This job ad is reproduced by permission of Ian Lister of NMIT:

Teaching Commerce and IT in China

Expressions of Interest

• Business Marketing, communications, ethics, commercial law, accounting and business finance
• Information Technology Web technology, database design and systems development

Well, it's great to be back home, but what a flight..
After the London - Hong Kong sector the last thing you want to do is spend 6.5 hours on the tarmac at HK airport. There was an engine fault that required a replacement part, followed by an "incident" that closed a runway that delayed us for yet another hour. For some reason the AirNZ management deemed that we should stay on the plane the whole time.
Then we needed to divert via Brisbane becuase the crew had run out of hours. Meanwhile I am throwing up and back on the oxygen.
Finally made it home at 11.30pm on Sunday (left heathrow 9pm Friday)
Half the family has got the flu too. Welcome to NZ!

Hong Kong is about a big of a culture shock as you could get after a month in mainland China. To suddenly surrounded by people of all nationalities and not the only Westerner in town was the biggest change.

Tomorrow I leave the mainland for Hong Kong after a month of teaching here in Hangzhou. What a fantastic journey it has been!

Thanks to my amazing powers to cyber-transport myself to New Zealand from China, I am able to compare the NZ results on Bing with the Chinese results. Here are the images, let you decide...
( I am guessing that massacre and protests will be removed from "related searches" in the near future. This is what we call a bug...)

Chinese version:

NZ Version:

China's attempt to control the internet via a client side package known as Green Dam seems to be faltering according to Information Week
Add to that, the software appears to be ripped off from a combination of US software maker Solid Oak and some illegal use of BSD licenced Open Source image recognition software - OpenCV - according to The Register

BBC News video worth a look. The title says it all.

It always seems to be party time outside the Wu Mart shopping mall on a Sunday evening. Things were just starting to warm up after I took these two videos. There was a fair bit of American Hip Hop, breakdance stuff happening.

Breakdancing Xiasha, Hangzhou from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Dancing competition, Xiasha, Hangzhou China from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Thanks to Gené for these pictures.
Click on the thumbnails for a bigger version.

Today we visited the historic town of Xitang, which is an hour an a half drive north of Hangzhou heading towards Shanghai.

Twitter censorship in China made it into the BBC too.

Thanks to Gené van Heerden for these photos.

Click on the thumbnails to get the bigger picture.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the famous West Lake area of Hangzhou with my colleague Gené van Heerden and four of her marketing students, who kindly gave up their Saturday to show us around this very scenic spot.

Left is Broken Bridge. Right is a picture of our trusty tour guides. Clockwise from kneeling we have How, Ruud, Alice, and Star.

We found an interesting art place that was in an historic building. It was full of beautiful traditional Chinese paintings, and we interrupted the local artists who were just having their lunch. They seemed genuinely very enthusiastic about their work and showed us their line sketches of the area. These were strictly not for sale.

There was a tourist "attraction" which enabled a passing sucker to dress up in traditional costume. I thought this would provide an excellent opportunity for me to do what I do best, act like a complete plonker. Donning this Chinese Emperor's outfit rapidly brought a huge crowd of onlookers who were obviously enjoying every minute of my ritual public humilation.

One of the more interesting emporia on this street was a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy and clinic. There was also the added bonus of free green tea to all and sundry who came into the shop. This had a special meaning for us, as we'd narrowly avoided paying around $20 for a cup of tea in an "Authentic Chinese Tea Shoppe".

The guys in New Zealand wanted to see how the building was going outside the appartment.

If you use one of the services such as bit.ly that use Twitter's API outside of China, it seems that you can still post to Twitter from there.

The college I am working at is called the Water Conservancy and Hydropower College of Zhejiang. It is one of 14 colleges/universities in the Xiasha higher education area, officially know as HEDA-Hangzhou economic development area

Despite Microsoft earmarking $100 million to market their new Bing search offering, neither this nor Live Search is available to me in China.

According to Wikipedia serialization is this:
"In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be stored on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward. This process of serializing an object is also called deflating or marshalling an object. The opposite operation, extracting a data structure from a series of bytes, is deserialization (which is also called inflating or unmarshalling)."

Today's session in China went really well. Some of the students are really getting the hang of this C# - Object Oriented thing, and asking lots of really great questions. Actually, based on what I saw today, I'd be prepared to offer a few of these kids a job back in NZ. They are really switched on and a joy to teach.

And get yourself banished to China..

  Well well well, you are not 10 mins from home in the taxi on the way to the airport to China and the whole family goes completely bonkers.

Well, it was your 70th, Ann, and I wish you well. I hope the next 70 years are as happy and productive as the last 70.

PS Can I borrow that headgear sometime? it might come in useful in some meetings I have to go to.

  Haha what a laugh! Here is the local restaurant next to my appartment. I took this picture after a half hour run through some industrial park where they make pharmaceuticals  and other interesting products that involve a lots of ducting, pipes, and chimneys. The restaurant had an interesting looking menu but was a squeaky clean joint of elevator music and couples dreamingly looking into each others eyes. Barf, pah - leeze.

So the reality is that I spend my evenings occasionally doing some work, watching DVDs on my laptop, Skyping the dog, the missus and the kids (not necessarily in that order) and finding new and unusual ways to IM people.

After a couple of weeks of this I am going to be looking to have some crazy fun and let my hair down explore some strategic business opportunities in Hong Kong. So if you think you'd like to join me, then just let me know

Whilst jogging round the streets of Hangzhou last night with Gené, we noticed the rather bizarre sight of a man with a TV on his shoulder riding pillion on a motor scooter. They casually sauntered across the road in face of oncoming traffic, lights off, seemingly oblivious of any personal danger.

This kind of behaviour is not unusual here, as the roads seem to exist in a state of perpetual chaos. Yet I have not seen a single accident or near miss.

However, I was reminded of some traffic experiments in Germany and the Netherlands where road signage is completely removed. Their experience is very similar, but it took a bunch of European bureaucrats to figure out what the Chinese have known for years.

"The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles" is the quote from Der Speigel article linked to above.

The problem in New Zealand and other western cities is that we mix these East and West attitudes to driving with sometimes disastrous consequences, not to mention a lot of predudice

Just try Googling the term "Driving while Asian".

It might take a while before Driving while Asian is as mainstream as Chinese medicine and therapy is becoming in the West, but it is certainly an idea worth considering.

Wish I was that supple. This boy definitely doesn't need more Yoga too.

This photo was taken on Saturday in the local park, a small oasis of green amongst the urban sprawl.

I have got up to 75 students spread over two rooms. I wander between the two and try to spot obvious glaring issues (like the student is doing the wrong exercise and doing it in VB, for example). I don't worry if they are asleep or playing Solitaire, that's their problem. Most are really hard working. There is a high percentage of girls on this course, which is quite different to IT courses in NZ and UK.  Sometimes they put their hand up and ask for help. A few cluster around in groups and help each other out. Somehow it all seems to work out.

This video does get to be a bit of a blur at the end. That's because I had it directly streaming from my brain receptors so you get to feel how I feel too.

Students in C# Lab, China from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

I had a complaint comment made this morning that my so called Blog wasn't a Blog because I didn't write anything apart from annotations to my photos and videos. Well, that comment is justified to some degree because you'll never get found by search engines if you don't have any relevant text. And no-one knows what you are thinking either, which in my case might not be a bad thing.

So just to redress the balance a bit, here are a few thoughts from one week down in China.

First of all, if you are coming here to work, it is a really good idea to arrive a day or to early to get your head in the right place. The people and culture are so different to our Western ways that it takes a while to adjust.

I had the fortune of only having a three day week followed by a three day weekend, and that break really saved my sanity (and of those unfortunate enough to be near me).

The weekend brought a flurry of photo and video blogging, but above all I got a chance to explore and really get a feel for the people. There is this strange sense of calm here that I haven't experienced elsewhere. The Hangzhou town is busy but somehow you don't feel your energy sapping like you might in a city like London or Delhi. I have never seen a hint of aggression or anti-social behaviour since I have been here (apart from some raised voices at immigration, but that's understandable)

There's some much crazy stuff happening on the streets. It might be normal to the Chinese, but to my Western biased eyes it all seems like sensory overload. I have seen street dancing (videoed here), women dancing the Jive together in the park, hairdressers on the street having some kind of motivational pep talk, and spoken to some really genuinely nice people. And of course, the really enigmatic T Shirt slogans for which China is so well known.

Now starting the second week of teaching here at the Water College, (on a Sunday because of the public holiday on Thursday) I feel more at ease, and I am enjoying getting to know the students. It's hard to teach because of the language issues, but at least with programming we have a universal language to converse in. Debugging C# programs in Chinese Visual Studio is not for the faint-hearted though!

If you are coming here from a western culture for a while, there's a few things that I would recommend bringing:

Coffee and Tea. If you need these, then they are hard to come by.

For kiwis, Vegemite, Marmite. Spreads are not that commonplace. Dairy produce in particular is a bit of a luxury item, and you really have to go to a bigger shop to find milk. You certainly won't find milk in the corner shop.

The bread is pretty average, most food seems to have too much sugar in it for my tastes. Watch what you eat at the street stalls. I am usually pretty adventurous in this department, but I am now convinced that the "meat" I started knawing into yesterday used to be something's tail. Eeww yuck. I had to "protect circumstance, begin with me" and dispose in the bin.

Books and DVDs. Give yourself time to zone out. There's nothing on telly that I could find anyway.

If you don't like hard beds, then a sleeping mat is useful. Mind you, I was happy with my hard bed.

At this time of year, you don't need a lot of warm clothes. It is warm and humid, so you have to pace yourself. Today, for example, is over 30 degrees, and humid. No one is moving very fast. 

The internet here is a saviour. Being able to Skype from my apartment is great, and I get a chance to talk to the dog and the cat too. Yes I really am that sad.

In my first session, I showed lots of photos of New Zealand and my family. The students loved the dog and cat pictures especially. They also liked the New Zealand "lollies" (sweets) that I handed around. Makes you more human I think.

We still have three weeks here. I am looking forward to seeing some of the older China if there's any of it left here. Gavin, my assistant here, told me that Hangzhou used to be the capital of China many centuries ago, so there must be some hidden treasures out there.

And Gené thought so too

Now this guy could really shake, and he looked just like Millhouse out of the Simpsons, to boot.

Robot dance competition, Hangzhou from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

These guys really could strut their stuff.

Robot dance competition, Hangzhou from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

I am sure that is useful advice here

I was thinking about stealing a bicycle, but then they came to take me away...

Thought Police from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Do you have something slightly larger, perhaps?

Improbably small underwear from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Will she ever ring?

Just don't press the red button...

You want to buy mobile?

Mobile phone shop, Hangzhou, China from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Well, we are all trying to get somewhere, kind of...

Random Traffic, Hangzhou from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

That's what it said on the bin, anyway..

These Chinese supermarkets love their packaging.

The two carrots on plastic tray with clingfilm wrapping got my award for most over-packaged product of 2009.

This photo demonstrates the standard etiquette on Chinese pedestrian crossings (you have to imagine the horn tooting).

You can't argue with that really, can you?

Here's a few pictures from the neighbourhood near my appartment. The locals are keen to try out their English, and when you are the only Westerner you get a lot of stares.

It's pretty urbanised here. The scary thing is that 6 years ago this was all green fields.

Most of the food here is Chinese. However, the Colonel has made a few inroads too..

Here's an interesting juxtaposition. Traditional foot remedy versus China mobile shop. The street was absolutely teeming with Mobile Phone shops. There was a guy with a T Shirt with the slogan "Nothing Rhymes with Pirate", but I didn't get time to capture that ancient Chinese proverb on film.

Here's some pictures of me in my lab of 75 students. There's actually two rooms, and I have to run between the two of them helping them with C# problems in Chinese Visual Studio. I have to carry my laptop so that I know what the menu items are in Chinese.

This is a bit of a challenging job.

Just arrived in China for my month of teaching OO programming at Zheijiang Hydropower and Water Conservancy college in Hangzhou. As you can see from the picture, we got a royal welcome. This is me and Gene van Heerden from South Africa who is teaching a marketing course.

First two days have been crazy for both of us, no chance to recover from jet lag. The students and staff are great though.

We have a three day weekend coming up..