Piet and Mia

Piet was born in Rotterdam and Mia in Beijing, but it being a small world (or a handkerchief as they say in Spain) they are now living together in Valencia and have already left their mark on the city, bringing people together.

While in his early twenties, Piet received an inheritance which enabled him to travel around the world in 18 months (although very little of that travelling was done in a hot air balloon. Unlike David Niven and Cantinflas in the film, they ended up in Valencia and not Chinchón. They met however in the Chinese capital, where Mia was born and raised.

Piet had already been in China for two years as a travelling travel guide before settling in Beijing to look for a “real job”. He worked in the relocation business and then for a telephone company before realising that there was a demand for a networking business in China, and so he set up a company that was designed to bring Chinese and foreign people together in a pleasant, relaxing atmosphere, where they called enjoy themselves while making useful contacts in a series of happy hour and theme night events which drew anything up to seven hundred people at a time.

So popular were the events that he not only had a waiting list of bars and restaurants wanting to host his events in the capital, but was also able to franchise the idea in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

He also set up his own tours, specialising in the lesser known parts of the Great Wall of China, where few foreigners went.

As 2008, China’s Olympic year approached, he was able to make use of his many contacts to offer accommodation in apartments to the many visitors arriving in Beijing, sharing some of the earnings around with private owners as well as the hotels. This project was registered under the name Homestay Beijing 2008, and before you get any ideas, Piet has already registered the name Homestay London 2012.

At the peak of his success, and with his visa about to expire, Piet felt that it was time for a change. By this time he had met Mia, who had attended one of his events in 2004, although it was three years later when they met at a dinner given by a mutual friend that they started their relationship.

Mia was an ideal person to attend a networking event for professional people, having a background in Marketing and PR and having run national campaigns for important companies such as Motorola, as well as doing some IT work.

Like Piet she has an entrepreneurial spirit and saw a market niche for a private cleaning service, which she ran for two years with reasonable success.

Although Mia had travelled all over Asia for her work, she had only ever lived in Beijing, and now has only ever lived in Beijing and Valencia.

At first they had considered Barcelona, where Piet had a friend, but finally opted for Valencia, where they saw more potential, along with the advantages of a city that is not too big and impersonal.

Mia also likes the fact that the city has maintained its traditions and family values, unlike other places, including her native land, where life has been speeding up out of control. What’s more, she finds the city attractive and the people nice, and is now combining her studies of Spanish with some part time work as a consultant for an international language school, helping to market courses of the Spanish language for clients in the Far East. She also tries to keep up her Korean, the language of her grand parents, and of course speaks excellent English.

Along with two equally keen connoisseurs of wine, Piet set up the Vino Valencia network, which has been written about in the leisure section of this newspaper, and he is currently developing contacts in all sectors of the Valencia wine industry as well as allowing Valencian and foreign people to get together and explore Valencian wines, and of course find interesting and useful contacts. He is also planning to diversify into wine-tourism this year, organising tours of local vineyards.

But that’s not all! With some many business projects working out, while he was still in China, Piet taught himself how to set up websites and became a successful webmaster, a talent that he still uses to the benefit of customers in Europe and Asia with his company Senlin Online.

‘Senlin’ translated from Mandarin Chinese is ‘forest’ and that is the English translation for Piet’s Dutch surname: Bos. Piet is already working on projects to help Valencian wine companies develop effective websites and project their businesses further afield, for as wine expert Robert Parker said recently “websites for wineries are now a must”.

Mia herself was one satisfied customer when she launched her cleaning service in China and found that her site was always at the beginning of search engine lists.

So the future looks promising for this talented young couple, who have rapidly adapted to this special city, giving of their skills and taking the fulfilling life that Valencia has to offer anyone with initiative and an appetite for the good life.