Our bed and our neighborhood....

Happy Chinese silk comforter, one of our first purchases...

The above picture of the bed looks nice, and the silk comforter is wonderful, however the beds here are as hard as the floor. Well, as hard as if you were sleeping on your comforter on a wood floor. If you roll over you wake up, that hard. We've been told that all the beds are like that, and that buying a mattress top may be difficult, but one of Tina's friends was able to buy some egg crate cushions at Wallmart for her bed so tomorrow we will purchase some sort of cushion, as neither of us think that we will be able to survive this bed too much longer. Already we are thinking about taking turns as to who gets to be the lucky one and sleep on the couch...

But enough griping, now that we are as settled as we can be until the rest of our belongings arrive, we decided to walk around our neighborhood last night. Also because the weather was still nice and, according to the internet, the tropical storm was taking it's time in Taiwan and wouldn't be arriving in Xiamen until around 0300 Friday at the earliest.

Also a lot of restaurants in the area, including some Thai and Italian places. We ate dinner the other night at a nice Korean place, and last night at a hot pot restaurant. Hot pot is where they bring over a bowl of chicken or pork stock, set it over a flame and then you order all the items that you want to eat. Bok choi, mushrooms, shrimp, pork, dumplings, all sorts of items, and you just throw them in the pot and let them cook, it's really quite good.

After that we found what feels like home to us, a small wine bar/shop. Nice, beautiful and with a good wine selection, almost like our old Que Syrah. The owners are both from Malaysia and speak perfect English, and they sat there with us and told us all about how things work on the island, where the ex-pats meet, how Tina can find work.... Tina already has an appointment with the woman's masseuse.