厦门植物园, followed by karaoke

Ah, talk about a busy Saturday. One of the girls that I work with, Yang, came over to the island to show us around and also just be helpful in answering any questions that we have about life in China. It was a nice full day of hiking through 厦门植物园, which is the Xiamen Botanical Garden. Absolutely beautiful, and the only thing that we could have asked for would really have been more time to see everything. Check out all of those pictures over on flickr, you should be albe to get to them by clicking on the picture box on the right side of this blog.

This is apparently the flower of Xiamen

After we left the park we took Yang over to a western restaurant that we've been wanting to try for a while. It is located close the the botanical garden, so that made it real easy to head over and order up a cheese plate and a bottle of wine. Two cheese plates later it's starting to get late and Yang needs to grab a bus back over to the mainland. We say good night to her and thank her for all of the help she was in answering those little questions that you never really know who to ask.

From there we head over the the main shopping street, Zhongshan Lu, and Tina takes me to one of the DVD shops that she had been shown. Yeah, we left there down 300元, but with a lot of good movies to add into our collection. After that we decided that since we were close to the Crown Plaza we would head over there and try the small little bar that we used to walk by but never stopped into. What we didn't know is that the place is a karaoke bar, ah how fun.

What's even crazier is we walk in and sitting in the first booth are our friends Jose and Edlin. Xiamen really is a small island. Jose has quite the voice, and it was nice to sit, have a bottle of wine, and listen to the everyone sing. After Tina and I started our third bottle of wine we, for some unknown reason, decided that we too would sing....

Butchering 'Bus Stop' by The Hollies

Singing 'House of the Rising Sun'

Another beauty of the karaoke bars is that a girl will sit with you at your table. Her job is to make sure that your glass is never empty and to get your songs put into the queue. Most of the time they just sit there and try not to look miserable.

The table behind us was also having a great night, they were tourists from Japan. It also felt good that they applauded when I finished, even if it was just sympathy applause. Everyone other then myself was able to carry a tune...
The one Japanese girl was using the seaweed paper from her sushi to black out her teeth and was also kind enough to show us all the fun one can have with their food....

Yeah it was a great time, by the time we finally finished all our fun and made it home, it was just after 01:00.