Celebrating California - Wine Country
A daytrip to Napa is one of those precious privileges of living in Northern California: Together with Stanford buddies Mike and Eve, and Juan we escaped the foggy Bay area yesterday and enjoyed ourselves in perfect weather conditions for a light pizza lunch, wine tasting (Corison, Stag's Leap, Silverado), and a wonderful dinner at Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen (same owner as Mustard's).
Back in California
After over 7 weeks of travel in Europe and Asia I am finally back home in California. It was a great trip with lots of good business progress, and also fun, experience, good food, nice people, and the like.
I am thinking more and more about how one can live in a flat world, i.e., in several places, continents, at the same time. I am now trying to be regularly in a couple of "Hub" cities, tiered into 3 classes:
- Tier A: "Home" (where I have a physical presence)
- San Francisco
- Munich
- Thinking of adding a city in Asia, probably Hong Kong or Singapore
- Tier B: Visit 3-4x a year, with friends, business, and basic infrastructure in place
- Tier C: Be there with little setup costs
- New York
- Sydney
- Beijing or Shanghai
This way I can create a sense of global personal presence while reducing travel cost (direct and indirect) to an absolute minimum.
Pavements of Beijing
Hitting the pavements of Beijing yesterday, like here seen on Tienamen square. It is good to be back in town and surprising, how much has changed again in the 2 years since my last visit.
Evening visit to Beijing opera (finally - the first time it was closed due to SARS, the next time I was only one day in eijing), very nice.
Business meetings on Tuesday, and time out with Yan Zhu from Stanford, before leaving for Japan on Wednesday.
Shanghai
Business in Shanghai. The buzzling city full of new high rises, areas where you simply cannot tell the difference from the U.S., world record of high speed passenger train - the Maglev, nightlife in Pu Shi, good food with Andrew in Pu Dong.
Chengdu Hot(s)pot
At least froma culinary perspective, the trip to mainland China is a full success: Chengdu turns out to be the hot(s)pot for spicy Szechuanese food - together with Rosen (tonight) and Jeroen (yesterday).
But apparently food is good for making business relationships and building community - the db4o Chinese Community is off for a good start!
