises about the enjoyable (if not exciting) lifestyle and the business opportunities.  Changzhou is in a lot of ways just another medium-sized city in Jiangsu, not that different from Wuxi, Nantong or several others. And that’s a good thing. There should be more places like this.

About 1,500 of us went to Changzhou for an investment promotion event, rather grandly titled the “China (Changzhou) Forum on Science & Technology, Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation,” this forum was basically a big ad for doing business in Changzhou, and it wasn’t the worst ad I’ve ever seen.  Of course, we went to the event to tell more people about RightSite and hand out more of our flashy die-cut namecards. (Changzhou has several industrial zones, all of which are great potential RightSite customers).

Who was there:

• Foreign businesspeople — we met folks from Chicago, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and points beyond
• Local businesspeople — by this we mean local to China, and this was the largest group.  Lots of folks from Shanghai and Beijing looking for cheaper bases for manufacturing
• Local government — reps from local and provincial governments were there to show face
• Foreign government — we shared our table at the banquet with the trade representatives for the State of Michigan, the State of Oklahoma, the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, the Port of Huntsville, Alabama and a few other points of distinction.
• Media – well, this seemed to be local media only, so I guess the guys from Reuter and Bloomberg were off covering the American financial collapse

What we found out:

• Changzhou has a museum
• Changzhou has a cool city plan
• Changzhou is signing some huge deals with foreign manufacturers to base facilities in the city
• Changzhou has a drive-thru KFC (the ultimate sign of civilisation)
• Changzhou has some serious cash — free lunch at dinner at the Traders Hotel for about 500 folks was not cheap!

Anyway, since we are not doing manufacturing here at RightSite we probably won’t be moving to Changzhou anytime soon, but I was impressed by the professionalism of the forum (keeping 86 tour buses of visitors coordinated is no small task). And while the city itself didn’t seem exciting, it did seem clean, civilised and well-organised.

And it’s only 70 minutes away on the high-speed, no spitting or smoking, train. Nice!

Related posts:

1. Hi Ho! Hi Ho! It’s to Changzhou We Go!
2. SOHO China Spends RMB 3.2 Billion on Zhongshan Road Office Project
3. Leoni Group of Germany Sets Up Asia Headquarters in Changzhou

This will be a quick post as we are off on the train to Changzhou in about ten minutes.  Yeah, where is Changzhou?  Which ‘zhou is that?  Well, it’s coming up fast kids, so pay attention.

Changzhou is one of the many medium-sized cities in Jiangsu which is booming, thanks to the migration of manufacturing inland into China’s heartland.  The city now has eight industrial zones, and today is having a major investment forum, the Changzhou Forum on Science & Technology, Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation.

We are headed there with our funky new die-cut namecards to tell them the wonders of RightSite and see what is up with the Changzhou industrial property market.

Will give you the full account when we return on the weekend.  See you soon here on Mingtiandi.com!

Related posts:

1. Leoni Group of Germany Sets Up Asia Headquarters in Changzhou
2. Road Trip Report

We have disappointing news today for any of you tuning in to find out how today’s web design focus group session progressed. The meeting was called on account of typhoon, or cyclone, or whatever you call that really big storm earlier today. So we had a team pizza lunch instead.

So for this afternoon’s web development conference call, instead of discussing the usability and aesthetics of the RightSite.Asia homepage, we had to focus on whether people should be able to choose custom sort orders for search results pages. (In the end, we decided that being able to guarantee our paid members that their listings would rank at the top of the search results was worth more than helping folks sort by property size).

So now homepage design concepts are delayed until tomorrow, and we will look at listings page concept designs next week. This means more time for those of you who have yet to weigh in our existing design concepts.

To get ready for next week, I’m posting the listing page concepts for your review here today.

Related posts:

1. Designing Our Future
2. The Shape of Things to Come
3. Hurdling Through China