friends come and friends go

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This post is about a 5km walk within Baoding. My new friend Zhu Hui leaves, and my old friends from Beijing come.

Last night, Zhu Hui and I had one last TV supper.

We got us some chicken, a few bags of chips and a bottle of coke.

There was a movie with Jet Li on the telly. We sat around munching on our stuff, watching people beat each other up. It was perfect.

The next day my friend left for good.

His plan was to ride the 130km to Shijiazhuang 石家庄 in just one day. Isn’t that amazing?

I think I’m going to need at least five days to get there. Or more.

BUT FIRST I’LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR MY LENS ANYWAY.

So I was left with virtually nothing to do in Baoding.

Given the fact that my feet allowed me to walk a little by now, I decided to change hotels.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t enjoy staying at the green place. I just needed a change, and I wanted to decrease the distance between me and my next target city a little.

As I was limping ever so slowly around town on my little walk within Baoding, I got into a little argument with a construction worker about a picture that I had taken. The picture showed him shovelling, or rather: it didn’t show him, it just showed his shovel moving through the air.

To me, this photograph was really just about the lights and the contrasts, which I both really liked. Too bad the shovel wasn’t in focus, though, but that was another issue.

But for the construction worker, it seemed to be about something else entirely.

The poor guy was apparently convinced that I was an evil journalist or a spy of some sort.

Makes you wonder.