Let's start with Wednesday.

 

I finished my last class at 12 noon and zoomed home on my bicycle. As usual I packed too much into my old, trusy and very well-travelled bag and got ready to go to Shenzhen for the weekend. I left the house in a big mess and walked to the bus stop.

 

It's not too far to Jiuzhou Port - about 30 minutes on the bus - and I arrived just in time to catch the next boat. I have taken the ferry to Shenzhen many times, and I still can't work out why the ferry company says that the journey takes 60 minutes. Maybe I always get onto a dodgy, slow one - but it always takes me 70 minutes to get there.

 

On arriving in Shekou - still very familiar (I lived there for 6 months) - but changing so fast - I made my way to my old friend Tony's house. He assured me that getting a room in a hotel wasn't a priority, so instead I went for dinner with him and his girlfriend, Joan.

 

Having satisfied our bellies, it was time to get into a taxi and meet some of his friends at a house party. We talked and drank beer and caught up on what we'd been doing since the last time we met. Before I knew it, it was 4am and I really needed to get some sleep. So he bundled me into a taxi and we sped off into the night. It wasn't until 5am that I finally got my head down, but the bed was comfortable and I slept like a baby, waking just before noon.

 

A perfect start to a mini-break in the big city.

 

 

I think I have finally resolved my non-loading photo problems.

 

Sorry to all those who couldn't see any of my images.

 

I'm using photojerk.com now - hope it's more stable than filelodge.

 

Now I can get on and talk about what I've been doing over the past week.

Thanks to he wonder of the internet, the owner of the lost camera showed up this week.

 

I would like to say thank you to Oscar who was the one who was honest enough to give me the camera when he found it in his desk.

 

All I did was wait to see if the owner would appear. So it's Oscar who deserves all the credit.

 

Here's the happy owner reunited with his camera.

 

 

Orange with his lost camera and friend.

 

A happy ending!

You know what really pisses me off?

 

Students who come to class and don't listen to the lesson. Always doing something from their textbooks instead of doing what I asked them to do.

 

 Having to say for the millionth time - 'Please speak English.'

 

That really pisses me off.

 

So - please stop it

 

It's rude and I don't like it.

 

Sometimes I feel like I'm babysitting a bunch of spoilt babies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does anyone recognise this guy?

 

 

 

If you do - let me know - I found a camera and this was one of the photos on it.

 

Get in touch with me if you can solve this little mystery!

 

 

 

I'm finally forty

 

I'm still amazed that it was my 40th birthday on Monday 20th March 2006.

 

I half expected it to be a bit of a weird day. the idea of being 40 was something that I wasn't really looking forward to. Surprisingly I was actually really happy. I was almost amazed that I had made it this far!

 

Where has all that time gone? I can't believe that I've been here in China for over 4 years. It's true what people say that the older you get the faster time seems to pass.

 

So what did I get for my birthday? First I must say a big thank you to those students who gave me a gift that day. You have no idea how much it means to me. The great hotpot dinner on Saturday and that delicious cake from Jusco I enjoyed with my friends were just perfect.

 

I did try to spend the weekend on one of Zhuhai's lovely islands with the 6 good friends who came to visit me that weekend. Unfortunately we missed the boat - but that didn't really dampen our spirits. We still enjoyed the sunshine and each other's company. I couldn't wish for a better band of brothers.

 

Since I always take any opportunity to spoil myself at times like this, I headed out to the computer market at Wan Zai Sha and bought myself a present. I have had some problems with my computer recently - not just because of the snail-like speed of the internet connection, but from viruses and spyware that seemed to take over my PC and give it a life of it's own.

 

After re-installing the system, scanning and re-scanning for every type of malware, spyware, virus and nasty software, I finally got things back to normal. However, my digital photographs now take up a huge amount of space on my hard drive. I began to worry that if anything ever happened to my computer, I might lose them all forever. To back them all up on CD-R would take 7CDs. I don't really trust a CD-R disk to last any longer than my hard drive anyway. So I treated myself to an 80G portable drive.

 

Now all my pictures are safely stored there - and I can stop worrying about that for now. However - as time passes, my photo collection will continue to grow and grow and their safe storage and retrieval becomes a constant nightmare. Yahoo has a photo album storage facility online - so I guess that I'll have to be much more organized in the future and always upload any new pictures to the internet.

 

None of this ever entered my head when I first bought a digital camera. I'd like to see camera companies offering free and simple software that comes with a digital camera that can download the pictures to your computer as well as uploading them to an online storage facility. Now that would be something that would give users something more than a headache and a big pile of CD-R disks. Maybe I should suggest it to the camera companies...

 

I have suddenly become drawn back to the old 35mm film camera. There's something special about the whole process. That mysterious and even exciting period from when you take the finished film to the shop to be developed to the moment you get to see the pictures for the first time. A kind of thrill - never sure if they will turn out just the way that you had expected them to - and the joy when sometimes they do, and surprise when they could be unexpectedly better than you'd have thought. Having your photos printed on paper so that you can put them in albums and look at them is also something I miss. Those shiny blocks of frozen time and captured memories have a quality all to themselves. Digital pictures are just a flickering image on a computer screen, their virtual existence and ethereal quality lack so much of the concrete reality of a print from a negative. Maybe (because of my age) I'm just old school. How, I wonder, will young people who grew up with digital cameras ever know that feeling?

 

Digital cameras just don't give me the same photography experience. I know that you can have those digital pictures printed just like before - but for some strange reason - and I can't work out what it is - I just don't do it. I suspect a lot of others are just like me too. New technology, new methods, new experience.

 

I think I'll buy a 35mm camera to replace the last one that got stolen in Qingdao. That was the reason that I moved to digital. This is an example of those ripples on a pool. How one event affects others in so many unexpected ways.

 

I think it's time I started to make my own ripples.