The Hotel Ibis Binjiang in Hangzhou, China looks good but there have been – for me – a few major issues that make me feel very happy that I am moving to another hotel today.

Hangzhou is a beautiful city, often called the Most Beautiful city in China. Ask most mainland Chinese about Hangzhou and they will tell you how beautiful it is. Marco Polo writes extensively about Hangzhou. The city has been wealthy and prosperous for more than 1,000 years.

I am in Hangzhou visiting my business partners, a Canadian guy and his Chinese wife. Hangzhou is her original hometown but she is now Australian by citizenship. The Hotel Ibis Binjiang is an easy walk to their condo and the price is good. They checked out the hotel for me before booking it on my behalf.

This is not my first trip to China or my first time staying in a hotel in China but it may well be the last time I will stay in a Hotel Ibis.

• air conditioning not consistently cooling the air – Hangzhou is very humid and it is quite warm.
• internet service is cut off at 11:30 PM until 7:00am
• breakfast is missing a few key components – like bowls for your oatmeal

Lack of consistently working air conditioning is important to me in a humid and hot climate. No window can be opened so I can’t even open a window to enjoy the cool evening air.

When I complained to the front desk manager that the air conditioning wasn’t working he patiently explained that it was central air and was working. Notwithstanding the fact that the cleaning staff would helpfully play around with the individual controls in my room and cool, refreshing air would begin to flow. Great staff in the hotel and they are very friendly and helpful even if I struggle to trying to explain myself to them with my 17 words of Chinese.

As for having the internet cut off at 11:30 – WTF. There is a 12 hour difference between here and Toronto and 13 between here and Halifax. Prime talk time with family, friends and clients.

Anyway – bye bye Hotel Ibis Binjiang in Hangzhou.

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The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節), also known as the Moon Festival or Zhongqiu Festival is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese people. Dating back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China’s Shang Dynasty, it was first called Zhongqiu Jie (literally “Mid-Autumn Festival”) in the Zhou Dynasty.[1] In Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, it is also sometimes referred to as the Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is in September or early October in the Gregorian calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumnal equinox of the solar calendar, when the moon is at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties. The Chinese festival is very traditional and a great way to celebrate.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the few most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the others being Spring Festival and Winter Solstice, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the fall harvesting season on this date. Traditionally on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomelos under the moon together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

• Carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns
• Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang’e Erect the Mid-Autumn Festival.(树中秋，竖中秋，in China,树 and 竖 are homophones）It is not about planting trees but hanging lanterns on the bamboo pole and putting them on a high point, such as roofs, trees, terraces, etc. It is a custom in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, etc.
• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members
• Fire Dragon Dances

Shops selling mooncakes before the festival often display pictures of Chang’e floating to the moon.

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Hainan Airlines is a great way to travel in China.

Have you tried calling an airline recently to make a reservation or select seat? How about when you are travelling in a foreign country where the language is Chinese? Well Hainan Airlines make this very easy by offering superb English language telephone support and service.

Offering service in English over the telephone is great but when you check in at the airport and get on the plane and someone is prepared to help easily in English was a pure joy to me as my Chinese is only up to about 17 words at this point in time. hahaha

And on board the aircraft things were very comfortable. Flying with Hainan Airlines reminds of what it was like to fly CP Air and Air Canada a few decades ago before they stopped chopping staffing levels on planes although I have enjoyed my time in the air with Air Canada when travelling to and from China since 2009.

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elong.com Travel is a wonderful company to deal with when travelling to China.

I cannot speak highly enough about the great service that I have received when organizing this trio to China from the people at elong.com.

Travelling to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language can be daunting at times especially when you are trying to book hotel and airline reservations. They offer friendly English speaking support 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

They helped me to easily arrange my travel in China with Hainan Air and various hotels. I am continuing to rely on them as I travel in China.

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Arrived in Hangzhou this afternoon – September 10 – from Beijing. Stayed in Beijing last night after arriving from Toronto on an Air Canada flight that was 4 hours behind schedule. More about Air Canada later.

The Mid Autumn Festival or Moon Festival falls on September 12 this year and in Hangzhou three days later on the Qiantang River the Tidal Bore makes its appearance. It is also known as the Silver Dragon. My business partners apartment overlooks the Qiantang River so I will have a birds-eye view of this event.

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I have just recently added the WP Stats Dashboard plugin to my blogs. For me this a very useful plugin.

From the WordPress site the following has been written:

Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

Notable features:

Lots of stats dashboard widgets
Tracking 50+ social metrics
Trending social metrics over time.
Autopost to Amplify and Posterous.
Sidebar widgets: social metrics, social profiles, total views, graph views per day
Profile finder.
Export Social Trends to excel.
iGoogle gadget.
Iphone App Available

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ChinaLily Search is launched. This has taken much longer than planned, heh so what else is new.

ChinaLily Search

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There is a certain serendipity in saying hello to strangers.

Serendipity is a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated.

I wasn’t consciously looking for anything when I said hello to Sam when we were both visiting a Starbucks but our conversation helped me to discover something. Sam was there with her month old daughter, sitting across from me and we began to chat.

We had a great chat and I reflected on one of comments later in the day. She told me that I had been helpful in explaining some web related things to her and that should offer my service to people. I have been told this many times over the years by friends and acquaintances that I have chatted with.

After talking to Sam a day or two later a friend said “You are such a great sounding board.”

I thought about this as a I went to sleep and the next morning Sounding Board Services was born.

I happened to see Sam again in Starbucks and thanked her. She told me to visit her blog because she had written about our meeting. Here is what she wrote:

A man sat down across from me and made some sweet comment about my daughter. Now, most people would smile and bend their heads back towards their work. Not I. I am awful at ending a conversation and worse at not engaging with someone who’s sitting directly across from me. Now, most of the time, the stranger and I will chat, and inwardly, I’ll be groaning about the lost time. Not this time.
Within ten minutes, the stranger at Starbucks had me running my own successful business and being a published author. I was staring at my books on the shelves at Indigo, spending my days in front of a bay window writing, and all it took was someone making me believe in my dream again. My strange and rare talent led me to a job coach, an inspirer, someone with his own very interesting life story and exactly who I needed. Life is extraordinary, and we can do anything we want with it, but sometimes it takes an odd encounter with a complete stranger to remind us of that.

Thanks Sam! You are an inspiration!

Visit the blog of Samantha Bailey and read her blog posting The Art of Meeting Strangers.

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Ok, I’ve just about completed the move of my various blogs over to tydbytes.com thanks to the multi site feature of WordPress 3.0. WordPress 3.0 allows you to host multiple blogs on one installation with one central control panel and this enables you to manage all aspects of each blog such as plugin updates and WordPress updates from one location.

Having this setup will make my life easier and hopefully I will be able to develop a regular posting schedule. In the past there seemed to be so much technical stuff to stay on top of that by the time I got through that there was no time left to do any writing.

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I haven’t blogged here since November 30, 2009. Yikes.

Recently I have been having a rough time with issues related to Acquired Brain Injury such as losing track of what I need to do especially projects. It has been as if on some things I have been in a suspended state where I am able to see what has to be done but cannot figure out the first step to take – it has been overwhelming.

So I have been cutting back on just about everything and clearing away a lot of web projects that have been ongoing but going nowhere AND constantly taking time and energy on my part. Sort of spring cleaning.

The result has been that I am getting going again although I have a number of clients who not happy with me at all. I mean HOW do you explain this stuff that I have been going through to people? Hell most medical professionals don’t have a clue about this stuff. Oh dear….hehehe Well at least I can still laugh about things.

So here I am writing.

I have moved this blog from one hosting platform to another. I had 5 hosting platforms with different companies and I am now down to 2. I have let a number of domains go by not renewing them. Just now mapping out what do do with a number of other websites. I already feel less stress and less overwhelmed.

Lots to do.

Need to write some words about my trip to China last year and my upcoming trip to China this September.

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