day 7: 定兴 (dingxing) – 固城 (gucheng) = 19,3km

First the bad news: My wide angle lens is definitely broken – here’s one of the last pictures I was able to take:

I am in deepest despair over that lense, and the only hope I have for now is that there might be a gifted person in Baoding who can help me fix this problem, otherwise there will be no more wide-angle shots, only telephoto – a world in a gruesome tube!

Wish me luck…

Here’s some good news, though:
1) My feet were much better today. Not exactly good, but better nonetheless.
2) My bowels were better too.
3) I had lots of fun with the telephoto anyways:

This trip is actually the first time that I’ve owned a telephoto, and besides its scary looks and the weight issue I am really loving it! I still think wide angles are more fun, but there are just some shots that you have no way of shooting without a tele range, like this one:

These two farmers are sitting on top of a pile of corn bags on a truck – there would have been no way to climb up there and portray their friendship like this with a wide angle lense. Besides, most people feel more comfortable having their picture taken from a greater distance.

…but I would have loved to have the wide angle anyway, just to show you how enormous that pile of corn bags was that they were loading onto their truck. “For export” they said, and something about airplanes, but I somehow couldn’t quite get the connection:

What do airplanes have to do with these?

Anywho, even though I am a bit nervous because of the problems with my lense, but today was still better than yesterday. I ran into a flock of walking lambsticks:

Their boss said they have about 2 months left until they will end up as part of someone’s diet – which they obviously haven’t realized yet, otherwise there would surely be a riot!

And another good thing happened today:
4) My friend 朱辉 returned!

I got his message from Baoding asking if it would be cool if we walked together for a few days – of course it was! We met up in a little strip town called 固城 and rented a room with no heating (there is only one hotel in town and ALL the rooms have no heating):

Then we went to warm up with some good Beijing-style hot pot before we would go to sleep in that refrigerator they called a “standard room” here.

It is freezing outside and possibly inside as well, and my fingers are getting stiff as I am writing this.

朱辉 is already snoring away.

Wish me luck the day after tomorrow in Baoding!

Soundtrack: A Perfect Circle – “Let’s Have A War”

—total: 144,7km

Posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 06:58 ;Filed under Hebei, Hui Hui, Walk.

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