Second day

Kai on Tiananmen

Yesterday I did the metro and tiananmen square. I can’t help but compare China to Russia. I asked a Chinese person did Chinese copy Russia or is it the other way around? She replied, “China copied Russia”.

The metro is quite disappointing. The trains are quite small and infrequent. I actually dared to go in quite peak times and it didn’t feel crowded at all. The carriages themselves are small and I had to duck to get into it. I think most people travel on the road by buses and push bikes. It does take a bit of time to go underground and queue up for a stupid piece of paper which you hand to someone as you walk down to the platform. The murals compared to Moscow or Saint Petersburg are also disappointing. I visited a few stations and it was bland, but I guess it was better than seeing hundreds of flashy ads. So it was quite peaceful. You could read a book down there.

Sports motif in the metro

Tiananmen square. I can’t help but compare this again to the Red Square in Moscow. It’s big, but not as big as I expected it to be somehow. It is also has a little moussaliam for Mao like Lenin. Ok, I admit it is much better than anything in Russia. Funny enough there wasn’t just Chinese flags on display, but Finnish ones too. WTF? Finland is haunting me. I asked why the hell are there so many Finnish flags and I was told there must be an official state visit from Finland. Of course.

Finland in Beijing!

Incidentally I attended Mobile Monday Beijing last night. Loads of people. Well organised. Once again a whole bunch of Finns. Nokia seem to do alright in China. Trouble is with these sorts of mobile meetings is that there is no point for a technical person like myself to talk to a mobile games salesman. Really. No point. Waste of everyones time. So everyone was there but it was difficult to ascertain who you should speak to, to push your agenda.

The talk theme was about mobile marketing which is a bit of a sick joke. First speaker wanted Flash which boiled my blood. Second speaker talked about the millions of people they successfully spam. Last speaker talked about SMS campaigns. He gave an example for people to text to and funnily people exclaimed it didn’t work! You see a lot of people there had CDMA phones which is 2.5G whatever, which weren’t compatible with the GSM networks. Oh super great!

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The whole mobile industry is so frustrating for me. I couldn’t help but blurt out how much a Email client or rather good Web browsers would be for everyone. Funnily some people agreed with me, but I think just as a gesture to calm me down.

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