Xiamen Friday December 29, 2006

View North-East from our 23rd floor hotel room

View South-East from our hotel room

A family spending time together

One of the numerous dried fish stores.



Journal Entry for this day;

Caught a taxi to Wuxi Airport. Flew to Xiamen and caught taxi to the hotel. We are staying at the Yuejiayibao Hotel. We are on the 23rd floor, room 2307, NE corner. Beautiful view of the main mountain chain, will record Mt. names later.

It is quite warm outside. I am wearing long johns and I hope I do not cook in my own sweat.

I am excited to be back in Xiamen. I can understand why I enjoy lots of light, Xiamen is very tropically sunny.

We walked around the hotel neighborhood. Donated 10rmb to a local Buddhist temple, Kimberly took a photo of the Sister Monk. We stepped into a shop selling Iron Pyrite in matrix, also it was carved into animals and lucky symbols.

We than walked northwards and noticed people selling puppies. One gentleman was selling Chinese Chows, another was selling tiger-striped puppies, kind of looked like Tasmanian Devil pups, one with fur, the other pup was hairless but still had orange & black stripes on its skin.

We stopped for lunch and shared pork steak w/ seaweed, bakchoy, tofu and onion egg pancake, topped off with rice. We paid a whole whopping 10rmb for lunch.

On the way back to the hotel Kimberly took some photo's of partly demolished buildings, alleyway restaurants, spice shops and shadows.

We also visited a rather large aquarium & fish store, with everything from freshwater thru saltwater varieties. Most of the larger fish had been visually enhanced. Someone had injected ink beneath the scales, pigments ranging from fluorescent thru solids. Some fish even had tattooing of landscapes and lucky symbols, though they were of poor quality.

At 5:10pm Mr. Cai called and we discussed time schedules for the next 5 days. Afterwards Kimberly and I went on the hunt, in the mood for food!!! However; we purchased a map of Xiamen and sought out the nearest bookstore. Brains need to eat as well you know!! We spent 3 hours in the bookstore and purchased 4 books;
The Prompt Understanding of Measure Words
A New Dictionary of English Phrasal Verbs
Discover Gulangyu
An Intro to Geology - Chinese Textbook.
Than we at KFC and returned to the hotel.

This was our first day back to Xiamen, nothing grand, but we sure had allot of goofy fun together. :-)