Author: ana

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in china photography

spring… in black and white!

well, yes. i loaded the holga with a roll of shanghai gp3 some weeks ago, only to forget all about it and go trigger happy on all the spring action happening around me… of course, spring isn’t as gorgeous when the film is black and white…



but i plan to take revenge this weekend, when we go to the botanical garden again!

this particular roll of film had a bit of horizontal scratching in some frames, and since it’s my first time with it, i wonder if the lab messed it up… or the quality is inferior and prone to scratching… or whether the holga is doing it, though it hasn’t happened before. anyway, it’s cheap (6rmb, €0.60!) and therefore good for experiences, and it’s called shanghai :) for sure i’ll be taking some with me when i go back.

Categories
in china rants

get your act together!


i don’t do a lot of posts where i complain, but the cats saga is taking its toll on us. our return tickets were long booked on british airways, but if we knew it’d be such a nightmare to ship the cats home, i think we’d have chosen a more pet-friendly airline. say, lufthansa, where your cats fly with you in the cabin, saving you half the trouble.

the service on ba has been appallingly clueless. first they don’t fly the cats in cabin – only cargo. that’s fine, i guess. so what do we need? we call london, we call lisbon, we call shanghai: nobody’s got a straight answer, always ending up forwarding us to somebody else. in shanghai, they forwarded us to the logistics person who is supposed to know these things, but doesn’t have the foggiest idea… first we’re told they can’t ship them to lisbon, to which we reply “but why, if the flights we are flying in have cargo service as well?”, then they suddenly can, then we need extra documents – documents which the entity supposed to issue says we don’t need…

what are these people doing?! so far, this has been the most stressful issue of the whole move. we don’t want to leave them behind, and we surely don’t want to take them to the airport and suddenly realize we’re missing a paper! how hard can it be to figure out these procedures and get a clean algorithm, step by step?!
this is all i want. kthxbye.


Categories
in china photography

south shanghai


the cosmo

walking around with the holga :)

Categories
in the netherlands

groningen class of 2005/6 – look what i just found!

i’m having a hard time keeping my focus today, because paulo discovered something completely and totally awesome: GOOGLE MAPS HAS STREET VIEW IN THE NETHERLANDS*!! :D

sounds random, but if you, like me, have spent some time abroad, the temptation of checking out all the familiar places is irresistible and very likely to send you on a nostalgic roller-coaster all day long. for my groningen peeps, here are some familiar sights. i’m sure some of these will make you go awwwwww as well :)


our student house, in van houtenlaan, the first place i checked for :) it looks the same and i can almost see my room here…


the albert heijn we used to go to!


mamma mini, my favourite thrift store!! how i’ve missed you!


the zernikeborg!


the gasunie building where i used to work!



grote markt, vismarkt, sally o’brien… *happy sigh*

oh, the nostalgia of happy times with friends in all of these places… and now if you excuse me, i’m going to peruse the other million spots in this beautiful city…

(*well not in the whole of the netherlands – just amsterdam, rotterdam.. and groningen!)

Categories
geek in china links and ideas

i havent noticed any results in the past 2 weeks…

there’s a new shop on dongxin road that sells make-up plus a panoply of useless yet very entertaining items. while inspecting them, i stumbled upon a few samples from the body shop, and bought a couple of them: coconut and mango body butter. it’s sooo hard to resist their scents and lovely packaging… *sigh*


when i got home, i checked their reviews on amazon (geeks shall be geeks after all). very moisturizing, smells divine, blablabla and then this:

I am a huge fan of the Body Shop and I absolutely *love* coconut, so I was really excited to try their new Coconut Body Butter. I was very disappointed, however, when I actually started using it. It claims to help your skin, but I’ve eaten it every single morning on my bagel and haven’t noticed any results for the past two weeks. Furthermore, it doesn’t taste very good. It smells fantastic, which is why I gave it 2 stars, but the taste isn’t as creamy or sweet as I would expect from a coconut butter.

I’m also disappointed that there is no nutritional information. It seems very high in fat, but I can only guess. I hope it’s not clogging my arteries.

i really hope so too! :D