http://www.hesspoint.com

Here the card from the hotel I stayed in during my last business trip. Hilarious mistake! I swear it is not photoshopped (except the smudging of the license plate number).

On May 12th Sichuan Province was rocked by an earthquake that strong that even here in Shanghai our office building started shaking. The quake, the worst in 30 years in China, brought unbelievable suffering to the people in the mountain region of Wenchuan and Beichuan. Just now as people are still trying to get people out of the destroyed houses another strong aftershock hit the region. However where is so much devastation and calamity there is also hope, compassion and sympathy. Everyday many people are still pulled from the rubble alive by the many soldiers and volunteers who do not rest if there is any hope left and put their own lives on the line for those in need. Everywhere across the country and abroad people are donating money and goods.

If you also would like to donate please find the contact information of the Chinese Red Cross below:

Hotline: +86-10-6513 9999
Address: 8 Beixinqiao Santiao, Beijing/ 北京市东城区北新桥三条8号

Account information:
Account holder：中国红十字会总会

for RMB-transfers
Bank：中国工商银行 北京分行东四南支行
Account number：0200001009014413252

for foreign currency transfers
Bank：中信银行酒仙桥支行
Account number：7112111482600000209

I think I speak for all the foreigners who live in China that our thoughts are with those people in Sichuan right now, the victims as well as the many helpers, that they will get trough these tough times and get all the help that is needed.

Update: Jia Dong, one of my readers, send me this link with information for donation: http://www.tongji.net/Donation_Call.jpg

Update: A colleague just send me this. Very heartbraking: I don’t know… but I do know

Since many many years I use LEO Dictionary to look up English - German translations. For a long time I have searched an online dictionary for Chinese but never quite found something as well as LEO.

Now LEO has released their own Chinese - German dictionary which is exactly what has been missing for all those years. Thanks LEO for being the coolest online dictionary on the web

I just found a great site that helps everyone who needs to fly a lot. Seatguru lets you see which seats in a plane are good and which will give you the guarantee for no sleep. Just select the airline, the plane and you see a map of all seats with comments. Now you can avoid accidently booking a seat next to a horde of crying babies.

When an old friend from university visited me in Shanghai last week we ended up looking up some other old friend’s blog and found this unbelievably cool website. Let’s just say we spend the next couple of hours (until 1h at night!) on this site. No, not that kind of site you are probably thinking of now, much much better: flightmemory.com.

In a nutshell, the site lets you enter all your flights you have ever done in your life. You can enter about anything from airline to seat number and if you sat aisle, middle or window (in case you still remember, damn where did I sit again on that flight in ‘03 from Toronto to Ottawa?). The beauty is that the site then creates you a statistic and some nice maps of all your flights. For me currently looks like this:

So as we are both flying a lot and on top of this I am a total travel nut (as you know when you read my blog) we sat there both hacking in our flights and wrecking our brains with questions like “What plane did I fly last time from Shanghai to Narita?” or “Which of the two Shanghai airports did I come in last time from Xiamen?” So we still have to see who leads in terms of distance and hours. Lets put it this way: 4.6 times around the world. Let me know if you beat that.

This is my first non-China related post in some time. However I thought I have to blog this one. When reading an article on Spiegel Online about asteroids I found this link to a asteroid impact calculator.

It is quite advanced. You can input how far you are from the impact location, how big the object, how fast and so on. As a result you can see if you would get incinerated, vaporized, blown all over the place or crushed. By the way you also see what happens to the rest of humanity and our planet.

So let the Armageddon begin and just to be sure, give Bruce Willis a call in case you get scared

Recently a friend pointed me to a service in Shanghai that is very helpful. When you are not at home and you need an address you can send a text message to a service number in Shanghai with the name of the place and it will send you the address in English and also in Chinese characters if your phone is so inclined.

One service is Shanghai Callcenter and the other one is Guanxi.

Both websites do not really work but you can look up the basics.

As many of you (at least if you also live in Shanghai) might have noticed, Shanghai has 3 new subway lines since End of last year. Now there is a great new website to plan your trip through the big city jungle: explore Shanghai metro.

It calculates the quickest route and gives you the estimated time and fare. Very convenient. And of course there is still the unbeaten dd-map if you can read and write basic Chinese.

When I wrote the last post, this was all still fun and harmless. However since the last few days it has seriously snowed, more then since the last 50 years. One night it snowed 20 cm. It might sound not much but in a city where it snows once in 50 years, a few centimeters of snow bring life to a screeching halt. Thousands of travelers for the Spring Festival are stuck at train- and bus stations as well as at airports. In Shanghai even buildings collapsed under the 10 cm of snow. I am not kidding. And apparently there is more to come according to Shanghai Daily. This photo I took from my office yesterday. For more photos check out this gallery by Spiegel Online.

On the lighter side there is a very amusing thread in the schanghai.com forum called "Schnee Geschichten" where Germans in Shanghai exchange their experiences during these days. If you speak German, have fun.

Yesterday people in Shanghai experienced a rare weather phenomenon - it was snowing! As the city is hit by almost all kinds of weather during the year as rain, thunderstorms, typhoons and sizzling heat, snow almost never falls. As a proof I took some pictures with my cellphone camera: