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It’s been a couple of days since Quentin sailed into Qingdao and for the last few legs he and Rachel (another crew member) have been doing the shopping for the leg ahead.

Each boat has a 15-strong crew and the next leg will be around 24/25 days.  On top of this they need emergency rations for another five days.  Scale this up to ten boats, add the food you’ll find (or rather not find) in Chinese supermarkets and you’ll quickly have problems.

We’ve spent the last two days in two of the big supermarkets in Qingdao… the Jusco and the Carrefour.  We have more or less cleaned both of these places out of tinned meat, tinned fruit, pasta, tinned tomatoes, Frosties, etc.  The only thing they did have enough of was, surprise surprise, pot noodles!

While checking out our six trollies of foodstuffs we had to pay twice… the till wasn’t up to either the number of items we’d had, or the sum total!  In the end we’d still only spent about 300 pounds at the one shop… not a great deal more than two large families might spend for their big shop!

Our big advantage over the other teams was having Xiaoxiao on hand to help with translation… both of packets and to help ask the shop workers if they had more Frosties, pasta, etc.  In the end a lot of the things we ended up putting in our trolly had come straight from the back warehouse.

We had a tough time convincing the store staff to let us drive the shopping carts across the road to our hotel.  In the end they agreed but only on the condition that one of their workers came with us to ensure they got them back.

It’s not every day you get to drive into a five-star hotel lobby with supermarket trollies.  We got some great looks going past the check-in desks and heading into the lifts.

This evening we booked our flights to Seoul at 5.30PM, returning Friday evening.  It’s a very short trip, but we knew this in advance.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the sights, but it’s a shame that some bloke torched the oldest structure in the city just a week ago.

Yesterday we arrived in Qingdao.  In total we spent close to 36 hours travelling without sleep (well, one hour on the connection between Beijing and Qingdao).

Matt Johnson kindly gave me a lift from my place to Woking station where I caught the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport.  I met my Mum here (who had caught the train from Doncaster at 6AM the same day) and we had a bite to eat before catching the (delayed by one hour) flight to Beijing.

Arrival time was around 9AM, outside temperature -11C!  At this point things took a turn for the worse…

In LHR we’d asked for our luggage to be checked right through to Qingdao.  As we’d arrived at 9AM and our connection to Qingdao wasn’t until 14:55 we quickly tried to arrange an earlier flight… everything looked set for a 9:50 flight up until it came to our luggage… we traipsed to and fro all over the airpot, speaking to different people with varying degrees of fluency in English until we were finally told that Beijing airport does not allow bags to be checked through to internal destinations.  By now we’d missed the 9:50 flight and headed back into the arrival area to collect our luggage which was now at lost and found!  Imagine if we had not tried to arrange an earlier flight—our bags would have stayed in Beijing while we flew to Qingdao!  Very disappointing service from BA when we checked our luggage in LHR!

As if this wasn’t bad enough, when we tried to check in for our 14:55 flight we discovered we DID NOT have e-tickets as lastminute.com had told us.  DHL lost our initial tickets and after three weeks of arguing with DHL/lastminute.com we were issued with e-tickets.  I had lastminute.com confirm three times that we didn’t need anything else for our flights.  Extremely poor service on behalf of lastminute.com and I will be making a formal complaint when I get back.  Had we not had such a long wait for our connection it is not inconceivable we would have missed the flight due to their incompetence.

Finally we were checked in.  Again, bad news… the alcohol my Mum had bought in LHR was not allowed as carry-on luggage on internal Chinese flights.  Why had we not been told this in LHR?  Why, when checking in for the connection, did the attendant not tell us then?  Only when we got to the security checks did we find out, and this meant another wait while we had to go and buy cardboard boxes (glass containers) and check in two more items of luggage!

The last mistake was our own… we believed we were departing from gate 37, and so waited there.  Only when we began to queue to get on did I spot in fact it was gate 47!  A quick walk to gate 47 and they were more or less waiting for us to show up.  Neither of us heard any boarding announcements for the flight, but as we thought we were sat opposite we weren’t paying a great deal of attention.

At around 5PM we’d got a taxi to the hotel (5-star Crowne Plaza near the marina where Quentin will sail into) and my Mum was very impressed with the room.  I decided that I could save myself some cash by staying at the Home Inns (a chain similar to Travelodge in the UK) which was a five-minute walk down the road.  I checked the room out and happy with it, agreed to pay 118RMB/night (about eight pounds)—this is roughly 1/10th of the cost of my Mum’s room… obviously nowhere near the same standard, but the Home Inns is clean and comfortable.  And I enjoy talking to the staff who don’t speak much English… there’s no challenge in a 5-star hotel!

In the evening we met the manager of the Hull & Humber boat Quentin is sailing on and we’ve arranged passes to gain us close access for when Quentin arrives.

Just booked flights to Qingdao in February. My Mum and I will be flying out to meet Quentin when he sails into Qingdao for a short stop-off on his yacht race.

We’re flying British Airways from Heathrow. Unfortunately we have to spend close to a full day waiting in Beijing airport due to the connections.

As there is little to do around Qingdao, the current plan is to fly (or maybe sail) to Incheon, South Korea. We’ll spend a week in Seoul before heading back, seeing Quentin off and flying back on the 25th (in time for work on the 26th).

Outward flights:

Tue 12 Feb 2008: Depart LHR 1305

Wed 13 Feb 2008: Arrive PEK 0705, Depart PEK 1455, Arrive TAO 1620

Return flights:

Mon 25 Feb 2008: Depart TAO 0755, Arrive PEK 0855. Depart PEK 1210, Arrive LHR 1515

Seems to have come awfully quickly this year.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to 2008 either, especially as 2007 only seems to have just gotten going.  The joys of being ‘old’.

I managed to book one of my days of holiday off on the 24th, which will give me a nice long Giftmas break.  My last day is Friday 21st and I’m back at work on Thursday 27th.  Just today I was asked to do two late (1.30PM until 9PM) shifts, 27th and 28th of December.  This is good as it means I get a little more time to drive down south after Christmas (it also comes with a little more cash in my pocket).

I’ve barely begun to buy the necessary items for friends… I have a few covered, but I’m stumped for ideas.  When I think about what I really want, I’m pretty low on ideas… I don’t really have any needs and as I’ve been earning more cash for the last few months I’ve been able to afford a few bits and pieces for myself (e.g. a fancy push-bike).

I’ve scraped some ideas together and updated my Wish List... the item I could really do with is a decent pair of stands for my Quad 11Ls… I’m going to start some reading now in the hopes of updating it with a specific stand that suits my needs.

What surprises me the most is that what I really want isn’t something that I or anybody else can buy… I need money to do it, but that’s more of a means to an end.

Ah, well, maybe when I win the lottery…

I foolishly bought a roll of 50ASA B&W film months and months ago… unsurprisingly, I never did manage to use it in the UK, but comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas was 30C average, I took it along with me, and ended up shooting it on our trip to the Grand Canyon.

For a 50ASA film it’s actually rather noisy; presumably because the emulsion is so old by comparison with the likes of Ilford HP5 (a 400 speed that has similar properties in terms of noise)... but I really quite like it.

I’d expected a very smooth, low contrast film, but that’s not really how it turned out… it’s nicely contrasty and while it has plenty of grain, it’s very small and adds to the film.

Here’s a Grand Canyon shots that I edited very quickly (8-bit in the GIMP)... click for a larger image:

So, last week I was in Las Vegas on business… I’d planned on holding back until I had some really great photos to include with a proper beefy blog entry.

I’ve just got my 12 rolls of film back from Peak, and I’m very upset to discover that every single frame that I took with the F100 I bought second-hand the day before I went away is out of focus. I was using Vlad’s Sigma 24-70 1:2.8 for most shots, but not all… I took a whole bunch with my 50mm 1:1.8 and a few with the 28mm 1:2.8, and these are also OOF.

I had originally planned to shoot a roll, take it to a one-hour processing place and see how they came out. I later didn’t bother, figuring that the chances of the metering not working, were very slim. I guess I was right, the metering was bang on… admittedly the scenes I was shooting were bright but fairly low in contrast.

Instead, it appears that the focal plane is misaligned in some way… serious bummer.

When scanning through 35mm frames all of the photos look great… but tbh, I was really hoping for some good shots this time. I knew I had a few killer ones from the Grand Canyon… the kind that I could put into a photo album for the future. No such luck.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so blase about it all…

The only positive is that all of the F3 shots (another six rolls) appear to be well in focus. I shot at some low shutter speeds for many of them, so a fair few will be lost to camera shake, but overall the exposure and focus look good.

Once I’ve scanned and sorted through, I’ll get some up.

UPDATE on a closer look, it seems that the film back does not have a pressure plate to hold the film flat… serious bummer.  I feel stupid for not realising until now, but then again, is it something you’d normally check?