Beijing, 1994

I'm finally starting to digitize my old travel snapshots. I don't have a scanner, and scanning is pretty time consuming, so I was thrilled when I saw, about a week ago, that Buy.com was selling a Hammacher Schlemmer digital photo converter for $50 (all gone now), half of what H. S. is currently charging. Rather than scanning, the little unit actually takes a digital photo of your original photo in a flash, and the software converts it to jpeg. It feels kind of flimsy, and the user manual is a nightmare, but it seems to do a reasonable enough job within its limitations (3 standard print sizes up to 5x7), and I'm glad I snagged it at that price. It looks like the exact same unit as the VuPoint model that Amazon is selling for $89, with mostly negative reviews on the site, so caveat emptor. (The same unit, it seems, is also branded by Brookstone.)

Anyway, it'll give me the opportunity to use old photos in posts, and maybe it'll inspire me to write more about trips past. For the time being, I'll just share my first three converted snaps, from a trip I made to China in 1994 (I'm pretty sure that was the year). I started in Shanghai and ended in Beijing, with stops at Suzhou and Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius.

The Forbidden Men's Room

They should have called it Ray's

Goodness gracious, great walls of Pete!