day 148: 平凉 (pingliang) = 0km

See this person’s yellow bag in the picture?

I’m led to believe that, whatever is in there, it’s probably among the most important possessions that this person has.

Assuming that we all have our own yellow bags - what’s in mine then?

…

I went to the post office today:

Just to send picture postcards? I wish.

Actually, I was going to ship my yellow bag.

This might require some further explanation about Internet connections:

The thing I use to get online is a wireless adapter that dials into the mobile phone network. It’s miserably slow but it’s enough to put up my posts.

Still, I have been desperately looking for hotels with Internet access whenever I got to a larger settlement.

The thing is, I need a broadband connection to upload the original files of my photographs to the server. If anything goes wrong, I want the pictures to be safe. There you got it, that’s what’s in my yellow bag: it’s the pictures of course!

So why would all this force me to sit around in my favorite fast food restaurant writing postcards?

See, ever since I crossed the Yellow River one and a half months ago (February 19th 2008), Internet connections have been dreadfully slow.

As of now, I’ve been staying in the same hotel with my computer running all day and all night ever since Monday, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

I’m still using the connection to upload resized pictures to panoramio so they will appear in Google Earth later. I can also upload some small pics to my photo gallery, and everything else is much easier on this connection as well - but it’s just not solid enough to transfer 40gb worth of photographs.

So today, once I had made myself admit the fact that my yellow bag was never going to get home like this, I realized that I would have to spend another day apparently doing nothing.

Take a walk on the central square, look at old people hanging out:

…it seemed like they didn’t like to worry about a thing.

Look at kids play with toys:

…not worrying about anything either.

While all the time, my loyal computer was at work again, burning DVD after DVD with my photographs.

So I could send them home later.

To save my yellow bag.

Soundtrack: Frank Zappa - “Bobby Brown”

—total: 1904,9km