“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine  doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing …  how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to writ
e the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google  and the World Association of Newspapers. 

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

I believe I saw Mozart’s ghost one night in Prague.

It was in a little street off the road that connects Wenceslas Square with the Old Town Square. He was wearing a long, dark cape and one of those 18th century hats. There was a comforting lightness about him.

I remembered this the other day when I was interviewing soprano Anna-Maria Rincon.

Anna-Maria was telling me how much she loves Vivaldi and the spirit of Venice expressed in his music.

I feel the same about Mozart and Prague.

Close your eyes and listen to Mozart’s ‘Prager’ symphony. You can see the hills of South Bohemia stretch in front of you. And you feel as if you were in an 18th century carriage, looking through a velvet curtain at the fields, the apple threes. All that beauty makes your heart ache.

But my favourite piece in the whole wide world is the first movement of Mozart’s Requiem, Introitus: Requiem aeternam.

It is as if it had been written for my soul.

Sometimes when I am really stressed, I listen to it and in a second I have forgotten where I am. I am back in Prague.

My spirit is free to soar higher and higher. Like curling incense smoke, it follows the shape of Prague’s thousand spires and disappears high up in the snowy Bohemian sky.

Photo: thanks to Suzanne Salvo and salvoatlarge.blogspot.com