A Quest, with Redemption
Apparently at some point during my efforts to both pack our bags and make sure that we had plenty of fully-charged batteries for my camera and our vide camera (they take the same batteries), I left the power cord for the video camera at home. This cord is not really needed when video taping, as long as you have sufficient battery power. However, it is needed to charge the batteries. Since I can charge the batteries directly in the camcorder, I decided only to bring that cord and not a separate charger. You see the dilemma.
I have a total of four batteries, and as soon as I realized my error (and completed unpacking and repacking all our bags to make sure it was true), I set aside two of the batteries (good for over two hours of video taping), so there’d be no worries about the five minutes or so of critically important video time on Sunday (for which we brought the camcorder in the first place).
Getting a charger didn’t seem like it should be that difficult, but when the shopping stop we thought we’d be making today didn’t occur, Stephanie started worrying. Okay, actually she’d been worrying all along, but now it was worse.
Our CHI coordinator, Lina, offered to help me and suggested we walk to a nearby camera shop. Unfortunately, they didn’t have chargers (though usefully they did have replacement batteries ready to be put into a charger if one should happen to already have one), the next place we went had stopped selling camera equipment two weeks before, and we ended up finding one in a department store that, except for the presence of lots of Chinese characters under the brand name signs, could have been a Macy’s or Nordstrom in the US. After two hours running around Beijing in traffic (between 8pm and 10pm), I walked into the lobby bar where I’d left Stephanie and a bunch of folks from our group with my arms and the bag raised in triumph. I got a round of applause and a kiss from Stephanie. All was right in the world again.
And we have less than 40 hours before we meet Lina…