So I got this listed in expat-blog. Not to be overly self indulging, but when we were researching our move to Beijing (though we were going to move whether we knew anything or everything we needed or wanted to know or not) we did find lots of good information on here, and if it wasn’t good information (or relevant), it was at least entertaining. My thought then was, maybe we can be equally informative or entertaining to some other “moving to China” hopefuls. You can find our profile here.
Maria is at a trial class today at Tsinghua University. I don’t remember if we had mentioned this earlier, but she wants to attend either there or Beijing University (Peking University) for their MBA programs; Tsinghua SEM iMBA and BiMBA respectively. They’re both “international” MBA programs, targeted to foreigners. It’s been three hours since I dropped her off; apparently it’s a long class.
Things are in progress as far as a whole slew of things that are going on.
Connections Bar and Grill: This is the restaurant that it appears I will be taking over shortly as General Manager. There’s been a good bit of family politics going on involving disagreements with the current GM and some potential investors, but that’s all being taken care of and I’d rather not get into the details and/or specifics because I’m not sure I should. Suffice it to say, I am figuring out how the current supply chain works, we have two cooks who can prepare everything on the menu, and one experienced waiter. This is a major staff cut, which just means a lot of work for me. The idea is to keep the restaurant afloat until the NEW restaurant can come to fruition. We’re changing the focus entirely, moving away from the relatively fancy fare to simpler stuff: all day breakfast, burgers and pies. Did you know you can’t really get a decent Western breakfast anywhere in Beijing? Specifically, pancakes and waffles! Same with pie?! So the new menu will have full breakfast, specialty burgers, and seasonal pies. My first task will be to keep Connections running AS IT IS until the new investors are ready and the new direction is ready, then we can close down the restaurant, renovate the kitchen and interior, print up new marketing, and “turn over a new leaf” as it were. This blog will soon be filled with excruciating detail about the whole “running a restaurant” schtick.
More is going on now with the Swiss helicopter people. New/additional investors have been found.
The idea behind Epiphany (that idealistic one where we want to imbue passion into the musical souls of the masses of musically educated but passionless Chinese through social music making and performance thing) has been shifted a little; we are out of money, don’t have the original venue we wanted (though I think we have a new and even better venue, right behind Connections and on the 10,000 sqm roof of the complex), but we’re moving forward. I think the idea now is to find other people who do have money and steer them in the proper direction.
A new company was formed to handle some “Remote Medicine,” whatever that is; apparently it might be relevant to something one of Maria’s good friends does, so we will be in touch with him.
Cow Farm! Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, I think we want fresh milk, yogurt, and cheese…
FTC Art and Gen-Next (the young, urban, born post 1980s, Beijing artists thing) is moving along nicely. I’ve got all the separate bits working now, the only thing left to do is tweak and perfect the silent bidding system. As I look at the scale of this project I’m doing for my father, it’s surprisingly how large it’s gotten. In one of the older posts I broke down all the different bits of it, but suffice it to say, I might be undercharging him for only 700 USD. Either way. This will be online soon, expect its announcement here. This may be the only place online to find the modern art of Beijing for sale…and I’m not talking about a specific person’s personal site; we’re actually gathering and representing currently 8 but soon to be many more artists and their works.
Oh, and I guess I’ll be doing something very similar with fashion…? I have very little details about that right now.
Maria will also be taking a trial class at BiMBA on Thursday. She’s going to study for the GMAT all day tomorrow, that’s happening relatively soon.
Well this post is long enough, the original idea was just to introduce expat-blog, so I’m going to end with that.
As an aside…I’m wondering if I should re-vamp my tagging system…
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