Happy Holidays

Sick again

Sick again, fever, coughing, can't speak ...

Engagements

Compare to the pure audit I had been doing in Toronto, I have many different kinds of engagements here. I summarized as follows:

1. Capital verification of newly opened foreign-funded entities
2. Pre-commencement review of the branch of foreign banks
3. Statutory audit per PRC GAAP re: Financial Statements and Operation + Management Recommendation Letter
4. Group reporting as per IFRS
5. Group reporting as per US GAAP
6. Group reporting as per UK GAAP
7. Group reporting as per Philippine GAAP @#$%^&*
8. English translation of statutory audit report
9. English translation of bond prospectus
10. Audit of statement of expenses
11. Audit of statement of Foreign Exchanges

So far I have no chance to touch IPO which is quite popular in China.

My clients include: banking, insurance, insurance broker, investment/private equity companies, funds, Qualified Foreign Institutional Investers, Commodities trading company, Interdealer Money Broking ... ...

Everything Will Be Fine

Whenever I come across problems, I always tell myself: everything will be fine.

My partner asked me if I was happy today and I said YES. Then he said: "OK, here are more works to do". I asked:"If I don't feel happy tomorrow, there will be few work right?" He said:"No, you should be HIGH every day." ^_^

Actually I am happy these days cos' a lot of problems suddenly resolved in this week:

1. I could view my blog page again. As there is no comments from the viewer, I just self-enjoyed that for a while.

2. My internet connection at home had problem for one month. There has been an error message every time I tried to be online saying "wrong userid or password". After I complained to the customer service, I was assigned a temporary ID which had to be signed up every 15 minutes when I was online. (Isn't it annoying???). The connection finally got repaired this weekend. And most surprisingly, I got a call from the customer service said that they will return one month connection fee to me. (I paid for the whole year when I signed up for the service).

3. My shipment after more than two and half months was finally delivered to my home. I got winter cloths eventually.

4. Most importantly, I finally got positive replies from two toughest clients about the agreement of the fee proposals which were initiated two months before. I may not do a lot of technical work these days, but I have really developed my negotiation skills. :)

All the above was involved a lot of back and forth, followups which frustrated me in the past few weeks ...

5. Last but not least, my hubby will come this weekend. Isn't that exciting after about three months apart?

So believe me, everything will be fine!

Suzhou 4

The Humble Administrator's Garden: another technique in Chinese Style Garden - borrow the scenerary - the temple tower looked like a part of the garden but actually out of it.

This building included all six elements of Chinese garden: Ting (pavilion), Tai (terraces), Lou (towers), Ge (open halls), Xuan (veranda with windows) and Xie (Pavilion on the water).

The terrace is just like Suzhou's house style, white wall and black tile.
Lingering Garden: the most famous rockery - the cloud-capped peak.

The osmanthus fragrans pavilion - in the spring, all the flowers are down from the roof.

Suzhou 3

Suzhou is a city built on the rivers and canals. We had a cruise along the canal around the city. It was like back to the old days:





Hanshan Temple is famous for the 108 bell tolls of New Year Eve. People from everywhere of China and Japan come to hear the bell tolls. It is said there are totally 108 kinds of suffering in the life. And every bell toll will remove one suffering in the new year. If you heard all 108, it will be a full happy new year!

We stayed in the Suzhou Garden View Hotel. It was a whitewashed residence house sitting along the crisscross canals, very close the central commercial area. With the garden settings of hills and water, pavilions and mansions, I felt like I was a lady from ancient time. We booked the hotel at a 60% discount from the well-known travel website in China. www.ctrip.com

Suzhou 2

Shi Zi Lin (Lion Forest Garden), the only garden surviving from the end of the Yuan Dynasty, is also called the Kingdom of Rockeries. It is famous for its man-made limestone mountains with winding pathways and caverns as well as pavilions, terraces and towers.


This is called "Nine Lions' Peak". Can you find 9 lines from the rokery?

One of the expression in Chinese style garden is called "frame the sceneray" which used different shapes of gate and window, and made the scenerary looked like a painting.

Forgot to say, this garden used to belong to the brother of the grandfather of IM Pei, who designed the Louvre Pyramid.

Suzhou

We decided to go to Suzhou in the morning of Saturday. We arrived at the train station at 9:10am. No ticket for the next train (9:35am) was available. The one after the 9:35am will depart at 11:30am. Someone came to talk to us that they were the travel agency of the railway and had some tickets reserved. However, we need to take their bus day tour in Suzhou. It was only CNY15(CAD2) for the bus and tour guide. No one wanted to wait another two hours at the station so we agreed. We could opt for not joining the tour anyways and CNY15 is not a big amount. The ticket for the train was only CNY22 (CAD3). However, there was no more seat available, so we could just stand to Suzhou which took about 50min.

We decided to join the tour after we arrived and paid another CNY135 (CAD20) to the tour guide for the entrance tickets. Suzhou is famous for the Chinese style gardens. There is an old saying that "up there is heaven, down there is Su & Hang". Here "Su" represents Suzhou. And "Hang" represents Hangzhou, another city about 3 hours train from Shanghai. Both are known as the lake region south of the Yangtze River, where the cultivation of rice and the breeding of fish flourish. A lot of graceful poetry of Tang Dynasty (around 600AD) and prose of Song Dynastry (around 1000AD) described the sceneraris of Su Zhou, which I could hardly translate.

The most famous four gardens in Suzhou are: Shi Zi Lin, Zhuo Zheng Yuan, Liu Yuan & Cang Lang Ting. All are on the world heritage list of UNESCO which website says "Classical Chinese garden design, which seeks to recreate natural landscapes in miniature, is nowhere better illustrated than in the nine gardens in the historic city of Suzhou. They are generally acknowledged to be masterpieces of the genre. Dating from the 11th-19th century, the gardens reflect the profound metaphysical importance of natural beauty in Chinese culture in their meticulous design". (to be con'd)

December

Time flys and I can't believe it is December already. The Christmas is not an official holiday in China.

I miss the holiday mood in Toronto's December, and I miss the holiday party of the firm. No chance to dress up this year ...:(

There will be no overseas Christmas trip for me as well. My buddy complained that he still has 18 days vacation and will lose it after 2006. It is common here that no vacation taken for the whole year. But I will take mine in May to go back to Toronto, - still 1/2 year left from now.