Nuffnang China is so far doing ok with the current Challenge 1000 campaign (?????. We target to get 1000 blogs that meet the requirement to sign up to our community, place the ad units, write a small post about Nuffnang and link to us. By doing that you get RMB50 in your Nuffnang account once the 1000 target is met. So in other words, it’s a collective effort between Nuffnang AND the bloggers to make this happen.

We’re already planning for future upcoming community events with bloggers so we’re looking at venues/restaurants to hold these events. I went to one last week to check it out as recommended by my friend Wangjing. It was her friend’s place at the west side and I haven’t been to the west side before. Her friend Stella came back from Canada and brought this Japanese franchise back from there and set up shop here, so Wangjing and I both went to have dinner there.

It’s called Sushi Nami Royale, small little shop, newly opened, very clean and simple. None of the fancy luxurious shit.

We sat ourselves down and not long, our food arrived. Oh gosh did we order so much haha

Somehow I found myself to be a “roll” person, so we ordered lotsa rolls. But there were a few unique dishes that we did try out as well.

One was this:

See that flame coming out from the oil? The meat is some beef tongue which we’re suppose to put on top of that flame to let it “burn”? Well, just slightly. It tasted good.

We also tried the a Japanese Eel pizza. At first I thought it was weird, but then it tasted pretty good.

Ended off with this drink that the owner made for us specially. That fruit is a longan, pretty familiar since we get a lot of it in Malaysia. The drink was…good i guess? I’m not a big alcohol drinker anyway hehehe But it was good.

Will be checking out a few other restaurants soon so that we can find a venue for our bloggers to chill out with. Hopefully we find something that will sponsor us soon!

Something we here at the Nuffnang China office started this week. Actually, we’re doing this only because of Julia as she doesn’t exercise at all. The rest, Rachel and Eric are fine. Rachel runs almost every morning before coming to work and Eric signed up for a gym and goes about 3 times a week. It’s Julia that doesn’t do exercise for shits. She keeps saying she’s skinny enough and all that shit but we keep telling her it’s not enough. Being skinny doesn’t mean being healthy, plus she eats a shit loads.

She keeps saying she ain’t fat but that’s coz she just graduated and just started working. Continue doing this for the next 2 years and see you ass grow and your health deteriorate quickly. Probably end up being tired all the time too. I didn’t want this to happen 2 years down the road for any one in our team. So “Workout Wednesday” was born to cultivate healthy activities during the week. Of course working out once a week sure ain’t going to help much but it sure is better than not doing any at all.

We’ll try to mix it up every week to do other sports/activities, but it seems that jogging seems to be the easiest and free-est, all you need is a pair of shoes.

“Workout Wednesday”, a Nuffnang China employee benefit.

Muahahaha….

This is what we’ve been doing the last few Friday afternoons at the office.

Beer is one of the cheapest beverages in China. The cheapest beer in Malaysia are the Tiger/Anchor beers you get at Chinese coffee shops at about RM 5.50 per can, or RM 11 per bottle. The cheapest beers you can get in Beijing are at the coffee shops too but the bottle (large) goes for RMB 3 each, that’s less than RM 1.50, or less than a Teh Ais or Milo Ais, about the price of a leong-cha-shuet.

So to save money here in Beijing, rather than drinking Coke, or Orange Juice, I have no choice but to drink Tsingtao or Yanjing.

You heard it, from the man himself.

After having that good blogger weekend gathering, since we spent quite a bit on the bloggers, we actually racked up quite a few meal points here and there that we could use to redeem good food. So we went back to the hotpot place that we took the bloggers to and had a feast ourselves. hehe

and as if that wasn’t good enough, that night itself, Wangjing invited us to her restaurant/cigar bar at the Financial Street area, and treated us to a full western style meal including salad, soup, mains, dessert, and wine.

Since it’s a cigar bar, she and her cousin gave us a tour and introduced to us the different cigars there were. We had a 5min crash course and now i feel like I know a shit ton about cigars!! Wahahah…well I like that feeling that I know, even though I really don’t.

This is their biggest cigar. Not for sale.

The next day (Saturday) we did our regular routine with Jason and gang. Dinner was at Beijing’s K-town Wangjing. (Yes, Wangjing came along to Wangjing for dinner too, haha). After dinner, what was supposed to be a chill night, ended up having red wine with cheese, then going to another place for flaming dr. peppers, and then to another place to dance and after that I excused myself to go home while the rest continued.

Yep this is a random pic of Montse and I in a Nike store. This is the new Montse, new and improved version, compared to her fatass +13kg version a year ago. She’s all out to flaunt. Am going to do some quick advertising for her here, she used to be the face of a lot of FMCG products in Philippines – shampoo, soap, hair coloring, etc, and get paid loads for it. Now she’s a strategic planner for McCann Healthcare, single, available and ready to mingle. Interested, please leave a comment below and I’ll forward it to her.

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Yesterday was the first time I’ve been to a football game EVER. It was awesome. Beijing Guoan vs Tsingtao. Of course the majority of the stadium was all Beijing Guoan supporters.

The Tsingtao supporters were only….

…yep that much. So for their protection, there were guards sitting all around them to protect from the Beijing Guoan madness. The vulgarity at the game towards the Tsingtao fans, were…awesome. You learn quite a few vulgar words at these games, it’s a good vocab picking up place.

Beijing Guoan only in the last 30 minutes scored 2 goals. Imagine what would happen if Tsingtao scored instead? hhmmm

Niubi – this is what’s written on the stadium door -

Just say it to anyone in China. Then see their reaction. hehehe

Last weekend was a fruitful weekend. This is not supposed to be publicized since it’s a more “closed” event. We just wanted to build better relationships with the more influential bloggers and let them know exactly what we were doing so they could support us. Since not many people read my blog I guess it’s ok to share a few things.

The 2 day event started on Friday evening where Julia and Eric, went to the airport with this:

Yep, it’s one of the posters to let the bloggers coming from other parts of China to identify us at the airport. We had 3 coming from outside Beijing. We then all went to Blue Frog at Sanlitun where it was the first time we met most of them and had a good night chilling, dinner, and drinks. Most of them have heard of each other but just not met them in person.

The next day was a whole day packed with activities. We started the day at a hotel meeting room where we really just sat down and presented what Nuffnang was to all these Chinese bloggers. Surprisingly they were all very supportive and also brought up many interesting concerns and questions.

Yep, I was sitting down most of the time, then as soon as I stood up to make some points, I saw Kingston take a pic of me.

We then adjourned to lunch at this awesome steamboat place near the Nuffnang office. It hadn’t been open for long but we found it since we walk pass it everyday. It looks SUPER posh and expensive but actually it’s priced very reasonable. I sometimes just spend my whole Saturday afternoon in there on their couches for Dimsum and doing some work on my laptop.

Lunch made us all too full. We then went to Nanluoguxiang hutong and Houhai to just walk around and enjoy the weather. Weather was really perfect that day. After all that walking we ended up chilling at a bar and having Tsing Tao in the afternoon.

Starming and Me:

Rachel and Kingston:

Then the fun started happening when we got bored and decided to buy some cards to play. Kingston was all about wanting to gamble, but not everyone wanted to do that, so we suggested, why not instead of betting cash, we bet push ups. NYAHAHAHAHAHA….

U can imagine, we were raising each other’s push up amounts til it got quite insane. hahaha. And the bloggers were sporting enough that they actually did all the push ups they “lost”. Kingston being the big gambler ended up “working out” a lot that afternoon!

We were all hungry again after all that working out, we went to dinner at South Beauty, a very famous restaurant in Beijing and then went to KTV after that where everyone let loose and chilled before heading home.

We were all really happy that all the bloggers had fun and we hope to have more of these in the future. Hopefully then it’d all be sponsored by advertisers!!!

Oh one more picture before I end this, before leaving Houhai, I just had to take this picture of this old “auntie” belting out some old-style songs so passionately in the middle of everyone at Houhai. It’s just something they all do.

Go just got back from Dalian in the morning yesterday and said, why not go for dinner? I normally go for kickboxing in the evening, but since I already went 3 days in a row, I decided to be lazy and take a break to go have dinner with him. He came to the office to meet up with me first and since Julia was still here she joined us for dinner.

We went to Shuangjing for Shabushabu. This chain joint, is always packed. It’s cheap and tasty steamboat. 3 of us ate for RMB100.

I’m starting more and more to like the Shuangjing area, there are a lot of apartments there and it’s very close to Guomao CBD so after work, a bunch of people go there to eat dinner near their homes and then chill around there before just heading back around that area to go home.

After dinner, we were just outside of the mall to enjoy these 2 dudes playing acoustic guitar and performing. Singing and playing. Pretty damn good I must say, no one claps though, so Go and I just kept clapping and “wwooott-ing” after every song hehehee.

Then it gets weird. Across the street, people were also outside, but not young people, a bunch of old people out there singing into a microphone with background music in an out-of-tune fashion. I looked at Julia, surprised. She said, yep that’s how China people roll.

Then it got even more weird. This group, had lyrics on a wall, with NO music, and just singing outside themselves. Yep, that’s lyrics on the wall and they were all singing.

Weird.

Well, as long as they enjoy themselves. I think that’s the most important.

After my 6-7 months at ECPod, I have decided to move back to a more user-friendly blogger.com even though my chinese readers won’t be able to read this unless they use a proxy. But given that a lot of chinese users do use proxies and VPNs, it shouldn’t be that big of a problem.

My parents and sister were here in Beijing for the first time ever! I took them around town for the whole week last week, which left quite little time for me for work, but it was fun nevertheless. We did all the main attractions – great wall, forbidden city, walking outside the temple of heaven, bird’s nest olympic stadium, and shopping at silk street market, yashow, and hongqiao pearl market. Heck they didn’t even get enough shopping at those places that they had to go to Carrefour in Beijing to shop. haha

These are a few pictures from their entire trip here.

Taking the bus to the great wall – all dozing off the 1+ hour ride:



We finally arrived at the great wall, SOOOO MANY PEOPLE…coming to see a wall. I have 4 at my apartment. The dude on the far right, was standing at a point marked “hero of great wall” or something like that, because it was on a cliff:

Look at the amount of people:

Our personal tour guide, Wang Jing. She was super helpful throughout my family’s trip, coming with us to the great wall and forbidden city and explaining the history behind it. She’s going to Spain for her masters in Spanish so good luck to her!:

Me and my family at the background:

This shit is tiring:

Forbidden city with Mao’s face at the back:

Who says blackberry’s can’t take artistic shots?

Bird’s nest at the back:

The olympic torch:

The focus is not on my dad, but if you zoom into the kid at the background, the mom basically just spread the legs of the baby girl, and because in China, diapers are expensive, kids pants have a big hole at the bottom so that they can “unload” anytime. The baby girl was “spraying her fountain” just like that:

One of the crazy buildings next to the Olympic park, that’s the top of the dragon head, and the following buildings behind them are like the body of the dragon (hidden). The building in front is the “water cube” – aquatic center for the Olympics:

Last friday night I took my sister out for the first time without my parents, so that she could experience the “young” life and not just the touristy stuff. We started off with this party somewhere in a industrial area. My friend was spinning at this “warehouse” there, they had free flow drinks and chuanr, and people were getting haircuts in the middle of the party:



Very artsy. Haha. After that we went to Punk at Sanlitun to show my sister the more upscale electro scene at Opposite House hotel. All in all, I think a very productive trip. I saw a lot of Beijing sights myself, but probably won’t do it again. So friends coming to visit, I’ll take you guys to stuff that the locals do, not what the tourists do.

Too tiring. haha