People Started to Wait at Red Lights

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Taken at Guangyuan Road, and Gongcheng Road

Taken at Guangyuan Road, and Gongcheng Road, at 8:50 AM, rush hours

Look at this photo. That is a normal day in rush hours in the morning. People started to wait for the looong red lights to cross the pedestrian. That was something very new to me. That continued to build my confidence to this city, and this country. As time went by, people will start to learn how to live in a city better, and will form some rules that everyone started to obey.

P.S. If you want to claim that this is another Shanghai Expo PR, please read this entry, especially my reply in the comment section. If you don’t want to take the time to read, let me give you a tip of the direction I am going to send you: “Read the Blind man and the elephant story, again, before claiming that even the blindest man can see people cross the road at red lights, at any time, in this city”.

P.S. 2: This is another photo of people lining up at Metro Line #7 at Zhaojiabang Road.

Baggage Check in Shanghai Metro

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The expo is coming. Everything is tighten up.

About few months ago, Shanghai started to check baggage at the entrance of major metro stations. The rule of whether a bag should be checked is not consistent.

I am wearing my black back bag all the time I enter metro. Most of the time, the security just ignore me, and allow me to enter without scanning, just like they treat the small hand bags ladies carry.

In other time, security asks me to put my bag into the scanning machine for security check. It is like this in most of the stations. The difference is, in bigger stations like Xujiahui, they tighten it, and in smaller stations like Jinxiu Road, they cover the big machines. Just two security guide using hand check.

This Moment, in Shanghai

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I took metro to attend an important dinner tonight.

I walked over the pedestrian viaduct at the Chengdu Elevated Highway, and the Yan’an Elevated highway – the theoretically central point of the transportation system of Shanghai. If you have some ideas of the Shanghai’s elevated highway system, it is basically a few big circles, called Inner Ring Road, the Middle Ring Road, the Outer Ring Road (S20, formally A20), and the Suburb Ring Road (S30, formally A30). For the Ring Roads, there is one horizontal (east-west) back born road, named Yan’an Elevated Highway, and there is one vertical (north-south) elevated highway called Chengdu Elevated Highway. The intersection of these two highways is, naturally, the center of this big transportation system.

That is a mega project – there are two lane road for any possible connections. That is C(4, 2) composition problem – the answer is 6 different path to be built for this viaduct.

I took some photos of this viaduct via my new Google Nexus One phone. Here is the photo.

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang at the intersection of Chengdu Elevated Highway, and the Yan’an Elevated Highway

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang at the intersection of Chengdu Elevated Highway, and the Yan’an Elevated Highway

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang at the intersection of Chengdu Elevated Highway, and the Yan’an Elevated Highway

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang at the intersection of Chengdu Elevated Highway, and the Yan’an Elevated Highway

From time to time, you can find some artistic moment and scene of this city – that is good thing for life. Hopefully everyone enjoys his/her own city this way.

In Market We Trust – Part II

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xge made a very good point under my entry In Market We Trust. That is exactly what I am trying to say about the market – the difference is, xge just gave better examples. Let me continue the argument here.

Intuition

The government decision makers are very likely to make decisions based on intuition, and the planned economy mindset. I, myself, made even more frequent mistakes when I make decisions about the market. I admit that I did several things wrong in my business without respecting the market laws. Here are some examples about the actions people take (basically using xge’s examples).

Hainan’s Land

The recent sharp increase in the real estate price in Hainan was a typical example. When the Hainan announced the “International Tourism Island” strategy, the house price almost doubled over night by the stimulate.

The Hainan government was scared because of the jump in price. Then, in order to control the price, they immediately announced to pause supply of all commercial residential lands. Not surprisingly, the price doubled over night again.

Train Tickets and Taxi

Train tickets in Spring Festival times are extremely hard to get because of the huge demand (2.5 billion people/time needs to travel in the 40 days), and limited supply (not enough trains). The price for the train tickets went as high as 4x of the original price in the escort market.

In order to keep the price low, the government requires all train tickets keep the cheap price, and crack down all the escort market, and implement Real Name system for train tickets – none of them touch the supply and demand. Not surprisingly, it is still hard to find a ticket.

For taxi, people complain that the taxi is expensive, and hard to hire in rush hours, so “illegal taxi” started to emerge to help them out. In order to keep the price of taxi low, the government tried everything they can to crackdown the illegal taxis, greatly reduced the supply. Not surprisingly, taxi is harder to get, and the government enforced low price (lower than fair market value) keeps taxi drivers out of the market. (Well. for the taxi business, the real problem is, the monopoly of government owned taxi companies get too high fee out of the pocket of taxi drivers, and use the power to keep private sector entering this market).

Supply and Demand

Finally, we started to understand the simple market rule: price is determined by the supply and demand. The only way to drive price down is to increase supply, and the only way to drive price up is either to decrease supply or increase demand.

In Market We Trust

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The main take away from my Silicon Valley trip is the understanding of “market“. I know, the recent financial crisis can be used as a way to argue the other way, I am still talking about the relative older style of market (like the flea market, and fish market), not the financial innovation stuff.

Hotwire and Priceline

Websites like Hotwire.com and Priceline.com (how I found it) let me think more about how to use the market to allocate resource more efficiently. Without services like Hotwire, hotel suffers from empty rooms, and visitors suffers from high price. They are the bridge to allow those unsold rooms to be evaluated and priced – the price is lower than retail price, which is very likely to be the fair market value of the “unsolde” rooms.

“Market allow any tradable item to be evaluated and priced.”

Rental Contract

Another interesting thing is the rental contract I saw in my friend’s house. When their last lease period is going to expire, the landlord gives them a list of renew price. It is something like this (I mocked up the numbers)

1 month – $1710

2 months – $1700

3 months – $1670

4 months – $1640

5 months – $1610

6 months – $1690 <– Attention! Price raises!

7 months – $1710

8 months – $1720

9 months – $1840

10 months – $1700

11 months – $1640

12 months – $1600

…

The idea is, it is not the longer you lease, the cheaper it is. It is obvious that the 9 months lease is the most expensive lease. My guess is, it is the time most of the tenant in this area planned to move out (based on the existing contract and prediction), or the season where many graduate are moving in. The price of the house is decided preciously in a bid-offer fashion, not by some ideology (the longer you rent, the cheaper it is)

That is a vivid lesson for me to understand the market.

Market

A market is the PLACE for buyers and sellers to trade.

Its function include pricing – market finds out the fair market value of any tradable item every minute.

The liquidity of the market is important. Liquidity means a seller can always sell something if they are willing to decrease the price a little bit above the fair market value, or the buyer can always buy something if they are willing to offer a little bit higher price than the fair market value.

“The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times” – Wikipedia on Market Liquidity.

The market rule is only the price and item – for the same item, it is just the price.

The only way to decrease the price of an item is to increase supply.

The God of Market

It seems I need to spend more time to understand how the God of Market works, and its role in price discovery, and resource allocation.

China is a market economy, but in daily life, it is still not very market driven.

Lining up for Metro – Part II

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This is the second post about lining up in Shanghai metro after I posted the first entry about it (Lining up for Metro?) three and half years ago.

These days, when I started to take metro again, I found out in more and more stations, people started to line up.

The Change Over Time

8 years ago when I started my blog, people never line up.

3.5 years ago, people started to line up in busy stations like People’s Square, and that was the only case I saw it.

Now, in many small stations, people started to line up – 5 persons a line. Look at the photos I took randomly at Jinxiu Road station of Metro Line #7.

The lines are not exactly that type of lines in armies, but people do start to honor orders. People will automatically make up two lines along the door, leaving the space for people to get out first. For efficiency, people won’t wait for everyone to get out to get in, but the door is wide enough for three lines of people, the order were kept and it is much more efficient.

Reasons?

I guess there are two reasons for it. First is the abundance of resources. When more and more metro is built, there are enough room in most metro lines for everybody, and people don’t worry about missing the metro in most of the cases. Please note: it is not ALWAYS, but in most cases. Even if there are times there are more people that you need to way for two or three turns, as long as it is occasional, people still respect orders that they formed in normal days.

A half empty train cart in none-peak hours

The second is the ramp up of the city life style. Metro and the city life style itself are new things to the Chinese people. It takes some time for people to get used to it, to start to understand it, and form a set of rules. The interesting thing is, time will just help people to shape their behavior without too much external forces.

For the elevators, the same thing happens. People started to naturally stand on the right, and leaving the left side for people to pass. This is more and more trendy in Shanghai. When the trend is formed, it is hard to change, since everyone will be happy to do it to demonstrate their “fit” with this city.

P.S. I chatted about it with my friend RC who introduced the phrase “T.I.C moment” to me. He joked: “No! There will be one TIC moment missing in Shanghai!” I am happy that the TIC moments fade out while this city advances in civilization.

Metro Line 7 and 9 Became Full Time

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After I am back to Shanghai, the Metro Line #7 became operating in full time – from 5:30 to 22:31. Before, it only operate between 9:00 – 16:00. That means, Metro Line #7 started to operate in real sense. At the same time, Metro Line #9 started similar full time operation. Both intervals are 6 minutes.

Look at this map I shot in a metro station – that is the current metro map.

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

On this map, there are many small modifications – the staff used sticker to mark out some stations that are not open yet. Since the stations and even metro lines are going to open in the next few weeks, they didn’t bother to create a new chart. Those segments include the east extension of Metro Line #2 to Pudong Airport, and west extension to the new Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2.

When the metro system started to form a network, the feeling of a metro ride is very different from the time when there are just one line or two. You will encounter an interchange station for every two or three stations. People get off the train and get on the train much more frequently than before – you are not sure whether they get off the train because it is their destination or just transit to another metro line. The capacity of the metro system is also expanded – the bottlenecks are no longer bottlenecks, because of so many “load balance lines” there.

I am very excited to see the change, and enjoy navigating the city by going under it.

Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2 to Open

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Before we are aware of, the city of Shanghai expanded beyond the speed of thinking.

2 years ago, Pudong Airport Terminal 2 just opened. In just 2 years, another giant terminal – Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2 will open on March 16, 2010.

Look at this satellite image. The T1 is small on the right, and T2 is much bigger on the left:

Map credit: Google Maps

According to news report, this terminal will be 4 times bigger than the current T1. I always complained about taxi, especially on Fridays, and they didn’t do too much about it. I guess this time, the taxi won’t be the bottle neck for the new terminal.

After the launch of the new terminal in one week, most of the domestic airlines in the current Hongqiao Airport will shift there, leaving the current T1 just serving Spring Airlines, and other few flights.

I remember there were discussion of abandon Hongqiao airport and shift all air traffic to Pudong airport long time ago, but the needs for flights are always higher than the capacity of Hongqiao and Pudong added up together. Then Hongqiao Airport was kept (some residents near the airport were too early to be happy about the news that the noisy airport will be closed). Now, when the Hongqiao Railway Station (the station connected to Beijing by high speed train) is located there, and Metro Line #2 and Line #10 extending there, the Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2 is the new center of transportation stage.

On Sunday, I tried to drive to that area from Beidi Road 北翟路. The huge viaduct has already been built for the Beidi Road, and S20 (formally A20). That will be the main road reaching to the terminal 2. It turned out the adventure is completely a failure, since the Beidi road was completely destroyed for the construction of the elevated highway. I chose to make U turn after get into it for 500 meters.

I will try to visit that area again in one week, and report what the new terminal looks like. In fact, it is not just a terminal – it is the framework of a super transportation hub that has never existed in China.

P.S. Chris of Shanghaieye.com posted photo of the terminal on his blog.

Photo in Google, 2010

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Everytime I am in the bay area, if I don’t visit Google, I feel the trip is not complete. So, I was in Google on Monday of my last week in Mountain View.

On the picture, from left to right is Yi Wang, Qiushuang Zhang, Jian Shuo Wang, and Meng Yang.

Photograph by a kind Googler using Nexus One

ThinkPad to Dell Latitude E4300

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After using IBM ThinkPad X60 for three years, I finally switched back to Dell. The reason I am using “Back” is, my first laptop is a very big Dell laptop, and I am a Dell user for several years, when I worked in Microsoft. Only after Baixing did we start to use IBM. The reason I used “ThinkPad” not IBM is, I don’t know how I should address it – it is no longer IBM ThinkPad.

I did the comparison between IBM and Dell in my previous post, and found out Dell offers better quality, better service, and relatively the same level of product as the current ThinkPad.

In the competitive market, any small change can be quickly picked up by end users, and shift from one vendor to another – the beauty of market!

I am a Hotel Tester

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During this trip, I used a strategy to change to a different hotel every one or two days depending on the price, and my meeting location, to optimize for both budget, and diversity of my stay, and get some idea about what is the best hotel fitting my needs. Here are the list:

2/20 – 2/21 via Expedia, Travelodge Palo Alto, $67, 3945 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA 94306

2/21 – 2/22 via Expedia, Creekside Inn, $79, 3400 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA 94306

2/22 – 2/24 via Expedia, Comfort Inn, Palo Alto $94 3945 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA 94306

2/24 – 2/25 via Hotwire, Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites Belmont $54 1650 El Camino Real, Belmont, CA, 94002

2/25 – 2/26 via Priceline, Holiday Inn, San Jose 1740 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95112

2/26 – 2/28 via Tina, Kingswood Village, $30, 1001 Commonwealth Dr., Lake Tahoe

2/28 – 3/2 via Hotwire, Crowne Plaza, San Francisco Airport, $67 1177 Airport Boulevard, Burlingame, CA 94010

OK. Here is the payload: My reviews. Interestingly, Comfortable Inn is my favorite place to stay. That was a surprising finding during this trip.

2 Star Hotels: Super 8, Comfort Inn, Travelodge

The lowest end of all the places I stayed in are the three: Super 8 (I stayed for few nights the last trip), Travelodge, and Comfort Inn – they all look similar. Their locations are not at inter-state highway in Palo Alto, and the have a L shape building with two floors, leaving the large space as parking lot. These hotels are small, with one part-time reception (not 24 hour service) at the entrance, and all the rest are hotel rooms. They offer breakfast – bread + orange juice… To me, the three hotels are of the same level. Actually, they are the same: 2 star in the hotel rating system.

The difference is, Comfort Inn offers much better quilt than the other two. I was frozen to wake up several times during the night. The quilt is as thick as paper – pardon my exaggerated statement. The quilt of Comfort Inn is relatively the same standard as Creekside Inn, Holiday Inn…

2.5 Star Hotels: Holiday Inn and 3.5 Star Hotels: Creekside Inn, Crowne Plaza

I stayed in two Holiday Inn, one in Fremont, and another in San Jose. They are, as my personal experience, Holiday Inn standard. Holiday Inn Express offer free parking, and free breakfast. The Holiday Inn San Jose offers, in their term, full service breakfast, which is , my term, expense breakfast.

All these hotels have huge buildings and many guest rooms. It is a maze to navigate with just a room number + a map (on which the reception was kind enough to place a dot indicating my room). The guest room is for sure far from the parking lot, and some includes stairs and elevator trips.

Crowne Plaza even charged $16 for over night parking, and $9.99 for Internet access – robery!

I hate Super 8 and Travelodge because it is noisy – the key driver for me to look for other hotels to stay, but these higher star hotels are even more noisy.

Super 8, Travelodge, and Comfort Inn are along El Camino Real, the main local road, and Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza are facing US-101! When the busiest highway in the area running outside your bedroom window, it is not going to be quiet night.

Convenient vs Luxurious

At the end of the day, I started to appreciate hotels that is

  • Simple (simple design and simple facility that I can understand at a glance)
  • Small (with limited hotel rooms, that I can access my door easily)
  • Free parking, Internet, and breakfast. (Free is not just free, it is convenient. I don’t need to talk with reception, waiting for a code to be delivered before I use parking or internet.)
  • Local (I would rather be close to a local community, rather at a transportation hub that no one besides travelers stay)

Finally, after sampling all the hotels, the dream of fancy hotels faded out. I know what I need – a simple place like Comfort Inn is what I need. The next step is to find a way to book at below $50. (any ideas?)

That gave me the inspiration of product design – a simple, easy to understand, and free product / service is better for most people, than a fancy, full-function, luxurious one.

Yifan’s Stories

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I don’t know why, when I am back, Yifan put all his toys into two big boxes, and asked his mom: “Would you please hide them so dad cannot find it?” What is in his mind to hide his toys from dad?

In the morning, Yifan kept asking me where I want to take his train to go. His stops are his familiar places like Shanghai, Luoyang, Beijing…. I told him, I am going to Rio de Janeiro. Yifan just smiled and cannot follow the difficult city name. Disappointed, he went to mom and ask where mom wanted to go, and mom said: “Amsterdam” – another way too difficult name for him to pronounce. He just know some simple names. Then he asked grandpa, and the answer he got was Buenos Aires…. Yifan was completely confused. Everyone burst into laughter.

Breakfast Meeting in Shanghai

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Are you serious to have breakfast meeting in Shanghai? Think twice before you make the appointment.

I never really understand why people would think of the crazy idea of having breakfast meeting in Shanghai. I received the invitation for some times, but always rejected it.

Why Breakfast Meeting is Good in the Valley

When I am in the valley, I found it so nice to have breakfast meetings. There are some benefits:

1. Breakfast in many places are nice – especially the brunch along the University Ave in Palo Alto and a nice restaurant famous for its brunch in Berkeley. People enjoy the scrambled eggs and coffee in fresh morning.

2. Commute. The early breakfast is very likely to be at some convenient place along the way to work for both parties. They may drive and stop by a cafe, to have breakfast together – they will have it at home anyway, and then drive on to their own work place. If you raise early, the traffic are generally better.

3. Dinner, and Lunch are too time consuming. Compared to breakfast, which is like the time for a cup of coffee, it is perfect for catchup, instead of serious discussion.

Why Breakfast Meeting is Bad in Shanghai

1. Most of places does not serve breakfast in the decent way. In Shanghai, the popular place serving breakfast is soup, dumplings. The street eateries often does not offer seats, or the seats is very crowded, not a decent place to meet. Hotels offering continental breakfast are very likely to be full service and expensive. There are not many nice and lite places for people to gather. (Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf started to offer scrambled eggs, which is good)

2. Transpiration is so bad. No matter how early it is, it is still in terrible traffic, that people want to avoid. Since in Shanghai, people basically don’t drive in downtown, and even people drive, the parking can be much more troublesome than park at free public 2 hour parking space in downtown Palo Alto, or Mountain View…

3. People prefer dinner over breakfast. The night life is actually the starting point for many people in Shanghai. The best meal in Shanghai is obviously in the dinner time.

Environment Matters

It is not the culture that makes the difference – it is mainly the history and the environment that shape people’s behavior.

Jet Lag Builds Early Raiser

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Jet lag is good thing for me. Whenever in US, or back to Shanghai, jet lag drives me wake up earlier and then I became an early raiser for some days. Thus I have enough time to write more blogs (helping me to get clearer idea about my world, and comprehend the message I got). It is just like an effective “Raise Early” medicine. But the problem is, the effect gets less significant along the day, and I will fade into normal life.

Is there any way to simulate jet lag?

My Passion to Second Tier Cities

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In a private dinner at Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference, I was asked to share a great idea with the accomplished investors, CEOs, and journalists. This is my idea:

Put all your money in the second tier cities in China! 10 cities in China is building their first metro system today, and they are connected by high-speed train system already. The Chinese version of Eisenhower national road system is also completed even before the economy stimulate plan, connecting these cities together. With the jump-start transportation system, talents, and capital will flow from first tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing to the second tier cities in the next 10 years. Think about what you can do in these booming cities: real estate, business, manufacture, outsourcing…

My passion and optimist for the second tier cities is real. The recent Hainan trip, and Wendy’s recent trip back to Henan all sent a clear message to me: the second tier cities are where the opportunity lies. Shanghai has became less and less competitive because of the expensive living cost, making it less attractive to talents.

When I met Yang Meng who just got back from his home town in Changsha in Palo Alto, he shared exactly the same thing with me. His high-school friends all went back to Changsha from big cities, to start their business there. He wrote a great blog about it: Golden Decade for Second Tier Cities (In Chinese).

Wendy and I went back to Nanyang years ago, and found out the highway with road plate G40 and G45 – one connect the city to Shanghai and Xi’an, and another connecting it to Guangzhou, and north China. All these roads were newly built. Wendy drove along the highway in the more recent trip, and reported back – there are no cars on it yet. When third cities like Nanyang gets connected to second tier cities, it makes the second tier cities more competitive with the vast supply of labor, resources, and market.

What do you think?

Wind Blows West to East

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This trip helped me to understand some basic weather phenomenon – the wind at the surface of the earth.

West to East along 31-37 degree in Latitude

In this article, I asked meteorology question: how come bay area is so warm when its latitude is as high as 37 °, it is warmer in the winter than Shanghai, which is just a little bit north of 31°? As my readers pointed it out, it is because the wind.

At that latitude, wind mainly blows from the west to east. Shanghai is cold in winters because the wind from the west is from the mainland, and is cold in nature. The wind for the bay area is from above the pacific ocean. The huge water body makes the air stable in temperature – cool in summer, and warm in winter, and makes that area much warmer and comfortable than Shanghai.

Cross Pacific Flight

The wind also solved another puzzle I had: why it takes longer to fly from SFO back to PVG (12 hours), than from PVG to SFO (10 hours)?

This time, with this knowledge, I paid attention to the real time broadcast of speed on board. From west to east, there are always 150 km/h tailing wind, making the airplane ground speed about 1,000 km/h (10,000 km distance divided by 1,000 is about 10 hours). On the return flight, the head wind is 150 km/h, making the ground speed 750 km/hour, thus cost about 12 hours.

This is the Simplified Answer

This is just the simplified answer of complicated meteorology. I researched on Wikipedia on this, and found many articles on this. The actual wind flows are very complicated, and vary greatly by latitude, and time. I just don’t care about other wind, like those in the south sphere. The simplified answer, wind blows from west to east, works at least for this time, and at this latitude.

The Scare of Shanghai Heals

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One part of travel is to see the other side of the world (like my recent two travels), and the other interesting part is to leave Shanghai for 10 days and get back to see how things change quickly. It is always good to get a reasonable distance from daily life, and when back, you discover more changes than you are always there.

This time, the change is the roads.

In preparation of Shanghai Expo 2010, which is just 2 months away, huge constructions spread out through out the city. That includes new elevated highways, improvement of current roads, and new metro stations. In early or March, many of the constructions are completed, and the scare of the city heals quickly, and perfectly.

Zhaojiabang Road

Zhaojiabang Road 肇嘉浜路 is one of the road that is impacted most. The 7 something new metro stations make it almost impossible to navigate, and delays directly caused our decision to move from Pudong to Puxi.

I took a taxi yesterday. The same road is back to its original status, and even better. The road is newly paved, and the lanes were marked with freshly painted white lines. That kind of “brand new” feeling is so strong, that I just would love to drive my cars there. The metro station is finished leaving many exits with Metro signs.

Other Roads

The other roads I paid particular attending includes the South Yanggao Road 杨高南路, and Longyang Road 龙阳路. The elevated highway and viaducts were completed, and the crowded roads suddenly become pretty empty with the new addition of the same size of capacity (but without red lights).

Good. Good. Shanghai started to become charming again.

Travelogue of Tahoe

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On Sunday, we were back from Tahoe with just 3 hours and a half on the road – comparing to the 9 hours on snowy Friday night, it is much better. When I finally find time to sit down, I can start to write a travelogue about my trip to Tahoe.

Where is Tahoe

Although most people in the States should know where it is, it worth some time to tell other readers where the beautiful lake is.

It is 200 miles east of San Francisco, at the border of California and Nevada.

map-tahoe.png

The transpiration is pretty straight forward – take the I-80 from San Francisco, passing the Bay Bridge, and drive all the way to the east for 180 miles, and take CA-237. Then you are there.

You cannot Ski without Snow

On the way to Tahoe, it snowed heavily, and it was the most heavy snow I experienced in recent years. Look at the photos below and imagine the snow!

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

Photograph by Peng Linlin

Photograph by Peng Linlin

It took us 9 hours to get there.

The Shining Sky with Snow

The Ski Field

Look at the nice ski field. It is obviously bigger than the indoor ski in Shanghai.

We took the lift up to the top of the mountain.

My First Fall

I started with a mild slope, and the speed went up so quick, that I had no choice but to run into the side snow to stop. Look at the first fall: The both ski completely get into the snow, and it took me quiet some time to get out.

My Legs!

For entry-level skier like me, I used all the effort to ski as slow as possible, thus using the ski as brake from the top of the mountain to the bottom. My legs just got so tired that it started to hurt, and I have to stop from time to time in the middle of the slope. When other more skillful guys camp and eat energy stick on the top of the mountain, I had a nice pizza near the Ritz-Carlton.

Mid-Mountain

When we skied in the afternoon, it snowed heavily. I took the time to take a picture of the snow covered mountain and the snow before I rush down the slope.

Taken from the middle of the mountain

Finishing the Great Ski Journey

At the time when Village Express stops operation, we have been on the slop for 5 hours.

Photo taken by a nice girl near us