The glaring yellowish thing on the floor IS snow. Picture taken of the train depot opposite my house.

Misty pictures of the Ferris Wheel in Jinjiang Amusement Park. That’s how most days are in Shanghai currently. Try to find the wheel in the daylight picture. Haha.

The Caffe Latte I like to drink. Except I drink from the bottle model instead of can.

That’s my keyboard. Well, no. Actually that’s the wall of a block of houses. Cool, eh? I will try to take a better picture another time. It’s near Xujiahui, about 10-15mins walk maybe from the station.

I have tried downloading the drivers through the package for XP, but on installation the program says it’s the wrong OS and abort installation. It looks like I am left with no possible direct transfer camera-laptop. I will have to buy a USB card reader for the Sony memory card or see if the PSP works. In that case maybe transfer the pictures from camera onto PSP then from PSP to laptop. Complicated, isn’t it?

Why am I having all this hassle? The Sony photocamera is recognised without any problem by my brother’s laptop operating with Vista. So annoying that only on mine does it seem not to be working properly.

But what people haven’t expressedly stated, but still obvious to people like me who can’t but put some sexual connotations to pictures, it looks like a picture of 2 persons, traffic sign type, and the RHS person giving the LHS person a BJ. You’ll find another disturbing image if you turn the picture upside down. It’s still 2 people, and the new LHS person now looks like s/he has his/her pants down. Go check it out.

As I mentioned before, I went to a recording studio where a friend of mine was having a session for her job. She had to have some people (mix of foreigners and locals) discuss a theme, then some English speakers to read some English articles.

I tried to be relax, but you could sense the stress in my voice at the beginning, when I was reading the articles…. That was my first time. And no need to say I pronounced several words wrongly, meaning we had to redo these sentences again and again.

At the end of the day, it was an interesting experience and didn’t go too badly. Whether I will be called in again, I don’t know. But I will remember this trial.

But having him here meant waking up early, going out shopping with him everyday, accompanying him to whatever places he want to visit (not the tourist sites, he has been here before), looking for places where there might be the stuff he’s looking for, calling and messaging friends to help, trying to figure out what restaurants are decent enough to take him there, get him tickets for metro, bus, train (he spent a couple of days in a town near BJ)… Lots of enegy spent. Well spent I should say, since I am such a lazy guy.

But his departure was a bit at a bad moment. I didn’t manage to watch Liverpool win against Chelsea as I was at the airport seeing him off, then last night I was too tired to stay awake to see Man Utd get beaten (I had only about 2hrs sleep the previous night)…. Hope there will be nothing special for the Champions League Final later this month.

The weather’s gone warm, in a week or two it will be too hot to walk outside, so better enjoy the weather now. I’m going out to feel the sun on me, and read a book at the park near where I live.

No, I am not posting my new year resolutions. I have got two of them, easy to figure out what they are.

What I was wondering is, should a new year resolution be something concrete, or can it be more like new year wishes/blessings? I was chatting to a Chinese friend earlier, and she said her new year resolutions were 1.Her parents were healthy, 2. Her friends were healthy, and 3.Her wishes come true. I argued that new year resolutions should be some concrete goals instead of intangible wishes, for example to lose 10kgs, quit smoking, learn a new language, go to Tibet, get married…. Ok, there is the less tangible, very popular (and often failed) ‘get fit’ resolution. But in the mind of the person expressing it, there’s a fit, muscular guy that they are aiming to resemble.

Anyway, what surprised me a little was when she said that her foreign friends said that new year resolutions could be to be healthy… I was wondering if they were unwilling to share their new year wishes (if they had any) and just said health to get off the hook. Or maybe they are easily sick people who want to be more healthy this year. But then she said she heard the anchorman on CRI programme (Easy Cafe) say that was his new year resolution. I’m really puzzled about that one. Was there something lost on the translation? (健康 in Chinese can mean both healthy and be fit) Do I have a bad understanding of what is a new year resolution?

I googled ‘new year resolution’ and came up with wikipedia’s definition as “A New Year’s resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a project or a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous.” So ‘health’ in itself is NOT a resolution. Ta!

Picture taken from myGoals.com

After getting back home, I asked another friend in Beijing via MSN to check why I couldn’t recharge, and she later replied that the service provider was doing some maintainance and that the recharge service was out that day from 5.30pm till next day 8am.

Saturday, I went to have lunch with some relatives in Beijing. My mum had asked me before to go and see a distant cousin of mine as he has some contacts there and could probably help me in finding a job. Well, we met for lunch, together with 2 other cousins, and got to know each other. The thing is, he knows people and can probably help for making business, but finding me a job is completely different. He recommended me stuffs that I already knew - that is need to be able to speak good Chinese, need to get to know people who are of the same field of me, attend conferences, etc… relating to that field, and make contacts (guanxi). Oh well, more or less back to square one. I’d better keep checking out with my own circle of acquaintances.

Saturday night, after watching Liverpool eeking a disappointing draw with Blackburn, I went back to my favourite ‘ma la tang’ joint. It was around 12.15am but I was surprised to see some 15 people out there chatting and drinking (plus about the same amount at the other joint opposite the street). But then, it’s true that Saturday night there would be people out late at night. Lamb skewers sure taste good that late, and the beer to wash it down was nice too.

It is weird that the two parcels’ notices were sent to different addresses although I put the same address on the parcels. :( Anyway, I had to make two trips to theh Post Office because of that.

I only paid Rs30 (about USD1) for each parcel. Although they are of different sizes. The costs were for storage or something similar.