CHINA: Tomorrow It’s Yongding. December 26, 2005

Hi All-

Can’t remember where I left off, but this might be it for a while.. We leave for Yongding in the morning.. and doubt we will have any connection at all..   We still can’t even find Yongding on any map, and no one we’ve spoken with has been able to tell us where it is…  So….an adventure!

We’ve been in Xiamen for two days now… Last night we had dinner at one of the many, many rather huge restaurants that abound throughout China… This one was four stories high… From our quick count of seats– we ate on the second floor– (not sure if the other floors are for private parties or what)…  there was room for about 700 diners on this floor… It was Christmas night, and the place was pretty deserted.. or so it seemed given the scale.. And the restaurant, like most others must use 150 watt bulbs placed 12 inches apart… Ordering was again a challenge, except that the menu had a few pictures, so we selected from those…

Today we took a little ferry to Guylanyu..  cost about 30 cents and took about 5 minutes… no cars.. Rather pleasant, hilly, great old trees, and colonial buildings… ferried back to Xiamen and walked through the old neighborhoods again… through streets filled with food vendors (including many chickens and pigeons, along with snakes and an unbelievable array of fish) .. We tried to get to the top of one of the new buildings to get a view (and photos) from up high.. but none of the guards would let us into any of the buildings..

Oh.. on the ferry .. a young man asked us to take his picture with the Xiamen skyline as backdrop.. he said he spoke a little English.. and asked where we were from.. We said USA.. and then he asked if we spoke Russian… Seems he’s at the university in Xiamen majoring in Russian language and somehow felt this might be a common language for us!

Tonight we ate at a local restaurant, specializing in Xiamen food — recommended by the hotel. Well this time the menu was ALL in Chinese and no pictures!  And no one spoke any English… So we drew pictures.. of a crab (since we saw tanks of crabs when we entered the restaurant) and an eggplant(??) and a lamb… We did fine with the crab (hard to screw up that drawing)… and they had us pick one from the tank… The eggplant didn’t seem to get very far, so we drew some other vegetables and did eventually get some greens… But the lamb was challenging.. They brought several staff to our table…(no problem since each restaurant has an overabundance of staff).. to determine what the animal was.. Mike proceeded to say “baa.. baaa” but that didn’t seem to get us anywhere either.. Maybe his “Ba-a-a” had a NY accent. Anyway, we did wind up with some peppered meat dish… but we’re not really certain what it was… Of course, I was convinced it could be dog…  but Mike felt his rendition of “Baaaa” definitely was clear enough…

It’s off to Yongding in the morning…  and then back to Xiamen on Thursday.
Fern

P.S. It’s been really good to have cell phones, since Mike and I have an uncanny way of losing each other on these intricate, winding streets so we often call one another and have been pretty successful in describing our coordinates.. to catch up with each other..