Blog Convergence

Day: 244

I spent seven hours today in a hurling steel cocoon of death that weaved in and out of three lanes of traffic across the rain slicked road from Pingyao to Xian. My Ipod was shuffling through a playlist from my mother’s birthday party with classics like “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It made for some interesting daylight hours. Although not really interesting enough to take my camera out of my bag for. The bus is usually a place I avoid trying to flash my camera, I have heard too many stories about people drifting off to wake up and find things missing.

Getting into Xi’an with the setting sun I had a plan. It was pushing 7pm and I had an 8pm agreement to meet Simon, a fellow Bootsnall PhotoBlogger, out front of the Big Goose Pagoda (I wish we had the balls to give things names like that in the states). I grabbed a bed in a downtown hostel, dropped my bag, brushed my teeth and jumped another cab across town.

Now I have never met Simon before, but we have been following each others blogs for more than a year now with the occasional email asking each other for photo advice or to have questions answer about places one of us has been. It already seemed like I knew the guy. He’s on his seventh month traveling and is on his way north through China, I happened to be going south. Out front of the Big Goose Pagoda, we shot some pictures of a water show and exchanged the general travel getting to know you banter. For those of you that don’t know these include; Where are you from? Where are you going? Where have you been? How long are you traveling? and normally a name is not even asked until your travel-cred (like street-cred) has been established.

As expected we got along exceptionally well, and it was great to have someone to talk about photography with that I didn’t feel like I was teaching. A dumb founded look is the most common response to my mumblings about f-stops and magic hour, but Simon understood.

Making it back to my hostel the beer drinking ensued and didn’t stop until everyone involved was quite drunk and were pushing sunrise. Stumbling into my room in the middle of the night, I am relatively sure I woke everyone in the room.