I have an American friend here in Shenzhen who runs a small English school on the weekends.  I help him teach classes every Saturday morning.  The other day after class, he was complaining that a button on his mobile phone had stopped working.  So, he took his phone to a man on the street who specialized in mobile phone repair.  The man possesses a set of tools and a magnifying glass for repairing mobile phones.  After ten minutes and a mere 40 RMB (less than $6), the man had fixed my friend’s phone.  This is amazing to me.  China has so many willing and available people to perform such tasks.  In the US, you’d have to leave your phone for 2-3 weeks and spend about as much money as a new phone to have it repaired.

I had this picture sitting around for a while.  It’s a good representation of a typical day at my apartment.  Got the computer fired up running Ubuntu 10.0, with a couple of terminal windows open for managing Call Me in China.  I’m logged into a WordPress site I’m working on (you can see my WordPress Plugin book in the upper right).  I’ve got my cash on the left side of the table ’cause I just paid for the Chinese food I’d ordered out, which is, of course, sitting in the foreground.  Let’s see, I’m having two of my old standbys:  Di4 San1 Xian1 Fan4 and a Xiao3 Chao3 Rou4 Fan4.  I usually order two ’cause it’s pretty tasty to fry up the rice the next day.  Anyway, it comes with two basic soups too.  All in all, some healthy stuff (assuming the ingredients are good!).  Got my external sound card and headphones sitting on the lefthand side too; I must have been working on some music recently as well.  Oh yeah, and if you look to the left of the monitor, you can see the green screen in the background for creating music videos.  Actually, I haven’t done that in a while; gotta go by some more Mini DV tapes!