"Almost all of you have spent a significant amount of time in this country, and have experienced a lot. There'll be prizes for the winners too."
Three days after the deadline, I finally got round to printing a selection of my photos. I took them into class and asked for help in picking some winners.
Teacher Wang almost immediately suggested I pick four under the caption "南北东西" - the four points of the compass, South, North, East, West under the Chinese ordering.
North was represented by a picture of the Saint Sophia Church in Winter, despite being a supremely generic postcard shot, and slightly wonky...
... East was a shot of one of Shanghai's seldom-explored alleyways with a couple of office blocks barely visible in the background - a contrast of old and new...
... South was a shot of a beach at sunset in Taiwan, taken back during my last visit in 2002...
... and West was a picture of me riding a yak during my trip to Tibet last summer.
A few shots didn't make the cut, to my regret.
There was a shot of some Buddhist monks' brightly coloured boots outside a Tibetan temple. I worried that the boots on their own lacked context...
...a picture of my parents and our tourguide relaxing in Huangshan. Unfortunately, it didn't have any connection to the "Foreigner Students' Life", and featured an ugly date-stamp down the side...... and the courtyard to the hotel I stayed at, again in Tibet, which looked impressive but lacked a proper subject.
A few days later, the winners appeared on the Foreign Student Centre notice board. I was one of six First-prize winners and one of 21 Third-prize winners! I visited the office to pick up my prize...... a face towel worth about 5.90RMB (39p), capably modelled here, in traditional Korean spa headwear style.
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