It’s been a while since I played badminton, and the Nuffies didn’t wanna go for jogging again for #workoutwednesday. I personally think that I get a whole lot more of workout from jogging since I sweat like crazy. They think otherwise, they said they had a bigger workout from badminton than jogging. Whatever….bleehhh…

Anyway, when we bought Julia’s computer, it came along with 2 badminton rackets and a shuttle cock! So we decided to use it and went out to the compound in front of our office building to whack a few.

Yep, sure ain’t dressed for badminton, and the wind was blowing the shuttle cock like crazy. So we were trying to hit the shuttlecock in a direction to make up for the wind, …like …golf? haha

Got a pretty good picture here with Eric, but let’s focus on the chick behind him, nyehehe

Ok so thought that pic didn’t give much credit to Eric since I was focusing on the green girl behind so this is another shot of him.

Who says blackberries can’t get good shots?

I guess badminton wasn’t fun enough so they started whacking each other instead of the shuttlecock:

Then the small kids that were hanging around decided they wanted to give it a shot:

We tried to play with them but when we hit the shuttle cock to them, it never comes back. All they do is just stand and smile, which ain’t a bad thing.

Jessica Lim stopped again back here in Beijing on the way back to KL from DC (Washington DC). I guess it’s a good way to break the trip from US to KL into 2 parts coz flying non-stop is quite a killer (24 hour flight!).

She was here on a 24 hour break so we decide to do some pretty chill stuff. We went for a massage at a place which I earlier bought coupons from a group-buying site here in China. They were RMB45 each (RM20!). But I guess you get what you pay for because the masseuse did some fire cupping thing for my feet and set my foot on fire! Yep tell me about it. After the massage they gave us more coupons to come back in the future and I must say the deals are pretty good, but going back there to get my feet lit on fire again? I don’t know….

We wanted to go for some Yunan noodles later but when we arrived there the shop wasn’t there anymore! So there was a peking duck shop next door with a whole lot of people in there so we decided to try it.

Food wasn’t bad and it wasn’t super expensive too. Might end up coming back here again for some nice atmosphere and not too far away from my place.

Headed to the very-talked-about Wudaoying hutong after that to go to this jazz place that has been written about very much. Ended up pretty disappointing. The hutong was quite dead, and the jazz place, well, when we went there we were the only 2 people in the bar, and the employees were “jamming”, no jazz. Oh, and Jess saw a rat just walk by the walls.

Later I found out from Simyee that there’s a better jazz place at East Shore, will be checking it out next week!

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With the help of Kingston and my mom I finally got my golf stuff shipped over here to Beijing! So of course, golf had to start. As I didn’t wanna totally embarrass myself on the golf course, Xixi and I went to this driving range to get myself accustomed back with my golf clubs.

I must say, when you don’t play for a while, the basics tend to come back and you hit better!

Xixi wasn’t bad herself too! With all that talk about “ooooh I haven’t played for 10 months bla blaa…”, she got all her shots going pretty well too! Psst,…she’s been playing very regularly since during high school so she’s had like 10 years ahead of me in golf!!

However, golfing in Beijing is really crazy expensive. The driving range in Malaysia costs RM10 for 100 balls. In Beijing, we paid RMB150 (RM70) for 75 balls each.

No wonder my shots went well here!

It’s something that wasn’t supposed to be announced yet since we’re not very ready at selling to advertisers at the moment. The Nuffnang Beijing office is merely a research office at the moment, finding out what’s what in the blogging community in China. Marketing Magazine got a hold of Tim Tiah and asked him to spill the beans on Nuffnang China so we kept it as low profile as possible.

Nevertheless, I guess it’s cool that my name was mentioned in a big industry magazine, WOOHOO!! But now the pressure is on to deliver….well, it was on the whole time anyway, but now it’s public, bleh.

Read the entire article here.

Last Sunday, Nuffnang China had it’s largest bloggers’ meet up so far. It was held in this new Sushi restaurant called Sushi Nami Royale. Met the owner Stella through an introduction from Wangjing. Stella lived in Canada for about 10 years and Sushi Nami is a Canadian brand that she thought of to bring to Beijing since she was coming back here. They’re looking to open more locations here in Beijing.

Back to the event, this event was meant for us to know our bloggers better and for the bloggers to come and understand more of exactly what we’re trying to achieve and ask any questions that they might have.

The event was supposed to start at 3.30pm but we had bloggers walking in as early as 3pm! Rachel waiting eagerly…

Once everyone got seated, we started the event by playing Broken Telephone, something I learned from Robb, but of course we did it in Chinese.

Then we started presenting the presentation that I present at every blogger event. This time I made it quick since it was a large group and expected more questions than before. But found out that in a large group, it’s harder to get questions since people are shy to speak up.

To keep the event light and not presentation driven, we got a chinese-rap band to come perform. The band was called HHHEEEIII!!! We actually met Ray, one of the members of the band through our Christmas event last year, we didn’t know he rapped, but after he won one of the prizes that night, we asked for a speech, but he said, why don’t I rap instead? We were like huh? and he just busted his speech out in a rap.

We were so amazed and found out that he had a band so we got him to come back to perform this time with the entire band!

You can see it’s a pretty simple 3-man band: 2 MCs and 1 DJ. Well the DJ setup is pretty simple, all he brought was just an iPad and he was churning out music from there!

We loved the performance, but then again, everyone also loved the food. The food was what Sushi Nami wanted to highlight to the bloggers so that they could blog about it after the event. Honestly, I’ve eaten at the restaurant twice before the event and I really do like their rolls. They also have this pretty cool dish called a Sushi Pizza, sounds weird but taste pretty damn good. If you’re a ramen fan though, don’t go for their ramen, it’s not too “Japanese”, since I’ve had pretty good training from Go to know what’s good and what’s not. hehe

Everyone sure did enjoy their food. Don’t think they’ve had an event where that many bloggers came together before. It was a cool experience for them as much as it was for us. We learned a bunch from them as well (through surveys that I haven’t looked through yet, hehe.)

Then it was time to leave, but we didn’t let them leave empty handed. The nuffies and I had already printed 100 Nuffnang Tshirts before hand to give out to the bloggers at the event so that they could go home with something. Of course, this Tshirt is going to be part of another campaign later on down the road but we didn’t tell the bloggers just yet!

One group shot of everyone! We had about 40 bloggers attend this event, 4 nuffies and the girl standing next to me, is Stella’s assistant, Yvonne, who’s team helped us out very much throughout the event. Didn’t get a chance to thank the team at Sushi Nami so I wanna do it here. THANK YOU SUSHI NAMI for your support and the awesome service throughout the event!

It sure was the first of many more events to come for bloggers. We wanna try to go to other cities to meet up with the bloggers there since we know, Beijing’s not the whole of China. We hope the bloggers did enjoy the event as much as we enjoyed organizing it.

Well it sure looks like I did. hehe

You can read the whole official write up here!

The only reason I would be going to a Hard Rock Cafe ANYWHERE, would be if there was a good deal or reason to go there. Of course, there was a good deal. It was Hard Rock’s Founders’ Day. Something like their anniversary? So they were giving away RMB 40 burgers and beer.

I thought, sure, why not. Blue frog’s cost RMB 40 for just the burger on Mondays. This one comes with a beer. So it should be a good deal. And it’s a reason not to go to the gym for one day.

Burger’s weren’t that great though. I still prefer Blue Frog’s. I check the regular prices for one of those burgers – RMB125. Might as well go rob the bank.

I guess someone had to pay for the decorations on the ceiling, and all the instruments hung on the wall.

At least the band was ok. I mean, wasn’t the best or anything, but then again, old people would die of heart attacks or stroke if they played anything harder.

Jessica Lim. Last I saw her was probably before I started working at Nuffnang. I had all the time in the world while selling Rainbows so was always hanging out and keeping in touch with lotsa friends during lunch, or after their work. But after starting to work at Nuffnang I guess life has been busy coz we got so many bloggers to take care of!

We’ve known each other for like probably 10 years now and seen each other grow up from the college days, the people we’ve dated, the jobs we’ve gone through. So it’s cool that we’re still in touch after all these 10 years.

So was chatting with Jessica on MSN one day and she said she’d be going to DC for some work for 2 weeks. I just suggested, hey why not just stop by Beijing on the way there and on the way back. She checked quickly with the travel agent and they arranged it perfectly.

So last weekend Jess stopped by for the weekend before going to DC. We started off with Malaxiangguo since she loves spicy shit:

The next day, something local as well, Guilinmifen. Go joined us for lunch too:

After some scarf buying at the Silk street market (Jess of course, not me!), we decided that the day was too nice to head back so we chilled by an outdoor bar and had a beer!:

It was one of Beijing’s best days since it just poured while we were inside Silk street market. This is a picture of Guomao bridge, I live just behind the tall glass building on the right:

And this is a picture of the tallest building in Beijing, one of China World’s 3 towers:

That night itself was Jackie’s birthday. She invited us to her birthday dinner at Ole!, an authentic Spanish restaurant at Sanlitun South. Dinner was great and we even had a flamenco performance to spice things up!:

The next day Jess had to leave for DC, we just decided to do a chill lunch at Sky Fortune, one of my favorite chill weekend places with very few people. They focus on hotpot, but their small selection of dimsum’s quality is pretty damn good:

So that’s part 1 of Jessica Lim’s Beijing trip. She’ll be coming back next week for just one night before heading back to KL. Good catch up times.

Last week on a Tuesday I went for a live jazz session here at one of the Hutong’s called Donghuamian hutong off Jiaodaokou street. It was a pretty good jazz session at a small little bar called Jianghu Bar. You’d probably guess by now, it was free cover that day, that’s why I went.

Why pay for jazz when you get it free?

On the way there, I came by this:

The owner must have had fun doing this.

This weekend was a long weekend and not a normal one that I normally have with just gym, food, and drinks. This weekend was different. Started off with drinks on Friday night at this new place called Beach.

The usual suspects, Jackie and Montse:

New friend Janice I met a day before at an English school for free pizza and wine:

Saturday – went to buy my golf bag! Woohoo I can play golf now!!! Had dinner at the awesome barbeque place and beer, then club hopped to 3 different places.

Sunday – Simyee invited to her house for an all-wholesome vegetarian meal. It was super healthy I almost didn’t feel bad for not going to the gym. Met a bunch of awesome people there, mostly her colleagues from Mercedes.

Monday – One of Simyee’s colleagues Chrystal, took me out to do some cherry picking. We were supposed to drive half an hour north but ended up driving more than double the distance and ended up at a totally different cherry field.

It’s not my favorite to do anything nature-y unless it’s golf, but I’ve heard that a lot of people go cherry picking during the summer or strawberry picking in the winter. Since someone was willing to take me, I went.

Chrystal starting to take pictures:

After a while, you got the hang of which to pick and which not to pick:

She did do quite a bit of picking but I only have pictures of her taking pictures haha:

Her friend Jane was the hardcore one, she’s also in the automobile industry – Toyota:

Each ticket allowed us to pick 1KG each. We were guessing if we over-picked or under-picked and not get enough value. But walahhhh…we got it right on the dot:

I think we spent about 1 hour there before calling it quits, since we were all full anyway already:

We then went to do more healthy stuff by eating at Element Fresh, a Taiwanese owned salad-type restaurant. Spent the rest of the evening there chatting and eating.

Was a good weekend. This coming weekend Jessica is coming, already have birthday parties and what not lined up.

Oh and of course, Nuffnang China announced their small event coming up on June 19th today! Check it out here.