Ron Mertens’ blog

This isn’t surprising, but still sad. When you buy your next cheap gadget, think about this.
It turns out that Apple’s ‘overseas’ suppliers are cutting corners ab it. 54% of these factories have failed to meet Apple’s maximum-hour work week. And this is a 60-hours (!) work week we’re talking about – over half of these [...]

Lately Michal is praising creativity all the time.  It turns out that being creative is good – not just because you invent startups and become rich – it’s also a great way to channel your energy, to overcome emotional and physical problems. In short – it’s really important to be creative. You don’t have to [...]

Everybody who traveled in Asia (and other places, of course) have seen those funny mistakes these guys make in English. It appears everywhere:  official places (we saw a “polace” sign in a police station), parks, places of business and on products (Michal bought a small notebook, which proudly stated “We only do well”). Here’s some [...]

Tags: chinese, chinglish, english, funny

Avid readers of my blog (hey mom!) know that I usually blog on books I read. The good ones, anyway. Here’s the ones I read in Chengdu. I read all of them in Hebrew, by the way.

Long Lost, Harlan Coben. OK, it’s a Harlan Coben book, which is pretty lame. But it was a OK [...]

VPN for youtube and facebook
Clouds and mists
Chang-Fu Xin Xan
Starbucks
Xian-Nan-Lu
Sichaun pepper (yuck!)
Our ‘home’ restaurant, the yellow/sterile one, the green one, the one across the street
Dodo’s cafe
The Metro
The secrets of Free Mori
Tandoor
Endless amount of high rise buildings
The Bookworm
Kabalth-Shabbath at Meirav’s
Abigail starting to walk in the museum
Tai-Chi
Spitting
Blue Massage
Bao-Tze
Shi-Er-Qiao Lu
The butcher-shop dogs
Table tennis at the gym
Road hierarchy: Bus, Taxi, [...]

Tags: chengdu, china, thoughts

As you may know, China has a ‘one-child-policy’. It basically means that you can only have one child (and if you have more, it costs a lot of money). I never realized what this law really means.
It’s not just that you don’t have brothers. Your parents do not have brothers, too. So you don’t [...]

Today we went to an Indian restaurant here in Chengdu, called Tandoor. It was really great – they were very friendly (the managers come from Delhi), and impressed with our fluent Hindi. And the food? the best we had so far in Chengdu – great Indian food! Dal Makhani, Palak Paneer, Samosas…
It got me [...]

I can’t believe it’s almost 2 months since we left Israel already. It seems like we’re in China for a longer period, although it’s very difficult to get used to this place. Everything is different.
Today I had 3 tasks to do after lunch – Pay our gas bill, get a hair-cut, and recharge the Chinese [...]

I used to like taking photos during my travels… mostly landscape – beautiful scenes, you know what I’m talking about. I meant, pictures of Michal and friends we met on the way is nice, but it wasn’t really exciting for me.
But now I’m mostly taking photos of Abigail. Suddenly a nice lake or building just [...]

It’s been more than two weeks here in Chengdu, and today we have the first sunny day. And I mean really sunny- blue skies and a hot ball of flames in the sky.
The weather in Chengdu is usually simply a mist – part humidity, part pollution, 100% gray and depressing. I’ve taken a lot of [...]