Day in the Life #3

Early morning today, alarm at 7 and out of bed at 7:30. Breakfast – muesli, bath and out by 8:30. Across the park to the bus stop. Stand at the bus stop for 20 minutes – the bus I intended to get doesn’t turn up. Annoyingly three of the same one pass in the other direction while I am waiting. Even more annoyingly, as a bunch of grannies get on in Bramcote we are overtaken by the same bus behind and I turn up to my class late. Again.

The class today was kind of disappointing. Being a day time class, the student makeup understandably differed from the class on Tuesday. As Saul said, funny how the young students are using the old-school cameras whilst the old folks are all playing around with the new technology. Or maybe it’s just that us young guns can use the new stuff and the old stuff seems really retro, funky and cool, whilst the older ones are like ‘Film? But that’s so dated!’ The other students today were mainly either middle-age middle-class mum types, nattering about Pilates, who could just about manage to turn their cameras on and point and click but little beyond that, or, middle-class middle-age know-it-all smug men with fancy digital slrs that they could just about operate on auto (I’m feeling a bit of a generation gap, and maybe a hint of jealousy – that Canon EOS was just so wasted on her). The class was thus going to consist of learning how to take a picture, how to upload it onto a computer, how to organise photos into files and how to resize them or alter the contrast. For the next 9 weeks, or 27 hours. Definitely not as cool as learning how to use a darkroom and process my own film. Given that I seem to spend half my life on the computer I feel quite comfortable doing all of the above. The rest I can probably figure out with some judicious reading of my camera manual. Thus I enquired about how to unenroll and it seems that my class tally may soon fall to just two a week.

Home, lunch, chips and beans. Mum had found my slr this morning and this afternoon my dad fished me out a bunch of his old lenses and photography books. I ordered the part that was missing from his camera. I’m almost spoilt for choice now, and with three analogue cameras, six lenses and a digital to play around with, my room is beginning to resemble a camera shop.

After lunch researched my South America trip some more. New plan (actually this was my original plan, I’m not sure why it changed) is to do Spanish in Buenos Aires. From there it seems it may be relatively easy to overland it to Ushuaia and see some sights along the way. Now I just have to decide how to get from Ushuaia to Santiago. I definitely want to do the tour from Santiago, that has all the cool bits like the Inca Trail and the salt lakes in, but I’m not so sure about the bit from Ushuaia to Santiago. More thought required I think. Found a website with many travel hints and tips, and possibly a way to make the Spanish lessons much cheaper since it seems there are lots and lots of schools that I had not heard of and not just the glossy brochure ones that I had been looking at so far.

Kick boxing. Ab work. Ouch.

Home. Dinner – stir fry. More SA research. Write this. Chat to Saul. Next – rice pudding, reading and bed.