As indicated by the previous post, I couldn't access my blog while in China. Nothing personal, all blogspot.com blogs are blocked. At one hotel I couldn't even get out of the country on the Internet. At another in Shangri-La, where the predominant ethnic minority is Tibetan, there was a notice in the hotel cautioning any kind of criticism of the Communist Regime. At still another, we had to use our passport number as a "password" to get on the Internet. Presumably, our emails were being read by Chinese officials.
Then upon our return a virulant bacterial infection kept me bedridden until yesterday (11/13/09). I won't call it a conspiracy to keep me silent. So only now have I had the energy to update this blog.
I won't repeat a description of the dismay I experienced with the changes in China since I was last there. For this go back to my main blog:
http://mikesbio.blogspot.com/
About Me
- Mike Holtby
- I am a psychotherapist (now retired) and photographer. When in college I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist, but I couldn't figure out how to do fieldwork in some remote part of the world with a wife and small daughter. So I changed my major to Sociology. I eventually became a clinical social worker. I burnt out on that field in my mid-thirties, and went to art school in commercial photography. However, in the end the best balance proved to be as a private practice psychotherapist, with photography as an avocation. This eventually synthesized with my original interest in indigenous cultures around the world (I've been to 47 countries) photographing people for a project called "One Planet -- One People". My other photographic interest is wildlife, and I have been on a dozen African safaris, as well as Yellowstone in every season, and Alaska to photograph brown bears. My reasons are similar to photographing indigenous people: the ecosystem is collapsing and much of the wildlife I witness now may soon be gone. I have now come full circle, building a photo studio on Whidbey Island offering professional portraiture, and working on a photo book project.